Getting by on the Generosity of Strangers in Japan

Also, everything has become absurdly expensive for the locals. During covid you could often find a hotel for 10,000 yen.

Pre-covid/covid times were great with 8000 yen business hotels in Tokyo. Capsule hotels were meant for salarymen and available for sub-3000. Now they're also part of the country-sized amusement park experience. Capsule hotels now easily exceed 10000 yen and business hotels can be over 30000 (I've seen 45000 for shabby places that would've been half empty pre-covid).

Wages are also not moving and locals are becoming second class citizens in their own country and rapidly. Add it to the entitlement everyone has and the "hospitality" that used to be found everywhere is now rapidly and noticeably going away. People don't know just how different it was before the tourism boom.

It’s not like things have become unbearably expensive though. It’s mostly tourist stuff. I’ll certainly take Japan over the price increases I’ve heard about in the rest of the world.

It’s easy to say that if you aren’t living a normal life here. Grocery receipts are growing faster than they ever have. It’s all small and incremental but enough to nearly double what we spent half a decade ago.

Keep in mind this is a country where new graduate salaries have been unchanging for the past 30 years. Even small rates of inflation is relatively devastating to certain groups.

I went to Japan in 2019 and 2024 and didn't notice a significant difference except for things that are clearly for tourists. The biggest one being the Japan Rail Pass, which almost doubled.

An important thing to consider is that the yen is really cheap now, it means lots of tourists because life is cheaper and high prices for imported goods for the locals.

That expensive? I've been checking prices this past weeks and I've seen prices around 8-10000 yen for regular hotels.

Got 5 nights in Asakusa for ¥43000 (in a hotel that's a bit more tourist oriented), and also got offered by Smar-EX a combo of Nozomi round ticket to Kyoto and three nights there in what looked like a business-hotel for a total of around ¥45000.

But of course, no doubt everything is getting expensive and crowded. I have "almost family" there, and I've been 4 times since 2007 (this next month is going to be my fifth) and the change on tourism was already very noticeable around 2018. And the numbers after COVID went crazy, and the low Yen is helping that too.

And it can be seen on the flight tickets too. Prices went down after the Tohoku tsunami (I remember paying around €470 for a round ticket in December 2012 or so), in August 2015 I paid €750, in August 2018 €780, and this year for July it's ~€1200 for economy and more than €2K for Economy plus (!). I guess that also having to avoid Russia helps raising prices.

I'm worried they're going the same path than here in Spain, where trying to find a room in Madrid or Barcelona for less than 70€ a night usually means having a shared bathroom, or even sleeping in bunk beds in a 8 to 12 person room. Not to talk about the rentals or general real state prices...

Edit: Ah, of course, as GuB-42 says, Rail Pass has doubled. But I guess that due to the low prices the trains were getting crowded and unavailable for locals... It's a bummer, but I'm not mad at all.

Having come to have known the Japan of the 90s, I was disenchanted enough by my last trip in late 2019 that I haven't made plans to return.

The traveler zones full of English and kitsch had swollen to encompass everywhere within walking distance of the first 6-10 stops out from any major station. The apartment prices out there also remained high, despite how poor and relatively unpopulated the areas were.

And, nostalgically, it was filled with Chinese families that reminded me of the tired, loud, inadvertently rude Americans that stood out 30 years ago. I was surprised to see the formerly silent annoyance of the locals towards them and every other dayhike backpack-wearing, heavily scented foreigner simmer over into someone saying something as they exited the trains more than once. When people couldn't give them their own cars, they turned their backs and give them an obvious wide berth.

Even Kyoto was like this, and I had to travel far enough off the beaten path to find somewhere that didn't feel like either a Japanese theme park or any other international city in the world that I just ended up staying in my family's home village, where only the parents and grandparents hadn't left.