On Pleasing Queues

Friends,

We are freshly back from Japan, which was a wonderful trip with a strange emotional overcast. The above photo is of the torii gate on Miyajima island — we didn’t stick around for high tide to see it emerging from the waves, nor did we join the long queue for a close up photo. When you arrive at Miyajima, it’s Disney-esque magic, you’re greeted by roaming sika deer who will nonchalantly walk up to you and investigate your backpack to see if there’s anything for them to munch. Signs everywhere ask you not to pet or feed the deer.

Within our first 5 minutes on the island, we saw multiple people petting the deer. Less than 15 minutes in, we came across someone feeding a deer an ice cream cone. I guess now is an appropriate time to mention that Taiwan’s native sika deer population was hunted to extinction, though some still exist in captivity.

I have absolutely loved our two trips to Japan. The sights, the history, the realization that I can read so much kanji … But being a tourist in Japan this go around felt like participating in a world that is coming to a close, an unsustainable reality. The things that make us enjoy Japan don’t seem to be able to continue, for many of the same reasons that Italy has imposed a host of new regulations . The attractions simply cannot handle the number and behavior of tourists and continue to exist as they are.

We are not blameless in this regard, either, and not just because we’re +2 to the total number. One of the main reasons we chose to visit the Hiroshima area was Ōkunoshima , an island inhabited by 1000+ rabbits. You take a short ferry from a nearby port, and on the fairy are a lot of flyers explaining the rules: Don’t feed them from your hand. Don’t pet them. Don’t feed them on the road. Don’t feed them anything other than the specially marked food they sell. Don’t leave leftover food. Don’t pick up the rabbits. But as soon as we got there, we quickly noticed a few piles of abandoned food and people feeding rabbits from their hands. And so, I confess, we were feeding the rabbits out of our hands by the end of our stay.

Japan really wants tourism. Pre-Covid tourism represented ~11% of the country’s GDP. The government is aiming for 60m visitors in 2030, which would be more than double their highest year ever (and thus seems pretty unlikely?). Its attractiveness as a destination is helped by their current currency problems — when we told Taiwanese friends we were visiting Japan, they immediately said how lucky we are and asked where we were going shopping. But tourism, of course, has its cost. In March, Kyoto announced a ban on tourists in the geisha district due to tourists harassing geishas for photos or even touching them. Then, last month, a small town with an iconic view of Mount Fuji announced a plan to build a mesh barrier after too many tourists swarmed a handful of parking lots, broke traffic laws, and created massive amounts of litter in the process of getting the same unique photo as everyone else. The reaction to these events on the internet has been to try to blame a specific group of tourists, from specifics sets of countries, but our experience was that terrible behavior crossed the spectrum of tourists–age, gender, ethnicity–with no clear pattern. Part of it is permissiveness: only egregious violations of existing rules are enforced, creating a culture where the rules aren’t doing what they’re supposed to, as seen in our rabbit island experience. Other people want to blame an uptick in selfishness, either post-Covid or due to internet, but I’m not sure I buy that.

I do buy a remarkable lack of self-awareness, but I don’t know what to attribute it to. Was it always there and it’s just better documented? Perhaps the most striking moment was when we were walking around the Peace Memorial Park commemorating the devastation of the atomic bomb. It’s a really incredible site, with a museum and all kinds of different ways of remembering the event, and an impressively consistent message of shaming anyone who contributes to continue the possession and development of nuclear weapons, of begging people not to let time fade the horrific atrocity. Near the park, across the river, is the Atomic Bomb Dome, the remains of a large exhibition hall that is mostly still standing, having survived the explosion. As we passed the river closest to the bomb, we saw multiple European families taking group photos with the dome in the background, calling for bigger smiles and even one guy giving a thumbs up.

I don’t think there was any malicious intent, but wow. Does the intent really matter? Given what was around them, I’m not sure what you do to fix that issue.

I’m also not sure why that feeling was more intense this trip but not our Kyoto/Osaka trip last year — part of it was probably because this time we visited during the largest holiday of the year — Golden Week — completely on accident. We booked our airline tickets first then discovered the holiday when trying to book a hotel. Last time we visited during winter, when being outside was slightly miserable. But, finally, tourism is finally rebounding from the Covid slump. Japan’s official numbers put 2023 at about 80% of 2019’s numbers (and much lower for January, when we were there), while January 2024 matches almost exactly January 2019. While China made up the largest group of travelers to Japan pre-Covid, South Korea is now the highest, with Taiwan only a little bit behind, based on February 2024 data .

Rule enforcement would help with the deer and rabbits and geisha and Fuji photos, but so far they seem to prefer banning spaces rather than use that kind of enforcement. Ultimately, I don’t think there is an answer as long as you’re going to have the number of people they currently have, let alone the number the government wants in the future. They allowed so many people in the Atomic Bomb Museum that there were stretches where I couldn’t see the exhibit on the other side of a hallway I was walking down, ~3 meters away, because the room was so packed with people. Miyajima, the island with the deer we visited, is small, but received 4.6m visitors in 2019. But maybe that’s not right — after all, it’s about 8x the size of Central Park, which receives 40m+ visitors per year and still vaguely holds together enough to continue drawing those numbers. Is that at all a fair comparison? I don’t know! I am very curious what tourism looks like in Japan in ten years. I guess it probably won’t be a dramatic change — just adding a few more fees, enforcing a few more rules, banning a few more places, and an accompanying overall decline in the experience. But we’ll see.

Further reading:

• I’ve only read HG Wells’ science fiction novels, but someone recently excerpted his thoughts on how to begin an essay, and now I want to read the full book it’s from — Certain Personal Matters , which is old enough to be out of copyright and on Gutenberg. Here’s the paragraph: “So long as you do not begin with a definition you may begin anyhow. An abrupt beginning is much admired, after the fashion of the clown’s entry through the chemist’s window. Then whack at your reader at once, hit him over the head with the sausages, brisk him up with the poker, bundle him into the wheelbarrow, and so carry him away with you before he knows where you are. You can do what you like with a reader then, if you only keep him nicely on the move. So long as you are happy your reader will be so too. But one law must be observed: an essay, like a dog that wishes to please, must have a lively tail, short but as waggish as possible. Like a rocket, an essay goes only with fizzle and sparks at the end of it. And, know, that to stop writing is the secret of writing an essay; the essay that the public loves dies young.”
• I’ve lived my life in a way where my social circle is full of childless adults, a subject that’s difficult to talk about in a thoughtful way. I appreciate RO Kwon’s work towards that goal in this Time essay . One thing that’s interesting to me is that most of my friends have the experience of being under a constant stream of persuasion to have kids, but I’ve somehow avoided that.
• Clarissa Wei has a provocatively titled essay on CNN about preferring to raise children in Taiwan than in the US. I agree with her points completely and was disappointed how many people only reacted to the title and ignored the nuance within. Like her, having school-age children is the one realm where being in the US looks more appealing.
• I’d heard for years that opossums are the scourge of ticks everywhere, so imagine my surprise when I read this wonderful example of creative student-centric research that shows that’s probably not the case. Opossums are great, anyways.
• I’m always partial to media studies analysis that pairs decades worth of cultural artifacts with current events. Asher Elbein’s essay “The Judgment of Magneto” is a masterpiece example.
• Rachel Khong has a thoughtful essay about working for a content mill aimed at protecting celebrities’ reputations on Google in the pre-social media takeover internet, with a comparison between her work then and the potential of LLMs now. I’m… especially sympathetic to and conflicted about her reflections on that job due to my current work with LLMs in the university classroom.
• Our latest food love is 肉骨茶 / bak kut teh, literally “meat bone tea,” which is a Malaysian soup with a lot of herbs and spices and traditionally some pork ribs, but we make it with tofu skin, mushrooms, corn, and cabbage. You can find a lot of brands with packets to make the broth (and, to clarify, they’re usually designed so that you don’t cut open the packet, a mistake I made the first time) and they’re often vegetarian even if the final product isn’t supposed to be. Highly recommend you seek some out.
• Self-plug: last month I gave a lecture to my largest audience thus far at National Chengchi University about using (and not using) LLMs as a writing tool. I tried to make it pretty nuanced, but I still have such mixed feelings about talking about them at all. You can read a summary of my talk and see some photos on their site .

This is a busy week — our trip to Hiroshima put me behind on grading, and we’re in the dreaded final stretch of the semester. It’s time to make a dentist appointment and to file our Taiwan taxes. After almost five years, our back door seal needs to be redone to stop leaking air conditioning out, humidity in, and block one more avenue for bugs. I need to go pick up a pair of repaired shoes from our shoe/leather goods repair guy, a guy I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because I’m thankful for him. Of course, he represents cost savings, and that’s good. He represents a way to prevent wastefulness and to fight against the shorter and shorter lifespans of consumer goods, and that’s even better. But, want to know my favorite feature of having this repair guy who we’ve now used six times and always appreciate his work? He removes purchasing decisions. Every time I have to make a decision about what to buy, what’s going to last, what’s going to actually get used the best, it’s more and more likely to be an awful experience. Reviews are unreliable. Quality judgements in a store often hide issues. Returns suck and regret is common. Our repair guy takes a few of those decisions away, lets us keep on with what’s working. So here’s to him.

May you find or become the repair person you need in your life.

-g