„Ich habe Jahre lang gefürchtet, ich könnte gegen Japans Regeln und gesellschaftliche Normen verstoßen. Der Umzug hierher hat mir gezeigt, wie sehr die Touristen über sie nachdenken.“
https://www.businessinsider.com/breaking-rules-visiting-japan-tourists-advice-from-local-2026-4
12 Kommentare
tourists overthink them? mostly what I hear about tourists in japan is that they’re annoying and treat japan like a theme park
Instagram and the rest of the internet treats it like a magical place.
I was as well behaved as possible and I started to see how 90% of the stuff online about Japan was pure BS.
Maybe unrelated to the news article, but when I got here in my 20s I stressed over not fitting in enough. I was always so self conscious about my appearance and everything. I worried about not following the rules. Now, in my 40s I am tired of the rules. I learned no matter what I do Japanese will not see me as an equal. So instead I pick the rules I want to follow but these self imposed „wa“ rules are dumb and I don’t stress over them.
Being a tourist and being a resident are different things. Tourists won’t ever be in situations where they have to deal with hidden rules.
Living here and actually working in a Japanese environment is a completely different story. Japanese business and social manners are completely different and many of them are even unimaginable for westerners. But the vast majority of residents here are “expats” who lock themselves in English only environments, working for foreign companies or smaller, newer Japanese startups, so they think the “hidden rules” don’t exist anymore just because they have never been exposed to them.
Also, nobody will ever correct you out loud if you break them, people will just think you’re weird, so it’s also hard to find out by yourself.
There is no „secret“ rules
The only rule is just do whatever as long as you don’t bother people around you
Don’t be a dickhead, it’s not that difficult
I wish tourists were overthinking rules…so many tourists being loud, blocking the walkway, sitting on the ground in public.
I’m a resident and I’d like tourists to continue to overthink the rules. If they get lax and start acting like they do in their own country it builds resentment among Japanese people which is projected onto foreign residents long term
Japanese themselves break them all the time, don’t think too much about it
I didn’t fit in my own country, so I never cared. Some things here are there I fit in my own country, and some many others I fit in Japan (here since 2014, now citizen).
What’s with the obsession of being accepted anyway? Like I’ve seen a lot of foreigners brought up this idea and proceed to mock Japan’s social norms and bazillion of rules that needs to be follow which I really find ridiculous coming from an outsider who were never even born and raise there.
I think it really depends on where you worked. It’s better not work for a Japanese company for foreigners.
Also, it depends on where you from. If you are non-Asian then Japanese tends to apply lower standards.But if you are from Asia, they tend to be harsher.
How fluent you can speak Japanese is also a big one. Japanese automatically has a higher standard because they assume you understand the hidden rules as you speak Japanese very well.