Travel Rant #6 - What Is Happening To Japan?
Before I visited Japan in the spring of 2024, I spent considerable effort researching an ideal itinerary. With so many online travel resources dedicated to Japan, I found myself drawn to the popular YouTube channel, Aboard in Japan. The channel is a long-running project of Christopher Broad, a British expat who has lived in the country since 2011. Our itinerary was broadly based on his popular video; the only modification I made was substituting Osaka for Inuyama and Shirakawa-go. I was very grateful for his recommendations on places that are more off-the-beaten-path, particularly on second-tier cities such as Hida-Takayama and Kanazawa.
While his travel videos are incredibly popular, the primary focus of his channel has been on Japanese culture and customs. Some of my favorite videos of his came from his early years, where he roasted the cultural peculiarities, such as Japanese TV shows and the pervasiveness of Japanese-English. In the age of slop content, Abroad in Japan earns a reputation as the premier YouTube channel run by a foreigner in Japan. Hidden behind his British sarcasm and self-deprecating humor, Chris Broad always made a point of not exploiting Japan. After all, as a long-term resident, he is keenly aware that Japan should be a playground for foreign content creators to make a quick buck.
A few days ago, one of his videos popped up on my social media. The video is titled “What is happening to Japan?” The ominous-sounding title seemed uncharacteristic for him, and I could not resist playing it. This video turned out to be his response to a video of the same title by another Japan-based foreign creator named Oriental Pearl. Her original video aimed to showcase the “seedy underbelly” of Japan by pointing out the amount of trash and graffiti she found in some of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods. A long-term resident of Japan herself, she bemoaned the decline of the city and, by inference, the state of Japanese society.
For unsuspecting viewers, this purported decline of Japan seemed indisputable due to the physical evidence presented. They formed a sharp contrast with Japan’s reputation as a country known for tidiness. I have no doubt many Japanese might also share similar sentiments when they walk by a graffiti-covered building and see trash on the ground. What bothers me about Oriental Pearl’s video the most is how she opted to equate Tokyo’s infamous red light district, Kabukicho, as the representation for all of Japan. For someone who has lived in Tokyo and married a Japanese person, she must be either disingenuous or ignorant to equate Kabukicho and Shinjuku with Tokyo, let alone the entire country. It was akin to declaring America’s decline by pointing out the shenanigans that visitors might witness in New York’s Times Square.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with pointing out the negative and seedy side of any destination. However, it is important to discern the underlying intents behind each of these videos. Did they highlight a specific social issue worth discussing or point out something negative for its own sake? In the case of Oriental Pearl, her video did not provide any historical context or socioeconomic background. It would be an entirely different scenario if she had analyzed the situations in the video, as she did on several occasions on other social media platforms. For a Japan-based content creator with more than a million followers, Oriental Pearl should take social responsibility more seriously and be open to criticism.
Oriental Pearl’s recent videos certainly reminded me a lot of YouTuber Cash Jordan. For those who are not from New York, Jordan is probably the most notorious content creator for New York-centered rage-bait videos. A licensed real estate broker, he began his career online by posting tours of New York City apartments, a unique genre in its own right. Starting during the pandemic lockdown, his channel made a dramatic pivot toward the city’s crime and economic decline. Nowadays, all of his videos feature AI-generated images of criminal gangs and towns set on fire. The video titles include capitalized keywords, such as "Invasion," "Plunder," or "War Zone." Average view counts of nearly half a million, which translates to approximately $2,000 to $3,000 per video. That was quite a good income for a hastily put-together video he churned out every few days.
As Chris Broad pointed out, the most dangerous aspect of this type of rage-bait content is how it is fed to us via anonymous algorithms. It was bad enough that these videos infiltrated the feeds on YouTube and Facebook, but the lethal dangers lay in short-form content platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, where they function more like a broadcasting network that feeds their users content without giving them choices. In the age of progressively short attention spans, provocative short videos are uniquely unfit for providing the necessary context on complicated issues like homelessness and the migration crisis that grips cities around the globe.
Since I don’t live in Japan or Tokyo, I am not the best person to comment on just how Oriental Pearl sensationalized the social ills in Japan. However, I have lived and worked in New York City long enough to speak about the realities on the ground in New York. Did things get a little dicey during the pandemic? Absolutely. It is all too easy to point a camera at a homeless individual and proclaim how dangerous the city is. But speaking strictly on Flatiron, the area I know best, there weren’t more homeless people on the street. Instead, there were simply fewer office workers to “drown” them out. I have worked in the same neighborhood for more than a decade and could recognize the neighborhood’s homeless and mentally disturbed individuals.
Whenever I visited my conservative in-laws or met people out on Long Island, I was always surprised by how fearful they were of New York City. With social media and partisan news, I can’t blame them for being afraid. To quote travel writer Rick Steves, the conservatives are motivated mainly by fear and love. Everything is relative. Without traveling and being exposed to different environments and cultures, it was too easy to be scared of the differences and the unknown. As a New Yorker, I have become desensitized to the urban ills. With some historical perspective, New York today is incredibly safe and prosperous compared to forty years ago.
As a small-time blogger myself, I am keenly aware of how overtly negative content could drive traffic and generate the most income for content creators. One of the most “popular” posts on this very blog is The Disappointment With San Miguel de Allende, in which I expressed my sincere disappointment with my visit to this otherwise beautiful Mexican town. From the metric of page views, this post “performs” far better than any other post on the site. That post elicits passion from both San Miguel’s advocates and detractors. I was surprised by the amount of vitriol directed at me. Unfortunately, some readers are confident that my post was purposefully provocative. They somehow equate my personal disappointment with a vicious attack on their favorite destination.
As much as I was taken aback by the vitriol of comments online, I couldn’t discount their feelings. In this increasingly polarized world, all creators shall be more thoughtful about the content being put out. Of the hundreds of blog posts I have written thus far, my favorite is my other travel rant on the problem with travel blogs. Readers shall be keenly aware of the financial incentive behind most travel blogs. Luckily, I have a full-time job working as a licensed architect; I do not need to count on this blog for a livelihood. For full-time online creators, the financial incentives of creating slop content were all too alluring. We ought to be more
