What annoys residents in Japan about tourists (and what no one says out loud)

I’ve been living in Yokohama for several years. That gives me an odd perspective: I’m a foreigner, I know the experience of arriving in Japan without really understanding how anything works, and I’ve also accumulated enough time here to feel the same weariness that locals feel about certain things tourists do.

Japan is not a country that’s hostile to tourism. Quite the opposite: Japanese people are extraordinarily tolerant, they almost never say anything even when uncomfortable, and that can create the impression that everything’s fine when it isn’t.

This isn’t about tourists being bad people. It’s about specific, avoidable things that make living in Japanese tourist cities a bit harder than it needs to be.

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The Mario go-karts through Tokyo’s streets

Let’s start with the most visible one.

For years, several companies in Tokyo have been renting go-karts to drive through city streets, typically in video game character costumes. The routes usually take in Shibuya, Akihabara or the Harajuku arch. Participants dress as Mario, Pikachu or Bowser.

The concept has a fundamental problem: these go-karts drive on real public roads, mixed in with normal traffic. They’re slow, they’re loud, they move in groups, and they’re usually recording on GoPros. For the drivers behind them, for pedestrians crossing their path, and for those of us who live here and see them regularly, they’re a genuine nuisance.

There have been Nintendo lawsuits over character usage, accidents, and regulation that has limited them significantly. But modified versions are still operating. And the customer profile is always the same: tourists looking for a “Japanese experience” that, ironically, has nothing to do with how anyone in Japan actually lives.

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Giant suitcases on the Yamanote at eight in the morning

This is probably the one that generates the most day-to-day tension.

Tokyo and Yokohama’s train lines during rush hour — between 7:30 and 9:00 — are among the most crowded in the world. People are packed in, quiet, trying to get to work. Bringing a 30-kilogram suitcase into that situation is, literally, taking up the space of three people.

It’s not that suitcases are banned. The problem is the timing: taking the Yamanote, the Keikyu or the Tokaido during rush hour with large luggage shows you haven’t thought about how the city you’re visiting actually works. The alternatives exist: coin lockers are in every major station, the takuhaibin service ships bags between hotels and airports for around ¥1,500–2,000, and airport luggage delivery services are cheap and fast.

The Shinkansen now requires reservations for large luggage. Urban lines can’t do the same. So the solution is simply: don’t do it.

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The volume

Trains in Japan are quiet. Not because there’s an announcement telling you to be quiet every two minutes — there are, but that’s not what explains it — but because people understand it as an implicit norm of respect for others.

There are signs asking you to set your phone to silent. There are priority seating carriages where calls are specifically discouraged. In most small restaurants, conversation exists but at a level that doesn’t disturb neighbouring tables.

Arriving in Japan and behaving on public transport or in restaurants as if you were at a summer terrace somewhere loud in Europe creates a very noticeable contrast. The same goes for stumbling out of karaoke or an izakaya late at night — keep it down once you’re on the street. I don’t need to give specific examples because anyone who lives here knows exactly what I’m talking about.

You don’t need to whisper. You need to calibrate.

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Blocking the street for the photo

In Kyoto, entire neighbourhoods have put up signs prohibiting photographing geisha in the street. Not because the city doesn’t like tourism, but because the situation reached a point where women in kimono couldn’t leave for work without having cameras shoved in their faces or being grabbed by the arm for a selfie.

In Tokyo the equivalent is the narrow streets of neighbourhoods like Yanaka or the steps of certain shrines: groups of tourists stopped in the middle, tripod or selfie stick out, blocking the way for people who simply need to get past to go home or to work.

The photo deserves space and time. But it also requires awareness that the street is a shared space, not a set put there for the photographer’s exclusive use.

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The rules at temples and shrines

Japanese temples and shrines have rules. Many are signposted in English. Some aren’t, because they assume the expected behaviour is obvious.

The most commonly broken by tourists:

No-photo zones. Many shrines have inner areas where “no photography” signs are visible. People still take their phones out. The usual reasoning seems to be: “if no one’s watching, it doesn’t count.”

Feeding wildlife. In Nara there are deer everywhere and people feed them whatever they have on them, not just the shika senbei crackers sold expressly for the purpose. The same happens in Miyajima with the deer around the shrine.

Stepping onto gravel or into Japanese garden sections to get closer to a particular stone or tree. The Japanese garden is not a park. The paths are there for a reason.

The same care applies at onsen, where visitors getting the etiquette wrong is its own recurring source of friction. None of these things ruins anyone’s trip. But accumulated across millions of visits per year, they have real consequences for the preservation of these places.

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Why no one says anything

This is the part that’s taken me the longest to understand living here.

In Japan there’s a concept, meiwaku (迷惑), meaning roughly “causing inconvenience or trouble to others.” Causing meiwaku is considered very negative. But pointing out that someone is causing meiwaku can itself be interpreted as causing meiwaku by pointing it out.

The practical result is that Japanese people almost never say anything when a tourist is doing something annoying. They move, step aside, put up with it. And the tourist reads that silence as approval, or at least as an absence of problem.

It isn’t approval. It’s patience. And it’s finite.

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I write this as a foreigner who’s been in Japan for years, not as a Japanese person complaining about visitors. I’ve done some of these things when I first arrived. I understand them. I also understand that a little awareness before you arrive — or during the trip — makes the difference between being a visitor who leaves a good impression and one who reinforces stereotypes that already carry a lot of weight.

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Article based on experience living in Yokohama since 2010 and travelling to Japan since 2007. The situations described are personal observations and those of other foreign residents in Japan.