Wary of foreign ‘bad manners’, Japan eases borders to aid hobbled tourism industry

29 comments

1. Bad manners…yeah, that’s it.

2. “Local governments remain worried that foreign tourists will bring in the coronavirus…”
   Because locals themselves haven’t been spreading it around plenty already.

3. lmao

4. > Already, the test tours have hit a snag. The Japan Tourism Agency said on Monday that a participant on a trip to the southern prefecture of Oita had tested positive for COVID. The three other travellers are asymptomatic, it said, but the rest of the tour was cancelled.

   That didn’t take long.

5. Tip for headline writer: Put quotes only around things that aren’t accurate.

6. here we go again

7. About the bad manners thing, the same thing is going on in Thailand which is significantly easier to get in to than Japan.
   Foreign tourists without masks everywhere, even with an actual mask mandate

8. Well, they should be worried about manners in terms of masking.

   I know that when they’re in their own country, it’s “oh I’ll quarantine I’ll mask up properly just let me in!” then they become that other user on here who’s like “I don’t wear a mask to show the locals how it’s done!”

9. Well from my own experiences in the US at the height of COVID, I saw countless people who couldn’t be bothered to step just a few feet back most anywhere I went or wear the dreaded, oh so oppressive face masks… I worked in a hospital before, during, and a bit after. I noticed this shit whether I wanted to or not. And it was intensely frustrating. So I can’t blame anyone for thinking tourists won’t be respectful of countries that aren’t their own.

10. Just got back from Japan, can confirm Canadians don’t give a fuck compared to Japanese. Both flights had inconsiderate people refusing to wear masks, and one of them started a fight. Their worries are justified.

11. let‘s just call it what it is, plain old racism.

12. Japanese tolerate immigrants, just…now they have an excuse to ban foreigners. Remember when they even stopped permanent residents coming back…yeah, pay your taxes, have a house, have a family …#### you you can’t come back in. about time the rest of the world knew what the j-gov think about the rest of the world. Covid has just reinforced their superiority/inferiority complex with the rest of the world.

13. The Japanese government are experts at deflecting blame. It was also the foreigners responsible for their awfully slow vaccination campaign!

14. This one’s fun to watch from the inside. We need foreigners for the money, and probably for population stability. The people here, however, would rather rely on robots and stagnation than have foreigners around. It’s been fun not looking Japanese.

15. As someone who’s lived in both the US and Japan for extended periods of time, this panic over reopening needs to end. Rip the bandaid off, and move on. Accept it and adapt to what lies ahead instead of delaying the inevitable all while adopting a mild superiority complex towards foreigners in the process.

    I am hopeful that I’m going back through Altia Central this year, but on the off chance that pandemic related garbage axes that plan or delays that plan… I’ve been waiting patiently to get back in. I’ve been trying ever since my college forced me home on threat of being kicked out if I didn’t.

    Let us in.

16. I refuse to go to Japan with those tours while this politic with covid continues, there is no way no one will get/be with covid during those tours… and that means canceling while in Japan, waste of money and time.

17. Will people finally realise that Japan is not the land of milk and honey that they thought it was..? Month after month all of this nonsense just shows yet again how Europe is probably the best place in the world right now as always when you look at the other places on earth. What the fuck.

18. This is a dangerous slope for Japan.

    A foreigner tests negative prior to entry, then after a normal incubation period post-exposure in Japan tests positive. But instead of drawing the logical conclusion “the foreigner caught it in Japan”, the anti-foreigner sentiment is deepened.

    Sure the current government wants to secure their elections. But further alienating themselves with anti-foreigner sentiment like this, especially at this point, is a really dangerous move when international tensions are rising among Japans enemies and cooperation with other countries is increasingly important.

19. call me ignorant or whatever but why does Japan never get “canceled” over these things? At this point its just blatant racism/xenophobia, like human rights are not a thing anymore or what. Also if this happened in like Germany or something the world would be on FIRE

20. Do Japanese citizens pay that much attention to things like this?

    In my country, we might hear about something like this on the news and then forget about it. We get tourists, but it’s all just just kinda background noise.

21. Cue the wave of Japan apologists…….

22. Bit clickbaity. A Japanese person who wishes to remain anonymous says foreign people are bad.

23. It’s astounding to me how many people in this sub feel entitled to being a tourist in Japan yet decry the “blatant xenophobia and racism” of Japanese authorities while simultaneously saying they won’t follow the few extant guidelines because *’it’s not how we do it back home’*. Ignoring how rightfully wary the authorities are after seeing how foreigners are reacting to COVID in their home countries, lots of you want to have the cake and eat it too and it’s so childish.

24. > Japan, where guidelines such as mask wearing and hand sanitising are scrupulously followed, has avoided the kind of massive infections that have swept through other countries.

    I’ll grant you people wear masks here, but those hand sanitizing stations get about as much use as a payphone these days. Shall we talk about how often Japanese people wash their hands, too?

    Not to mention, I’m pretty sure Japan has not avoided massive infections. Am I wrong in considering the beginning of this year to be a massive wave of infections?

25. Don’t use hand sanitizer? Oh yeah? And this is coming from a dude in a country where people have horrible hand hygiene by the simple fact that they don’t wash properly or at all their hands after using the toilets which also includes taking a sh•t. I have been living in Japan for 20 years and I am still baffled to see in my daily life the majority of dudes I encounter not washing their hands. Which in fact bring an interesting observation in the form that dudes get out of toilet after taking a sh•t wearing a mask but skip the hand washing all together. So manners here apparently means mask and hand sanitizer. Everything else including basic hygiene? …. Who cares.

    And by the way my female friends tell me that it’s apparently not much better among Japanese women.

    So if he wants to speak about manners he should first have the locals learn basic hygiene before trying to lesson everyone else about it. The hypocrisy of Japanese is often mind blowing really.

26. [removed]

27. Which manners that are broken are most offensive to the Japanese?

28. the year is 2050, Japan has yet to reopen its international tourism industry…

29. If they don’t want the millions and millions of tourists messing up their pristine cities and clogging the streets I get it. But then don’t complain about having no money. Just shut down the business, let them all go belly-up and enjoy your peace and quiet.