Why’s everybody going to Japan?

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A Tokyo-based listener shares her overwhelming experience with American and European tourists visiting her, prompting a deep dive into the s

Key takeaways

• Japan's appeal stems from its rich storytelling tradition, evident in centuries-old literature like 'The Tale of Genji' and modern media such as manga and anime.
• Historical waves of fascination with Japanese culture date back to the late 19th century (Japonisme), with renewed interest driven by digital globalization and accessible pop culture.

Main topics

• Rise in American tourism to Japan
• Cultural fascination with Japanese pop culture

Notable quotes

"Japan is very poor in natural resources... but it's very rich in stories." – Roland Kelts

Conclusion

The surge in American tourism to Japan is rooted in deep cultural resonance, historical

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:32) Can you... Just introduce yourself. Speaker 1 (0:34) Yes. My name is Lisa. I am living in Tokyo. I grew up in Tokyo. I was born here. But I sound like this because I went to school in the States as well. I spent about four years in Philly and five or six years in Seattle. Speaker 8 (0:49) Got it. And so you wrote in with a question which I really enjoyed. Can you tell me what your question is and how you came to it? Speaker 1 (0:57) Yes. My question was, why is every single person I know going to Japan or talking about going to Japan. And this question drives me crazy. I think that I tried to sound overly chill when I asked you this question, but actually it's not chill at all, you know, PJ. And I think to give you the full context, is it okay if I share you my screen? I have an Excel sheet that I want to show you. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the reason why it's not chill at all is this is a... What is this spreadsheet? This is... spreadsheet of every single visitor that has visited me since November 2022. This Speaker 8 (1:36) is insane. Speaker 1 (1:38) Wait, hold on, hold on, Speaker 8 (1:40) hold on. We really need to slow down here. You're scrolling through, there's so many tables and cells. How many people have visited you in total since November 2022? Speaker 1 (1:49) If you count people who weren't my guests, but I kind of contributed to their experience for, that's 119 people. Oh my God, you have graphs. Yes. Sorry, how many? 119 people have visited me. Since November 2022. That's right. And if you count only my personal guests, that's 96 guests. Speaker 8 (2:09) That's crazy. If Speaker 1 (2:11) you average that out, that's actually one person every five days. That's 20 % of my days since. November 2022, that's been filled with someone visiting me from maybe the U.S. or Europe. Speaker 8 (2:23) Both the fact of the frequency is wild and the exactness of your documentation is wild. Thank you. It's a guest visit calendar, November 22 to April 26, and it's every single day of your life and whether someone was visiting you? Yes, Speaker 1 (2:41) that's exactly right. As you can see, the green cells are when I had a visitor. And especially, I think, around 2023 and 2025, this was taking over my life, PJ. Like I was spending all of my free time either planning what I would do with people that are visiting or helping them figure out their itineraries for when they're in Japan, like answering questions. Like I love everyone that visited, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I was spending so much time as like a personal tour guide. Speaker 8 (3:12) This is the picture, just the visual image, because it's on this calendar that you've shared. The days without visitors are white and the days with visitors are green. And just the sheer amount of green squares, it's a data visualization of an out-of-control problem. Yes. I'm so surprised at what I'm seeing. Did you know, like, I understand that part of the reason American tourism to Japan has spiked is just, like, economic. But I feel like it is not. Just economically? Do you have an understanding, as someone who has lived in both cultures, what happened to make Japan so cool to Americans? Speaker 1 (3:50) Yeah, this is something I want to know, too. Speaker 1 (3:54) I originally thought that maybe at first it started out with the K-pop hype and then kind of a more interested in general in the Asias. But I'm not sure that that accounts for such a huge spike in tourists in Japan. So if you have the answer to this, I would love to know. Speaker 8 (4:10) Because it's funny, like countries kind of get crushes on each other sometimes. Like one country will just decide another country represents like sophistication or chicness or whatever. And like... I feel like I've been a part of and observed at the same time that wave happened from America to Japan, where all of a sudden it's like Japanese clothes and like Japanese food and Japanese pop culture is like what the people I know seem more curious about, what definitely teenagers here seem more curious about. And it's like you want somebody who can say, to Speaker 4 (4:40) the extent that question is even answerable, like here's what happened. Speaker 1 (4:42) Yeah, that's exactly right. Speaker 4 (4:49) Okay, so this week, we take on Lisa's question, which I have to say appealed to me because it was a question I've had, people at our show have also had. Why, both in my real life and on social media, does it seem like so many people are going to Japan? It used to be rare. We had our theories at the show, but what we Speaker 2 (5:07) wanted were answers. This week, the real origin story of an international crush after this break. Welcome back to the show. Speaker 2 (6:13) Why are so many people going to Japan? This question, it turns out, belongs to my favorite genre. The kind of question you can ask at a dinner party and know that there's a good chance it'll redirect conversation for about 45 minutes. Because obviously, there's lots of reasons someone would visit Japan. But what happens is every person at the dinner becomes convinced that they are the one who has seduced the reason. And dinner turns, for me in a fun way, into Japanese tourism supply and demand court. with each person prosecuting a different case. It's a cheap currency. It's Pokemon. It was lost in translation. Guilty. Guilty. Probably not Speaker 4 (6:49) guilty. But the thing is, talk is cheap. We wanted real answers here, and so we invented a patented method to try to Speaker 2 (6:57) suss them out, a two-part test. We decided that first we would talk to experts on Japan and America, find out what the experts thought was going on, but then we would check that expert work against our own listener survey. to see if the reasons the experts said tourists were all going to Japan matched the reasons the tourists said they were going to Japan. Science-esque. So, let's begin. Can Speaker 3 (7:20) you say your name and what you do? Yes, my name is Roland Nozomu Keltz. I'm a Japanese-American author and editor and scholar, a professor at Waseda University, and I'm producing a film right now. What's the film? It's a documentary about Osamu Tezuka, the god of manga and the father of anime. It sounds like you stay busy. I do. Speaker 8 (7:43) Where am I currently speaking to you from? Where are you? Speaker 3 (7:46) I'm Speaker 8 (7:46) in Speaker 3 (7:46) Tokyo. And Speaker 8 (7:47) how long have you lived in Tokyo? Speaker 3 (7:49) 26 years. And before that? Osaka. And before Osaka, I lived in New York City for about 10 years. Speaker 8 (7:57) So you grew up in America but moved to Japan when you were pretty young? Speaker 3 (8:02) Well, yeah, not exactly. I went to kindergarten in Morioka, Japan, which is where my grandparents lived. And so I was here when I was five and a half. And then I used to come back to Japan every summer with my mother, who is Japanese. Speaker 2 (8:18) Got it. Roland was an ideal person to talk to, both because he's written about the question we're asking, and also because his roots in both countries have given him a kind of cultural double vision. He can see Japan from an American perspective, but also vice versa. Roland will tell you that the American pull towards Japan has happened for a variety of reasons. Reasons we will explain in a helpful numerical and ordered list. The very first one, and for Roland's the foremost, is one that, to me, at first sounded a little squishy, and then, as he explained it, persuasive. Reason number one, Japan's culture of storytelling. Speaker 3 (8:56) I often say that Japan is very poor in natural resources. There's no oil here, very little land. You know, you can grow rice, but only in these tiny rice paddies. It's a small country, but it's very rich in stories. The storytelling culture in Japan is astonishing. In fact, you know, most academics and critics would say that the first novel in world history is the tale of Genji. which is Japanese. It's a thousand years old. You know, stories in Japan are really amazing. And I think through the internet and through manga and anime, the rest of the world discovered that the storytelling is astonishing. Speaker 2 (9:42) Stories. This is the beginning part of Roland's thesis for what's going on here. And he told me, Western fascination with Japanese storytelling transmitted via Japanese culture, that's not something that began, as I'd assumed, in the 90s. According to Roland, there have already been two prior waves of this. Speaker 3 (9:59) One was in the late 19th century, driven largely by Europeans, this movement called Japonism or Japonisme, particularly the French. but other parts of Europe were drawn to Japanese woodblock prints, which, weirdly enough, they were kind of low culture, just like manga or Japanese comics were low culture. These woodblock prints were disposable. They were printed en masse, and they were used often to wrap Japanese ceramics or other valuable goods when they were shipped to Europe. And these Europeans sort of like... took off the wrapping paper, you know, it'd be like putting newspapers around delicate objects, and they discovered that, wow, this wrapping is just beautiful, stunning. A big difference, though, is that it was mostly the upper classes and the esthetes who were drawn to Japan at that time. So 1867, I think, was the World's Fair in Paris, and Japan had a booth or a... and they presented all these Japanese visual arts and the Europeans were smitten. And so you had Van Gogh and Degas, Monet, taking influence from these Japanese prints. And so that was in the late 19th century. And then you had another wave, second wave in the 50s and 60s, when the beatniks and the hippies were drawn to concepts, very loose concepts of Buddhism from Japan, this notion of... letting things happen and not always being the agent of your own story, but accepting the universe as it is, nirvana. You know, concepts that were not exclusively Japanese, but were delivered through Japanese imagery and Japanese novels and poetry. So again, it was sort of high art, or at least a concept of high art that Westerners imagined was Japanese. So what's different now is that it's clearly... pop culture that is driving this current wave. And I'm not really that philosophical about it. I think it's very specifically commercial. There was a huge hit series called Pokemon that emerged in the late 1990s, almost simultaneously with another hit manga and anime series called Dragon Ball. Speaker 3 (12:39) And those emerged in the late 90s, roughly the same time that Studio Ghibli, the studio of the great Hayao Miyazaki, They made a deal with Walt Disney Corporation for distribution of Miyazaki's films, including My Neighbor Totoro, which became kind of an iconic film for young Americans. And that explosion in the mid to late 1990s occurred at the time the Internet was exploding. So the combination of the technology that could bring Japanese media into living rooms and bedrooms around the U.S. and around the world. And these particular hit series and hit films brought the genius of Japanese storytelling and visual art into the bedrooms and living rooms of Americans. And that transformed Americans' image of Japan. Speaker 8 (13:40) It's funny. I mean, it's the way that sometimes, historically, America has charmed other places. It's like... Our pop culture. You know, it's like our movies show