Visiting Japan is easy because living in Japan is hard

Hat tip to Kyle Daigle for sending me this Instagram reel:

I don't scroll reels, so I'd hardly call myself a well-heeled critic of the form, but I will say I've never heard truer words spoken in a vertical short-form video.

It might be helpful to think of the harmony we witness in Japan as a collective bank account with an exceptionally high balance. Everyone deposits into that account all the ingredients necessary for maintaining a harmonious society. Withdrawals are rare, because to take anything out of that bank account effectively amounts to unilaterally deciding to spend everyone's money. As a result, acts of selfishness—especially those that disrupt that harmony—will frequently elicit shame and admonition from others.

Take trash, for example. Suppose the AA batteries in your Walkman die. There are few public trash cans, so:

• If you're visiting Japan – at the next train platform, you'll see a garbage bin labeled "Others" and toss those batteries in there without a second thought

• If you're living in Japan – you'll carry the batteries around all day, bring them home, sort and clean them, pay for a small trash bag for hazardous materials (taxed at 20x the rate of a typical bag), and then wait until the next hazardous waste collection day (which could be up to 3 months in some areas)

So which of these scenarios is more fun? Visiting, of course!

But what you don't see as a visitor is that nearly every public trash can is provided as a service to customers, and it's someone's literal job to go through each trash bag. So while the visitor experience above is relatively seamless, some little old lady might be tasked with sorting and disposing of the train station's trash every night. And when she finds your batteries, she won't just have to separate them from the rest of the trash, she may well have to fill out a form requisitioning a hazardous waste bag, or call the municipal garbage collection agency to schedule a pick-up. This is all in addition to the little old lady's other responsibilities—it doesn't take many instances of people failing to follow societal expectations to seriously stress the entire system.

This is why Japanese people are rightly concerned about over-tourism: foreigners rarely follow any of the norms that keep their society humming. Over the past 15 years, many tourist hotspots have reached the breaking point. Osaka and Kyoto just aren't the cities they once were. There just aren't the public funds and staffing available to keep up with the amount of daily disorder caused by tourists failing to abide by Japan's mostly-unspoken societal customs.

It's also why Japanese residents feel hopeless about the situation. The idea of foreign tourists learning and adhering to proper etiquette is facially absurd. Japan's economy is increasingly dependent on tourism dollars, so closing off the borders isn't feasible. The dominant political party lacks the creativity to imagine more aggressive policies than a hilariously paltry $3-a-night hotel taxes. Couple this with the ongoing depopulation crisis, and people quite reasonably worry that all the things that make Japan such a lovely place to visit are coming apart at the seams.

Anyway, for anyone who wonders why I tend to avoid the areas of Japan popular with foreigners, there you go.