picketship's recent activity
-
Comment on Tokyo, yeast, and expectations in ~travel
-
Comment on Tokyo, yeast, and expectations in ~travel
picketship (edited )LinkYour experience is your experience, and I'm really sorry you had a shit time. I've known three close friends with toddlers to go to Tokyo/Kansai and the only thing in common they had with your...Your experience is your experience, and I'm really sorry you had a shit time.
I've known three close friends with toddlers to go to Tokyo/Kansai and the only thing in common they had with your experience is the stairs. All three took prams, and the accessibility of Japanese metropolitan infrastructure is poor.
The only common denominators I can think of between the three very different families is they were pretty well travelled pre-kids, and one had travelled with a toddler before.
Any way you cut it, it sucks that you had a bad time. But to my reading you've made some unilateral statements here (like Tokyo being 'toddler hostile') like they're objective facts. All three families stated that people were very friendly to their kids, that local parents helped them out with supplies, and even tantrum relief by playing little games with the kids or just giving 'the nod' of 'been there'.
Also the food is seriously overrated, give me hate if you want, but the US has better food, especially LA/NYC. You can get better sushi, cheaper, in LA than Tokyo. It's the truth.
I'm not trying to 'give you hate': with the state of the yen, the cost thing is provably not true, unless you solely went to Michelin-starred restaurants. Having been to Tokyo and LA, my experience is LA sushi is fine for American food, but not great. I think you'd really struggle to find people who agree with you, but people who are travelling for food only are few and far between.
As far as the food being 'seriously overrated' and 'the US has better food', these are subjective judgements based on your one trip, not 'the truth'. The food being most people's highlight when they talk about travel to Japan indicates that maybe it didn't suit your palate, but that's a subjective thing, not a giant lie that Big Japan is trying to pull on the world.
It sounds like a big thing you had were the expectations you had from being such a big fan of anime and manga, and coming up against the reality of real life as an outsider in Japan. I think the LDP sucks and Japanese politics is in a dire place, but making pronouncements about Japan being xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic based on your trip and the comics and cartoons you watch is a very broad brush to be painting with.
A gay couple I'm friends with goes to Japan every year because it's so accepting and they like life there so much. A trans colleague of mine goes to Japan each winter to snowboard because they feel it's one of the few safe destinations for them globally at the moment. I know lots of queer people who go to Japan regularly and have a great time. If your point is that Japan has a lot of work to do to mainstream LGBTQIA+ inclusion domestically, yeah, definitely, so do most countries. But in a thread about travel, it sounds like you're talking about discrimination against tourists in minority groups that are in danger in much of the world, and that just doesn't align with what I've heard from my friends and family who identify that way and have been multiple times.
I'm not trying to paint Japan as some perfect utopia, and obviously the recent success of anti-foreigner and overtoursism candidates is a very strong point in your xenophobia column. Most of the xenophobia is directed at mainland Chinese tour groups and foreign workers on temporary visas. I'm not saying that's good, as it's disgusting, but I'm just really surprised you encountered this in Tokyo.
The only active anti-tourism sentiment I've seen is in Kyoto, which I understand as living there would be a nightmare. I got turned away from one bar for being obviously not-Japanese, and I later learned it was an extremely upscale place where politicians go to fool around with hostesses and mistresses, so I put that down less to xenophobia and more not wanting tourists with camera phones in there accidentally causing sex scandals in their social media posts.
I've seen some anti-American sentiment in Japan because of Trump, but I'm not American. A good friend of mine who looks like Superman and is as all-American looking as they come went recently, and learned how to say 'I don't like Trump' (or, at bars, 'fuck Trump!') which seemed to make everyone laugh. No one proactively asked him, he just wanted to make it clear. Mostly, he said they were just impressed that he'd come so far and asked if he was a cowboy because he was born in a famously rural state.
So again, I am really sorry you had a shit trip. And I am honestly not trying to 'both sides' this - I believe what you say, I just don't think it's as simple as 'Japan isn't a good place to go with kids', 'Japan is hostile to people who are different', and 'Japanese food isn't that good, don't believe the lies'.
It's possible to do all your research and have a really disappointing experience - it happens to Japanese people all the time. But I do feel for you, I had a very similar experience of disappointment to yours when I went to America. I'd done all my research, I had some great places I wanted to go, but I just hated it. It was right after Trump got elected the first time and I felt like I was in danger the entire time, even in 'safe' parts of major metro areas that were supposedly liberal. I saw more guns than I'd ever seen at my life just arriving at customs, and when I went to the southwest I was scared of shootings. I saw racist lawn signs, the 'trans debate' ("Should they exist?" in dressed-up terms) was just beginning, I hated the quality of the food compared to other places I'd been, I hated the non-existant ways to get around.
I think what I'm trying to say is it's possible to get really excited about going somewhere and just bounce off it. I didn't like America, and not many people from my country are going there anymore, but plenty of people loved it and express sadness that they don't feel safe travelling there any longer.
Japan wasn't for you, and that's just part of life. The only thing I'm trying to push back on is where you're making really declarative pronouncements about Japanese travel based on one trip. Again, it sucks that it wasn't for you, there are memes about how difficult it is to navigate a western stroller around Japanese stations and 'Japn toddler leg gains', but it doesn't mean the place sucks because you had a bad time and it didn't match your manga.
The reason I'm posting something that is trying to say 'I'm really sorry that was your experience, but it's not universal' is that we have a bunch of threads in ~travel about Japan, and lots of people have young kids. Having known people who've travelled there with babies, toddlers, and young mobile kids, they've stated it's child-friendly, and I really don't want people thinking the whole country is off limits if they have a young family based off one (admittedly, very disappointing) time they read about.
The 'no to go box' thing is a bug bear that's so infamous I'm pretty sure the /r/JapanTravel FAQ had it in there for a while.
It is really annoying when you have food left over, but if I remember right, Japanese food standards (especially Tokyo Metropolitan Gov. ones) put the legal liability for any food poisoning on the restaurant if they bag up your food and you get sick. Because of... Japanese culture, instead of explaining this, the most common response is 'I'm sorry, we don't have any containers'.
I have heard one poor waitress saying 'we don't do that' to an irate American couple at a pizza place in Harajuku, so I stepped in to help out. They were still pissed and visibly angry at a Japanese teen girl at her part time job, even after I explained the law in English. So normally I'd be with them on their crusade to take the slices home, but fuck people who are rude to wait staff, especially when they're doing their best in a foreign language.