Originally Posted by
jib71
This. Some tourist-oriented areas are starting to resemble film set / fantasy Japan, which is unrecognizable to me ... but perhaps that's the "real" Japan, or perhaps it's the future of the real Japan. In any case, it's the Japan that people are willing to pay to experience.
Back with my (imperfect) York analogy, I do recognise this. Places like the Shambles have changed from being a cool old street where I know there's a really good bakery that makes Italian style bread that is worth going out of your way for, to a street that looks a bit like Diagon Alley, where they have to have people managing the round-the-block queue for small, vaguely ghost-like statues.
Is this Instagram/TikTok tourism? Desperate to get that perfect image. My experience at Kyomizu-dera chimes with that. I'm too old for the kind of social media that seems to exist to prolong your adolescent insecurities into adulthood in order to sell you stuff, but maybe that's just my cynical attitude
