Blame tourist for all your countries problems
Refuse tourist into many Izakayas for decades
Fail to capture the tourist market for decades
Prices rise and force out much of the native population
Try to pivot to the same tourist you told to GTFO and never marketed to
???
FORECLOSURE!
Literal pottery.
Not a smart marketing decision to gatekeep Izakayas from people with money. Many tourist out earn even the most skilled of salarymen by a wide margin. Not marketing to this group has been a massive mistake, foolish.
I mean, fuck racists and xenophobes but the piece isn’t blaming foreigners for this. At the end, it mentions them not really being attracted to izakaya and, before I lived here, I wasn’t really either. It gives a host of actual reasons in the article linked.
The title is kinda shit since it can be interpreted in more than one way (as in “Japan’s izakaya don’t attract tourists and are going out of business” instead of “japan’s izakaya are going out of business BECAUSE they don’t attract tourists” which is not what I believe the article was saying)
Edit: the actual source won’t load for me. Jin news reports it strictly as rising prices. Yahoo News only mentions they’re not seeing any benefits from the surge of inbound tourism. The rocketnews headline is bad.
The comments of the OP can be read like it’s the fault of izakaya for not adapting to Tourism, but in the actual article it seems more like Japan has broader problems which are causing a fall in purchasing powers which has hit the clientele of izakaya and the flaw of izakaya was not taking advantage of Tourism to make up for the fall in local clientele causes by those problems in Japan which are not the fault of izakaya (or tourists).
I come from Lisbon in Portugal, which has also become extremelly touristic in the last 2 decades, and there Tourism is actually killing the rest of the Economy (mainly indirectly, by pushing up house prices and the cost of living more broadly, which in turn make it too expensive to live or operate a business in Lisbon). Anyways, my point is that anybody who expects more than a handful of establish traditional mom & pop restauration businesses to be capable of adapting by marketting themselves and catering to tourists, has no fucking clue of the kind of people who own and operate those businesses. I mean, sure they’ll serve tourists (in broken English or maybe French), but actually adjusting to look more appealing to Tourists (lets just say that good traditional food and fancy looks are uncorrelated, possibly even negativelly correlated, in the Portuguese restauration business), much less any form of marketing other than word of mouth, is beyond most of them.
The impression I get is that izakayas are also old fashioned, so I bet they’re run by the very same kind of old fashioned people from humble origins who grew up back when Education was less universal, that run most restaurants in Portugal.
Absolutely. It used to make the news when anything went up in price. Sometimes, for the case of a famous piece of candy or something, the president would even appear in a press conference apologizing for a 5-yen increase. Similarly, wages weren’t really increasing for people all that much. Suddenly, Covid, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its impact on energy, and a few other things hit at once. Prices have gone up and up. A lot of companies have not raised wages quickly enough. The yen also devalued against several currencies. These all led to a lower quality-of-life. The median pre-tax salary in Japan is around 5 million yen.
This can vary a lot. There are chains as well as mom-and-pop places. Some offer very high-tech environments with tablets for ordering and robots to delivery and take empties. This can cut some costs (many just have the tablets), but it only goes so far. This does also allow them to support English (and often Chinese, Korean, and sometimes others) for core menu items, but specials aren’t always there. Others are still very traditional. There are probably a couple of izakaya that do cater to tourists, but not a lot. They also aren’t generally what tourists are going for so I’m not sure that would be worth trying.
We have that in the big cities, particularly with AirBnB-like accommodations. Laws had to be made about them but enforcement is still poor. There are many operating illegally. It’s made the news when an investor would buy an old building to turn it into one and raised rents on everyone to ridiculous levels to get them to move. This forces locals making those above-mentioned Japanese salaries (and many of whom are pensioners) into worse situations or prices them out of their areas entirely.
Home ownership in Japan is weird. In many places (outside of Tokyo and a couple other metros), housing is a depreciating asset where it’s only down to the land value after 20 years and that land will go down in price in most of the country most of the time. Some people will buy condos instead of houses on their own land, but that comes with its own set of issues as well. We do have that as well, though. Some domestic, but a lot Chinese and from other countries as a source of investment income. This is one reason Japan has cracked down a lot on foreigners buying property and such in the last year and change.
Some places want to introduce two-tiered pricing for residents vs tourists. One complaint is that anyone who looks obviously-non-Japanese will likely get the foreigner treatment by default which I would not be looking forward to. Some companies jack up prices for greed, but that’s capitalism I guess. Some do it because their rents get raised and they have less choice. Either way, higher prices price out locals and create more rage toward foreigners (some people forgetting that tourists and foreign residents are not the same thing (mostly racists)). This is even though the majority of foreigners living and working in Japan are making the same wages Japanese folks would which is not a ton (especially for those of us would like to visit our family every once in a while).
It’s a weird and difficult situation. Many Japanese large companies are exporters that want to get paid in USD/EUR and have the JPY be weak when buying inputs. So, for the economy, the weak yen is good to a point. On the other hand, it’s hurting other places (and the future in general, IMO, but that’s just my impression). Japan also has a growing wealth-inequality problem and the weak yen and inflation are hurting people. It’s obvious to people wishing to travel abroad or buy items from other countries, but less so to those who are just paying more for everyday goods that get imported (and/or shipped with imported energy/fuel, using plastics that rely on imported petroleum, etc.).
The government is cracking down on visas (in both good ways (to prevent companies from exploiting people and the system which can drive down wages) and bad (raising costs to be insane compared to the wages here)). They had a business manager visa that had laughably few restrictions and had a lot of people setting up ‘businesses’ but really just using it to live in Japan, but knee-jerked the other direction which has caused people living in Japan for years running their own businesses to come up with an exit plan as they will not meet the new requirements (previous: something like 5 million yen value and some other stuff to now: 30 million yen, requirement to hire full-time a Japanese national, spouse, or PR, and other education/language requirements).
The whole thing is a mess. I don’t have a coherent conclusion to this. There are multiple problems with multiple factors and both good and bad reactions to them and proposed solutions. I guess we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping the xenophobia and racist people and parties fail to show any real results and we can focus on the actual economic and social issues, but I won’t hold my breath. I planned to live here forever. Bought a house, run a small farm in addition to my main job, invested, etc. I’ve been forced to have an exit plan in case things get worse for non-Japanese living here and/or they tank the economy totally.
Wow, thank you for taking the time to explain all that!