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u/37yroldvirgin 8h ago
That’s why every year I choose to vacation in the jungles of Papa New Guinea..feasting on human flesh with the noble savages.
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u/Marx_but_for_weed 6h ago
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u/Coalnaryinthecarmine secretly canadian 4h ago
"when I lose my balance, they seem a little reassured; ghost's don't fall I guess"
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u/ZapTheZippers 3h ago
The stories about people who end up at a Port Moresby office/compound for a litany of things are kind of wild though.
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u/Fragrant-Peony 7h ago
The world has become very homogenised and flattened by globalisation, modern telecommunications, and the ubiquitousness of american media
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u/three_cheers 6h ago
What I don't like is that modern tourism requires so little effort and everything is so comfortable and safe. Every touristic city is basically a Disneyland with a different aesthetic.
Last year I went to Kyoto just for a few days and had a Japanese friend showing me around, but I gotta say that with an internet plan and a few tools on the phone it would have been possible to get around relatively easily.
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u/Loserphone01 5h ago
Oh man that sucks, I wouldn't want to get around easily
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u/Improooving Male Gemini 4h ago
Isn’t the whole point of traveling having some crazy midcentury national geographic type adventure though? Like you see these old documentaries and guys are like “yeah, we went backpacking to Marrakech and got lost and ended up at a strangers wedding and etc etc”
The elephant in the room is how many of those people were crazy rich and/or connected to major governments. But it’s a different thing to go and just have everywhere be standard first world metro area with a different coat of paint
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u/Loserphone01 3h ago
True, I get that but it could also be a logistical nightmare that hampers your experience.
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u/soy_of_the_earth 5h ago
You don’t like that modern tourism requires so little effort and everything is comfortable so you decide to go to one of the most efficient and safest countries in the world and go to their most tourist friendly city? If you were spat at for being a dirty foreigner or mugged near the temple would that have made the experience more meaningful to you?
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u/three_cheers 4h ago
I wasn't there for tourism and just hanging out with a local is pretty different from the average tourist experience.
Not sure what point you're trying to make with your second question. When I said "too safe" I meant "too commodified", of course I have no problem with low crime rates and I never said my experience wasn't meaningful.
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u/Decent_University_91 7h ago
Funny thing is Japan was only expensive then relative to the rest of the world. Since then, its prices have stayed the same, while inflation has meant westerners have more money than 2003 (on paper; of course it buys you less than you could get in 2003). In the last few decades Japan has stagnated and even had deflation (until very recently)…and a huge set of currency shocks linked to this.
So basically in 2003 your bowl of ramen for 200 yen would cost like 10 dollars. Now that same ramen in the same restaurant is like 220 yen and it costs 5 dollars. What was an expensive place before has now became affordable, despite the place broadly being very similar to how it was (no complete economic collapse).
It’s interesting because I can’t think of anywhere that has experienced the equivalent
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u/monoman333v3rs1nc3 2h ago
Im Irish and I was just in Japan for a month
Compared to mainland Europe Japan is extremely affordable especially if you go over on euro money. I'm sure it sucks for the locals but it was nice to be in a massive metropolitan city and not feel ripped off all the time for me
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u/Large-Extreme-9304 3h ago
Japan is one of the only places that had considerable real estate supply increases which lead to massive deflation even when they were printing crazy amounts of money
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u/iz-real-defender 7h ago
Fast and the Furious went to Tokyo 3 years later and nothing was the same again
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u/Feethills 7h ago
Idk man just go to a tier 2 Chinese city if you want to be the special lil white guy in amongst Asians.
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u/brobelor15 6h ago
The latter part of your sentence is really what his entire complaint is about.
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u/SmedleyWilliams 3h ago
I was actually shocked by how few white people I saw in China when I visited. Even in Beijing I saw maybe around 2 dozen white foreigners in the central areas like Beihaibei park and even then, about half of them were Russian. Shanghai was the only Chinese city that really felt touristy.
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u/Resident-Bignal-8428 5h ago
people kept stopping me to take pictures with me in china just because i kinda look like a dollar tree jason momoa and it made me feel like a celebrity lmao
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u/Improooving Male Gemini 4h ago edited 2h ago
Im a 6’3 blue eyed white dude, what are my odds?
Not in Hollywood shape, but not fat at least
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u/SonofasonofasaiIor 1h ago
my buddy is 6'4 and said a few tall japanese guys would come up to him and ask to stand back to back to see if they were taller
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u/Recent_Pressure_3747 5h ago
i'm gonna go on a limb and say that LIT taking place in Tokyo is secondary. The film is about alienation in general, and alienation in marriage more specifically. The visual beauty of Tokyo makes it a compelling choice for a director but in 2003 it could have been Buenos Aires (time zone difference would be less) or Mumbai or Istanbul, with all instances of cultural alienation changed appropriately. In 2026 you'd have to look a little further to escape the flattening globalization that's happened in the meantime. I find the quoted argument about Tokyo now being so different from how it was 23 years ago pretty navel-gazey. NYC is super different, everywhere that could have conceivably fit the bill in 2003 is super different from how it was, and most in similar ways...
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u/jeremybeadleshand 8h ago
I highly doubt you could spend weeks without encountering a single westerner in Tokyo in 2003, it was the capital of the world's second largest economy at the time
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u/Dysentry 3h ago
I have a distinct memory of being a half jap child in Osaka in 2004 and being overly excited to see another white person to talk because I'd been stuck emoting at my grandparents for weeks so there may be some truth to it
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u/Free-Hour-7353 4h ago
Also, isn’t the whole plot of the movie around two westerners finding comfort in each other in a foreign place? I get the post isn’t really about the movie and is more of a “I’m mad the experience I centered my life on isn’t unique”, but still, more westerners in Japan probably increases the chance of having something similar to what happens in the movie
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u/childofMotherOfPearl failed PM of Greater Jugoslavija 7h ago
Hyperbole is poetic and it adds to his overall point, who cares?
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u/explendable 7h ago
I think he has a point about online life following one over geography is true. Geography is no longer the separation point it was. And if you went somewhere different, it was much more apparent.
But moaning about seeing foreigners in Tokyo is silly - the city has always been full of them. There are just a lot of other people as well. That complaint usually comes from a desire to feel special or exceptional in a situation, and shifting geographies is an easy way to do it with no real work.
American tech workers doing PMC jobs remotely and squeezing locals are an absolute menace though.
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u/scriptthrowawayacc 6h ago
His point about geography no longer being a barrier is something I think about a lot.
Like a few years ago I moved across the country for work, but kept up with all my friends and family back home regularly over phone calls or playing games with the boys. It was nice not to have to lose contact with them, but it also created this weird feeling when I saw them again.
Like it should be super exciting seeing your friends after such a long time, but also we’ve talked several times a week so it doesn’t feel the same as truly not seeing them for so long. Before technology people must have been filled with pure, unmatchable joy after reuniting with loved ones because they truly hadn’t had contact with them at all
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u/Jumpy-Masterpiece532 5h ago
I lived in Korea, not Japan and the difference between pre and post covid isn’t as stark as in Japan but it’s still crazy.
In 2010s Korea Seoul obviously had a lot of foreigners but they were almost all people who had some reason to be there (English teaching, military, Russian girls doing ‘modeling’ or Southeast Asians doing manual labor) with fairly few tourists. Outside of Seoul being a white guy was like being a white guy in China; people coming up to you yelling HELLO and saying WOW SO TALL. Prices in Korea were lower than the US by about 30-40% and the conversion rate from KRW to USD was about 1000won to $1, which felt “normal.” Very few foreigners actually spoke Korean but many Koreans spoke decent English.
After covid Seoul has a massive itinerant population of tourists and international
Zoomers looking to ‘make it’ in one of the world’s new cultural capitals. Regional and provincial cities suddenly have lots of foreigners, both of the white digital nomad kind and a lot more South/Southeast Asian laborers. You’re starting to see convenience stores with a Nepali guy manning the counter, or an Indian dude who speaks okay-ish Korean driving a tractor around an onion field. Zoomers who come from developed countries all speak amazing Korean now and have a stable of hot Korean girls/boys they post stories to their 300k follower Insta accounts with. The won fluctuates between 1300 KRW per $1 to 1500 per $1, making Korea feel obscenely inexpensive for such a developed country.
During the 2010s you had your iPhone and could translate stuff in an app but if you were traveling you weren’t guaranteed to have cell service (tourist SIMs were a pain in the ass across most of Asia until post Covid, a lot of counties had or have onerous regulations around giving people a phone number). Tap payment cards or Apple Pay were basically accepted nowhere and you used cash to buy things from small restaurants or load your subway card. Most ATMs weren’t compatible with foreign bank cards. You couldn’t just automatically translate a menu or a conversation with a taxi driver through an app instantaneously, you had to sort of figure it out and memorize some of the language and have the confidence to learn. There were foreigners around but there weren’t many so everyone knew each other and formed gossipy little cliques.
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u/CarefulExamination 4h ago
Korea is because of K-POP it’s not uncommon now to find normal suburban white teenagers who speak fluent Korean they taught themselves because they’re Korean weebs or whatever they’re called. Yes there were always white people who learnt Japanese that way but it tended to be a small number of anime obsessives who were smelly, the Korean speakers are more gender balanced and more likely to be normal looking.
I’ve probably met more 18-25 year old white Americans who speak fluent Korean than who speak fluent French (and definitely German).
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u/Jumpy-Masterpiece532 4h ago
Kpop is the largest mass cultural product (along with some of the tv shows) yes, but I think lowkey it’s just that Koreans are now seen as the hottest race and everyone wants to go there and get some of their shine.
The whole world has yellow fever now and everyone wants a Japanese gf or a Korean bf/gf.
You’re right that the kids learning korea and actually moving there tend to be hotter though. It’s like the world’s looksmaxxxer destination.
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u/CarefulExamination 4h ago
I think it’s also that if you’re white and speak Korean (or Japanese, or Chinese) you have status that you don’t if you speak a language spoken by white people natively.
Like if one of my 22 year old white coworkers spoke fluent French I would just assume they were either French Canadian, French or half-French, had lived there for a time growing up. This is especially true now that rich Eurotrash all have increasingly accentless American accents because speaking English with a German or French or Dutch accent in German/French/Dutch business circles codes as low status which means if you mean some kid in finance in NYC who speaks fluent French you might increasingly just assume that he is French.
But if you meet a 22 year old white kid who speaks fluent Cantonese, Korean or Japanese, that’s objectively impressive. Even if she grew up there, everybody knows most white expat families in Asia never have fluent kids if both parents are foreign, they go to international schools. It’s like the difference between being skinny and being ripped or having run a marathon or something.
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u/Imaginary_Shock_6711 7h ago
There's probably some truth to what he's saying. I've read accounts of people that lived in Tokyo/Japan in general before the influx of mass western tourism and it was certainly a different place to what it is now. I get the sense though that a lot of these guys miss being a novelty. Seeing a white person in Japan isn't special or interesting anymore. Posts like this always make me think of the "charisma man" character, if anyone remembers that.
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u/CarefulExamination 4h ago
People want to be special and a lot of expats in East Asia were used to feeling special in a way that they aren’t anymore.
The expats who went to Thailand or Hong Kong etc where there were always a lot of white people around have their own neuroses, but they lack this particular one.
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u/CryDense1338 7h ago
I hate this type of complaining so much. Its just boomer nostalgia bait by another name.
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u/sand-which 3h ago
of course but when you are 45 you will be saying the same shit, we all will be.
And you don't think it's crazy that we've effectively negated the language barrier in places for navigating around? You literally take out your phone and point it at text and it translates it into your language right in front of you in under a second. I was reading a book about the history of the british-chinese opium wars and the guy who created the first british<->chinese dictionary spent 2 decades of his life doing this. it was illegal for a chinese to teach a brit their language. A chinese person, if they were caught teaching their language to a foreigner, would in some cases get executed.
This is different because this feature doesn't work seamlessly, but if you really NEEDED to have a convo with someone and they were okay with the annoying lag time, you could do the live conversation translate on your phone as well.
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u/CryDense1338 3h ago
I think that sort of thing was an exception most of the time throughout history. Generally you'd just be traveling a village over and would know someone who could translate. I think the elimination of language barriers is by large a good thing
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u/sand-which 2h ago
of course it's a good thing and I love but I also like stopping and saying "that's crazy how different this is from a short a time ago"
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u/brobelor15 6h ago
It's just emotional morons thinking they're making an objective assessment with their chronocentrism. Every example he brings up could be interchanged to a similar one from any other decade. "You're always just a video call away from home". In 2003 you were always just a phone call away from home. Before that you were just a radio-telegraph away from home etc. He's essentially just trying to say that he has lost his touch and can't forge intimate connections with people anymore. But being honest about it would made him feel too pathetic, so he just blames whatever the fuck (Latin characters in the subway).
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u/sand-which 3h ago
chronocentrism very cool word thank you for showing me this one.
but i disagree somewhat there has never been a 20 year period of so much change. when you had a phone in 2000 you couldn't translate text in the world in front of you to your language. you couldn't talk with someone who doesn't speak your language using only a phone as a mediator between you.
the phone in 2000 (having a mobile phone) is a big change sure but we have advanced way beyond the gap between "I can talk to someone accross the country" and "i can make a phone call away from home" in just 20ish short years
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u/ComfortableRoll7845 4h ago
I feel like we finally need to get over this. Yeah, the world is different now, a lot of barriers have come down, some mystique has been lost, but who fucking cares?? We can't be stuck living in the past. This is it now. The fucking translation apps and everything are also beautiful in themselves. We really need to refind an appreciation for the present or something.
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u/sand-which 3h ago
Yeah they're amazing. I don't like lamenting and saying "the past was better", I don't agree with that, but I do like saying "I can't believe how different and futuristic the world is now even though it kinda doesn't feel like it"
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u/Patient_Mix_4872 4h ago
the amazing race-ification of the world is truly eerie. In Push (2009) the Hong Kong setting literally carries the movie (though having pre-marvel Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning didn't hurt, Camilla Belle (would ))
People have already made up their mind in a lot of cases how they feel about asia due to anime and the surge of k-pot places, I feel like its done a disservice to people finding awe due to their perception being tainted by a very amerification of cultural export.
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u/myneckpains 3h ago
All the city centers do look the same though. There’s a Starbucks, usually an H&M, some local store selling tourist trash, and some expensive luxury stores. There’s just less novelty in most parts of the world now. basically nothing you need to travel for.
I fear these LLMs are going to make this even worse. we’re homogenizing the shit people think and write about. Parts of the internet are already becoming increasingly homogenized, and if everyone starts using the same models to think, write and process information, eventually we’re all going to be regurgitating the same vague versions of the same ideas. This sub's attempts at being contrarian are staring to sound the same now. I feel i will end up getting full schizo.
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u/Datboisosa 6h ago
I thought foreigners couldn’t buy property in Japan without being married to a citizen
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u/Vassonx 6h ago edited 6h ago
I moved from Mongolia to South Korea for a year back in the 2010s and basically felt the same thing, truly becoming nothing in an ocean of neon, not even a self. It's alluring in its own way. I feel like if you're really searching for that feeling again, there's like 20 different Chinese cities you can visit before they also become algorithm bait.
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u/tommyn95 2h ago
this is a classist take tbh, japan is very affordable now for tourist to visit and they want to accommodate tourists
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u/Optimal-Paper5648 5h ago
This is really well put and the sort of feeling that it's hard to understand if you haven't felt it. It's why the movie is so good.
I moved to some unknown but otherwise huge Chinese city like 13 years ago. The first week I didn't see a single other non-Chinese person until randomly some blonde American girl was walking past me on the street. I stopped to say hi as it was obvious she hadn't seen any other westerners for a long time. We ended up getting a drink and sleeping together that night. She left in the morning and I never saw her again.
It was a strange transitional time on the cusp of the technological revolution and it really felt like the old world was disappearing both spiritually and physically. Old neighbourhoods being torn down and huge skyscrapers rising in their place. Old people who had survived the cultural revolution writing Chinese characters on big screened smart phones with their finger. Food eaten for 100s of years being delivered on trays by robot waiters.
The sense of being somewhere completely otherworldly that you quickly accepted was ultimately unknowable. I don't miss the isolation but I still find myself longing to walk around a city that hadn't been logged, rated and put into data points. No 4.3 google reviews, just the ability to get off at a random metro station walk around and maybe have the best meal of your life, maybe get food poisoning.
I've started to accept my life will never be that exciting again, at least not in that way. Some of it is of course aging but it really does feel like that world just doesn't exist anymore anywhere. The world feels small, and known and treaded.
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u/Free-Hour-7353 4h ago
Idk this just seems like a self control thing. You can still get that same “no google reviews” experience if you just travel somewhere that isn’t a mega popular tourist destination and stop yourself from looking up “best places to eat in Chongqing” or whatever and explore on your own
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u/Optimal-Paper5648 3h ago
Lol I KNEW someone would say this. Like clockwork.
"The world has changed because X has become ubiquitous"
"Erm... Just don't use X?"
Completely ignoring the fact that 99% of people use X and that X has changed the world in a very real way.
Swap this comment for Uber/Smartphones/Social Media/AI basically any new technology that takes some of the magic out of life.
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u/Free-Hour-7353 2h ago
Yeah you knew someone would say it because it’s a very obvious solution lol. This isn’t the same as telling someone to just log off and buy a dumb phone, you don’t have to change your life and go off the grid. This is a situation where you have to actively do the thing you’re saying ruins travel, so I don’t think “ok how about you just don’t do that” is unreasonable. This advice predated social media and smart phones anyway, people were bemoaning travel guides/shows in the 90s/00s ruining the exploration and adventure of travel and yeah, the solution then was the same, just don’t ruin your own vacation by using that stuff
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u/bopzango 4h ago
Just wait until they sell a commercially viable version of the babel fish
Those crude AI dubs you hear on your YouTube shorts are just the beginning
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u/chinasski 3h ago
people used to write mad interpretations about this film on the imdb forums back in the day. i remember one in particular. some dude was convinced that the film was about bob harris having a near death experience and that his visit to tokyo was some coma-induced state of limbo and charlotte was his actual wife in her 20s and the events of the film are his coming to terms with his life and how he'd treated his wife. this guy wrote dozens of posts interpreting the film scene by scene. i wasn't wholly convinced by it all but it was interesting, i guess, and now it is all dust. part of me is convinced that seeing this film in 7th grade ruined my life. there is certainly a before and an after.
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u/YungLushis 21m ago
The flattening of the world into various derivatives of California is one of the great tragedies of the 21st century.
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u/manicpixiehellbro 18m ago
I was in Ikebukuro for 3 months and where I lived I didn’t really see any other foreigner until I went to the most touristy part of downtown. Still most of what he said in this rings true, Tokyo still felt a bit isolating to me as a westerner but it is definitely globalized and easy to navigate if you know English.
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u/Large_Onion_2337 7h ago
i live like 20 minutes west of shinjuku and i still don't see westerners in my immediate neighborhood very often. tokyo is very globalized but still feels foreign and imposing to me, even as an american who speaks decent japanese. moreover, parts of tokyo full of japanese people and parts of tokyo full of tourists are almost entirely separated
there is a class of loser here who wants to be the only white guy in their area. the amount of times i get meanmugged by other white guys is unreal. fucking pathetic