Slight O/T

I think this tourist market split has been there for some time. There's always been Japanese bus tours like Hato, HIS, Sunrise and JTB which mostly offered tours in Japanese, booked mostly from a physical travel agency office well beyond when internet bookings would/should have taken off. Some do/did offer some tour support in other languages with Japanese guides but I remember reading foreign guest complaints of things lost in translation. Perhaps that has improved?

I have been on a decent amount of tours, though not recently. I feel it's somewhat fair to say various American guests may take a different kind of guide approach and knowledge base than Japanese. Just like some of the Asian guests want time for shopping (possibly check Klook for tours geared towards Asian language speakers). I imagine guides have their preferred customer targets & group sizes, too, not solely based on prospective gratuities and language abilities. There's also the inflation felt by domestic guests and weaker yen for foreign ones.

The increasing languages normally spoken by tourist adjacent staff beyond Japanese due to the foreign tourist market expansion is both a pro and con, imo. I have mixed feelings about that as someone who appreciates the multilingual convenience & increased cultural exchanges but misses the actual feeling of being in Japan with mostly Japanese speaking guests with more traditional Japanese service in core tourist areas. But my long standing preference is to not talk to anyone & poke a machine or website when possible which works nicely with the automation for cost cutting and labor shortages. Younger domestic travelers also seem to prefer less traditional service coupled with slightly more flexible/updated hospitality (coffee, beer, and wifi at ryokans finally mainstream, but alas for me, also an amenity downgrade/trade off from loose leaf to cheap tea bags/PET bottle which is probably less wasteful). Such is the path towards 60 million inbound travelers per year.