Why’s everybody going to Japan?

24:35meaning a country that experienced a teensy amount of tourists, a trickle. Three Japanese people took a trip out of the country for every foreigner who visited. And that's the Japan David Marks lived in for his first decade as a resident. He was a lonely American enthusiast in a country most people he knew would never want to come visit. In 2011, about a decade into David Marks' time in Japan, only 6 million foreign visitors came, which is what the U.S. got this month alone. Whatever signal of coolness, of storytelling, of culture Japan transmits to the rest of the world, something was blocking that signal.

25:11At least for almost everyone but David. And so you, I mean, this is such a funny way to put it, but like you liked Japan before it was cool. I think one of the things I'm trying to track in this conversation with you is like the rise of a country being considered cool by another country, which feels so subjective. Although as you start to lay out these markers, like, you can actually look at American pop culture and see one country change its estimation of another. Yeah, I mean, the other part of this that is hard to understand if you're under the age of 40 is just the incredible amount of propaganda.

25:45I mean, it felt like propaganda, looking back, that you got from MTV about America is the coolest country in the world. And the reason the Soviet Union collapsed is because people wanted blue jeans and wanted to listen to Michael Jackson. And everybody wants to be American, and Americans effortlessly are the most stylish people on earth. And so, you know, especially when I went to Japan in 98, for the first time, everyone was dressed, you know, 100 times better than I'd ever seen in the United States. I mean, everyone. It's just you walked down the streets, like, how is everyone dressed this well?

26:21And the consumer society just seems so much more robust. The scale of it seems so big. And it really broke my brain because I realized that the message I had gotten about how permanently cool the United States was and that cultural leadership wasn't quite true. That there was actually something going on in Japan, but no one had really seen it because no one was over in Japan. So there was very little reporting of what was going on there. So David Marks started actually trying to rigorously study coolness, one of humanity's more elusive topics. He has now pursued questions like, why were Japanese youth in Harajuku dressing so much more fashionably than American youth in Manhattan in the 1990s?

27:10And he's been able to arrive at, I believe, pretty convincing answers. He has also looked at the big question. Why was Japan uncool to Americans, and why did that change? In 2003, when I moved here, Japanese artists at that time were using the same materials as Western culture. And so they're designing t-shirts, which every American knew, and wearing sneakers in a cool way. And they are sampling old jazz records or doing things like hip-hop, but slightly off. I mean, so I think they were operating in the same zone as American culture. And so when you saw it, it did seem very strange, but it was speaking in those elements that you were expecting from American culture at the time.

27:54That's such a good description of something I've experienced but would not be able to articulate. It's often it felt like, oh, these are people playing in our forms or at least forms we like with elements we like, but they're putting them together in a way that feels really different. And it's familiar and novel in a way that draws me in. It's oftentimes an experience I've had across that cultural transmission. Yeah, I mean, even the name Donkey Kong.

28:19It's like we vaguely understand that those are two words we know, but no American would put those together.

28:30Yeah, and I mean, I used to feel like playing Mario. It felt like just like such a funny mix of like a dream an American would have with elements that wouldn't have been in the dream. Exactly.

28:42So imagine that across culture and also imagine that this has been bubbling for decades in Japan and no one has seen it. And so in the 90s and early 2000s, it starts exploding into the U.S. because there's now a way to actually get access to it. And people are quite fascinated, I think, for the right reasons. And then it just grows. So that's reason number two. Americans stopped being afraid of Japan and fell in love with the country because its culture was just different enough from ours to make us scratch our heads. But those reasons do not explain how this trend became supercharged. After this short break, the craziness begins.

29:34Thank you.

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33:00Welcome back to the show. Reason number three, tourism to Japan took off. I don't say this often, but for once, it was because of a government plan. A conspiracy, except not really because this was in the open. The plan starts fitfully in Japan in 2003. Then Prime Minister Junichiro Kozumi launches a campaign called Visit Japan.

33:31The goal is to get from 5 million yearly visitors to 10 million. The campaign launches with this advertisement, which if anyone outside of Japan had made it, I think would have been considered borderline problematic.

33:49This is their music, not ours. And if you're picturing a montage of geishas applying white makeup, cherry blossoms, temples, the world's most stereotypical procession of Japanese imagery as imagined by a Western eye, you are picturing things correctly. But this campaign fell short. Japan may have been an attractive place to visit, but it was too expensive. But then, in the early 2010s, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returns to office. And Abe does something very consequential. He deliberately drives down the value of the yen. He's doing this to help Japanese exports, not to bring in foreigners. But by pushing this button, he makes everything in Japan cheaper to outsiders.

34:32Hotel rooms, restaurant meals. Here's Roland Kelts. You know, you can come to Tokyo, you can get a full, beautiful, excellent soba lunch meal for under$10. I'm not exaggerating, by the way. under$10. I mean, last time I was in New York in May, you can't get an apple and a banana for$10. Yeah, you really can't. You know, so, I mean, it's become attractive partly because it's less expensive. Japan has become less expensive, cheaper for foreigners. But remember, that was due to government intervention. And Abe, wanting to juice these numbers even more, now deploys more measures to further sweeten his country to outsiders.

35:18In 2013, he relaxes tourist visa requirements for visitors from Thailand and Malaysia. Soon after, he does the same for visitors from China and Indonesia, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, summons a ton of Asian tourists. Here's David Marks, who was living there at the time. Asian tourists were the first major boom. So in the 2010s, people from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea start coming into Japan. And that really changes the city and it makes it internationalize. And suddenly there's English menus at every restaurant, which didn't exist before. And then you start getting more European and American tourists after that.

35:59I think, you know, a little bit pre-COVID and now after COVID just exploding. And I do think there was just a word of mouth, almost campaign for Japanese tourism, which is that every person I met who would come here for the first time, But how was it? They were like, oh, it was incredible. It was like a 99 % satisfaction rate with their time in Japan. And so you could understand they would go back home and tell everyone around them, oh, my God, Japan was incredible. You have to go. And then they would plot their return to Japan as well. And so it's kind of spreading word of mouth. David Marks has now had a front row seat to the remarkable effect of all this word of mouth.

36:42Back in 2003, the year he arrived, Japan had had about 5 million annual foreign visitors. 20 years later, 2023, the first full year that our listener Lisa charted, 5 million visitors. Just two years later, that number had already nearly doubled, 42 million. The momentum has just become berserk. So much so that plenty of Japanese people now believe Operation Visit Japan has over-succeeded. We foreigners just love Japan too much. And of course, we foreigners cannot stop posting about our ardor. So you want to get to Tokyo for the low? Well, you came to the right place. This is how you get flights to Japan for cheap as f***.

37:24I flew to Japan from LA for only$500 round trip. Today, I'll be flying with Zip Air, which is a budget airline. You can literally get$2 ,000 tickets for just$800. Just hit Google Plays. This whole story of the third wave also tracks with the rise of Instagram and TikTok in the mid and late 2010s. You can call social media reason number four, which I'm only not going into more detail on because we all get it and it's not that interesting. But I will say, to post a photo of a place online at all, the place first has to make you feel something, which leads us to reason number five, actually the hardest thing to describe about Japan on a podcast.

38:00And I think the easiest thing to notice as a visitor, the feeling you get as an outsider when you just experience how functional it is. Like, toilets in Japan are so damn clean. Like, how is this even possible? The infrastructure is amazing if you have a car and you don't really need one. But if you have a car, the roads are amazing. You don't have to worry about potholes. The public transportation will literally take you anywhere that you need to go. And then what's crazy, bro, is everything is on time. A lot of different factors, I think, have contributed to the tourism attraction. But the most important one is functionality.

38:37What do you mean? Well, a lot of countries around the world, particularly the U.S., have become dysfunctional. And I say that in terms of public space. The parks are dirty and dangerous. The railway system is atrocious. Yeah. The airports are a mess. And when you're in Japan, things just work.

39:02I'm jumping in here just to say that what Roland just said is, in my experience, both extremely true and also the kind of thing that I can imagine bothering some people who are listening. Because I think to American ears, hearing somebody complain about public disorder, a dirty subway, a crowded city pool, can just sound very elitist. It's rich people shit. If you don't like it here, move to the suburbs. Join a country club. But what's funny is that in Japan, the idea that you would want the subway to be clean isn't elitist. It's actually sort of the opposite. Why shouldn't public things be nice?

39:36Why should anyone want to opt out for a private option, pay for an Uber? Once you get used to this flip in thinking, you get to have a very surreal experience. Walking around Tokyo, you just don't see trash on the street. Not even cigarette butts. You don't smell urine or feces, animal or human. Public spaces in Japan are kept about as clean as private ones. For an American, visiting this is just such a new experience. I don't think it's why anyone visits the first time, but I bet it's why some people go back. It's part of why I wanted to. In America, one way you can show you care about society is to ride the dirty subway.

40:17In Japan, one way you can show you care about society is to be really invested in the subway being clean. Japan is a democratic, pluralistic society that also has these socialist underpinnings. You should have clean, safe parks. Of course you get an education. Of course you have health care. It's not like people have debated. It's a kind of civility that I think is very, very attractive in 2026. That was the thing I found most shocking the first time I visited was the level of function felt. It's funny, it didn't make me think, why isn't America like this? It made me think, how is it possible that Japan is like this?

41:01But just to be on a public train that is more clean than my bedroom. And so what you're saying at least fits my own experience of rising Japanophilia. It was just like, whoa, this just seems to work, and it's nice to briefly visit a place that seems to work. Well, there are codes of behavior in Japan, and they don't suit everybody. I mean, you get on a railway carriage, a train car, and you just keep your voice down or you don't speak. Yeah. You get on an elevator, crowded elevator, and you're with a friend of yours or your partner. And when you get on the elevator, you shut up. They're kind of bottom-up codes, which is very attractive to me because I don't like top-down authority.

41:51So I like the fact that when you're in Japan, you learn how to behave and you do it on your own. There's no cop hovering over you telling you to do this or do that. You just notice that everybody else is doing this, so you're going to do it. And it's not for everyone. I mean, just literally yesterday, I was in a cafe with a Russian woman who has lived in Japan for a number of years. She's totally fluent in Japanese. And she was explaining her project to me at this cafe. And the place was packed. And she has a very loud voice. And this guy who was two tables away from us stood up. And in English, even though we were speaking Japanese, in English, he said, Will you please keep your voice lower?

42:43And because she's lived here, she looked at him and said, Ah, simio-sen, which is, you know, I'm sorry, or excuse me. And she followed his request and lowered her voice. And we actually moved to another table to be away from him. So we wouldn't bother. He was trying to read. But what was interesting to me is I thought, you know, if this happened in New York, I could imagine her saying to him, you shut the F up and sit down and don't bother me. Which would be following the rules of this place. Exactly. And I would totally respect her if she said that. And if the guy insisted, then I might even stand up and say, hey, sit down or go to another cafe.

43:25Yeah. Fine, she has a loud voice. What's your problem? But in Japan, she heard him. She looked him straight in the eye and she said, sumimasen, I'm sorry. But it did occur to me, like, this would be completely different in New York. It'd be confrontational. So there's also in Japan this desire to avoid conflict and to harmonize somehow. And that can have its dark sides. I mean, some of the most vicious fights I've seen in bars have been in Japan. Because when the pressure cooker explodes, oh boy. And I'm not the only one to say this. I've had a long friendship with Haruki Murakami, the novelist.

44:11And Haruki once said to me, I love the Japanese people, but they scare me. And I said, why? He said, because if someone told him to go to war tomorrow, they'd do it. Because of this desire for consensus and harmony? I think that's what he meant, yeah. And I also think he was referring to a kind of repressed violence. And it's something that I guess you would see more as a person who lives in the culture than a person who visits it. Because if what you're describing is a status quo mainly of harmony and order with occasional, like, the suppression of aggression coming out in a much more amplified way, that's just not something that you see on your five-day trip to, like, Tokyo to Osaka.

44:54Not usually. I mean, unless you're unlucky in the wrong bar at the wrong time. You could see it. Different cultures have different values. and the things an American tourist is likely to appreciate in Japan, more order, maybe more harmony, a Japanese person might say, yes, those things are true. And there's another side to them. There's nuance, certainly, to all of this. Even the idea, which you'll hear a lot, that Japan is safer than America. It's true on the level of crime statistics, but I'm sure we have Japanese listeners who've had experiences that don't map to those numbers. Every place is complicated.

45:31Okay. Have we made it across the slightly delicate rope bridge of observing cultural differences? Maybe. If we have, I'd like to take us to the sixth and final reason that our experts offered as to why foreign visitors are visiting Japan. The final element in our perfect storm. It's actually Japanese craft. craft. There's a term shokunin in Japanese, which is basically a craftsperson, somebody who makes something really, really well, or who is a great, great chef. They know how to make great sushi, they know how to make great ramen. And it's revered here, still, even in 2026. And I think it does date back to the Edo era from the 17th century, this hierarchy in Japan where people who make things and can actually execute and do something are superior to merchants who just sell stuff.

46:35A really great guy in the anime industry once said to me that Japanese people, if they're going to do business overseas, they need to understand the Walmart model. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, in America, the merchant, the company that delivers or sells the good is number one. Nobody cares who actually made the goods. No. He said, so if you go into Walmart, you can buy a$5 pillow. And it was made by people who know nothing about pillows. They don't care about pillows. They're working in some factory in Southeast Asia or China. And he said, that's the Walmart model. But he said, in Japan, we actually think the person who made the pillow and made it really well is the most valuable person.

47:23And I often discover, you know, when I have American friends come and they say, I want to go to the best ramen place in your neighborhood. And so, you know, they can look it up on Google now. But we go to the ramen place and there's a line around the block and you have to purchase a ticket. And the ticket says you can come back at 3 p.m. and get a seat at our little ramen counter. I take them back at 3 p.m. and we have this ramen. And they say to me, oh, my God, that's the best ramen I've ever had in my life. It's the best soup I've ever had in my life. It's incredible. And sometimes if they're business people, they say, why don't they franchise?

47:59And I've interviewed enough chefs and shop owners to tell them that they don't franchise because if they franchise, they're not going to be in control of the noodles, how the noodles are cooked. They're not going to be able to control the negi, the spring onions, where they get them, where they source them. You know, they source their spring onions from a guy named Sato, who is in Chiba, and he has the best spring onions, and they source them from this guy, and they've done it for years. And they're not going to be able to control that if they franchise and open a shop in Yokohama. They're not going to be able to control the quality of the pork broth, the quality of the bamboo shoots.

48:41All of this is done internally, and it's very, very site-specific. If they franchise, they can't control that. But the American idea is, oh, of course you'd franchise because you can make more money, right? You can just grow, grow, grow, grow. Japan is not like that. It's not about grow, grow, grow. It's about, no, no, no, you're the craftsperson. You're the person who makes it. You make the pillow really, really well. It doesn't matter who Walmart is. They're idiots. They're very low on the hierarchy. The top of the hierarchy is the guy or the girl who knows how to make an excellent pillow. Yeah, and it's like, you know, people care about money to some degree, to different degrees everywhere.

49:25But what people tend to care about the most, or a lot at least, is status. And so if you have a place that worships the biggest merchant, you're going to have a lot of Walmart. And if you have a place that gives more status to the best craftsmen, then you're going to have more wonderful small places that do something really, really well. Exactly. And I think that is a part of the tourist attraction to Japan. So those are the answers per our experts and their research. But we don't just blindly follow experts here. I'm not vaccinated. Kidding. Kidding. However, we did put out a call to the hundreds of thousands of listeners in Search Engine Nation and asked to hear from people who have visited Japan wanting to check our work here.

50:14And once we asked, we unsurprisingly got an inbox-melting number of replies, which looked like a lot to sort through. But fortunately, Piper Dumont, Search Engine's chief data scientist and also intern, collated the responses. It turns out that our listeners' reasons for visiting map insanely well onto what we've just learned. For instance, nearly half of our respondents mentioned culture. I had always been obsessed with Japanese pop culture. I grew up binge-watching a lot of anime. I've always been into anime and video games. You know, Nintendo consoles, Sony consoles, being a fan of Pokemon, One Piece, and all that.

50:53One listener sounded like he was quoting our expert, David Marks verbatim. It is both simultaneously extremely similar to and also dissimilar from any Western country that you've been to, which makes it a very unique experience. About a quarter mentioned the wheat currency. The currency exchange rate seemed like it was the best in like 30 years. I remember reading an article about that. The Australian dollar has a very favorable exchange rate with the yen. We also heard a lot of people talk about craftsmanship. But what delighted me the most were the reasons that just would never have been captured by any method other than a large survey.

51:29I got FOMO seeing so many people go, and I went to see the Godzilla Museum. Godzilla brought five listeners to Japan. I hope they got to meet him. And there were also the one-of-one responses. I went to Japan last year to see the work of Mazuhiko Kimura. He is a legendary bonsai master who has what I would call a very unique punk rock chainsaw approach to his trees. I fell in love when I was 18, but I didn't realize it until over 10 years later, long after we'd lost contact. I recognized that the only way I'd ever see him again was to fly to Japan, which eventually led me to spend a magical four days in Osaka last year.

52:11I'm 6 '5 and have blonde hair, and Japanese people would say, oh my god, you should go to Japan. People will stop you on the street and ask for your autograph. By the way, it was not true. There's a lot of different reasons that people do it, but I was there to honor the dead, specifically my mother who had passed the year prior. People go to places because of other people or their memories of them. Also, maybe this shouldn't have surprised me, but I didn't expect to hear how enthusiastic some listeners sounded just talking about what Japan's functionality meant to them. Like it was a place you could go where entropy had been paused.

52:50I took my family to Japan, So they could see what a high-functioning society really looks like, where everything runs on time, is perfectly clean. It's clean, which is especially important for an age where kids like to pick things up off the ground and lick them. There are public toilets everywhere featuring functioning bidets, for instance, because everybody poops and poopy buds are gross. Everything just works. It's on time. If every country treated each other with the respect, like the Japanese and their punctuality and how they cue, oh, the world would be a far better place.

53:36it's funny because like i you know as broken as the place can be i still really love america and i love a lot of what is so annoying about it like i love the sort of anarchic mix of different people with different values expressing themselves in different ways. And, you know, the general feeling that, you know, something kind of broke 10 years ago, not just politically, but like COVID, like everyone, the driving got angrier, the people got angrier, the elbows got harder. The people listening to like TikTok videos without headphones on the subway seem to be more prevalent. It's like, I both love the way people live here.

54:15And it's like an eccentric friend, you know, who is starting to turn the corner from eccentric to not well. Like, it makes me understand the draw of Japan. And also that what you're saying is both, it is a distinct culture that insists on its own values, on its own way of being. And also, it's a place whose public presentation is now about modeling or emphasizing things that are true about itself that people come to visit to encounter. Yeah, I think that's a good summation. And also, I should add that A lot of what you said about what makes America or the United States so attractive is equally attractive to a lot of my Japanese friends.

54:58I mean, a lot of my Japanese friends are really, really attracted to the U.S. They love American movies. They love American TV. They love American pop music. they are very excited when they have a chance to go to LA or Seattle or New York or Boston. Because it's a place that is, like for the same reason Americans are excited about Japanese culture, because it's just a place that is different? Yeah, different, but also, you know, it's so free. There are no codes of behavior. If you're Japanese, you don't have to behave like a Japanese if you're in, you know, in Midtown. You don't have to. It's all lifted off of you.

55:38I have But a Japanese friend who's a very successful editor at Condé Nast, Japan, and she has lived in Vancouver and she's lived in New York. And she actually said to me once, she said, oh, she said, when I'm on the plane and it's landing in Tokyo, I get this in English, you'd say my shoulder sees up. And I said, what do you mean? She was like, oh, she's like, I'm coming back to Japan. I have to have to follow the rules. Right. Right. And so it's also important to note that Orientalism has its sort of inverse, right? You know, there's a lot of Japanese who think America is fantastic because there's no rules.

56:17There's no codes. If somebody tells you to be quiet at a cafe, you can say, fuck off. Yeah. Right. And it's fine. You can't do that here. Yeah. It's like two places you can go to have a vacation, not just from your place, but your culture. Yeah.

56:41Roland Keltz, professor at Wasada University. We'll have links to his excellent book, Japan America, in our show notes. We will also have a link to W. David Marks' book, Amatora, there as well. I recommend both. Also, thanks to all of our wonderful listeners for sending us your voice messages. I'm sorry we couldn't play them all. We did listen to them all, and we're going to do more of this in the future.

57:12Thank you.

57:47Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It's created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamineni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Fact-shaking this week by Annika Robbins. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moore Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Vanessa Tenkati, and Hilary Sheff. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, please email us, pjvote85 at gmail.com, subject line, advertising.

58:25You can also send us your questions there if you have a question for the show. If you are a search engine listener who would like to never again hear an ad on our show, then you can sign up for incognito mode it's our paid feed we also provide bonus episodes just recorded one today you can find incognito mode at search engine.show your contributions there which are voluntary are also what help us keep our project running we really appreciate our incognito mode listeners we also appreciate all of our listeners thank you for listening to our show we'll see you next week

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