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Oh yeah man, it's absurd. A lot of Asian countries have tried incredibly hard to shield the world from seeing how xenophobic and racist they are. As a black man who lived in China for 5 years, I had way way more openly racist comments and actions towards me than in the US. Like more the first month in China than in the other 40 years in the US. Japan is better, but still pretty bad. They're just more quiet/restrained about it typically.

That's something that always bugs me, the rest of the world always tries to shame the US for racism and other related things like they've solved a problem. They have, it's just having 90%+ the same race/skin color of people. Hell China is committing a genocide right now against the Uyghurs because they're Muslim and look more middle eastern. All while the evil US takes in more legal immigrants than the 2nd. 3rd, 4th, and 5th countries combined. The US definitely isn't perfect by any stretch, but it isn't even close to as bad as everyone likes to act like it is, get captain dip shit out of the presidency and you've already made a huge improvement.

Are izakaya the bars with all the really good fried stuff and cheap beer? I was in Japan for business and we spent an evening at one such bar and it was an amazing experience.

And yeah I've never gotten to go for pleasure, but spending a week in a smaller part of the country really made me want to go back and get to see more of it.

Honestly, as a foreigner who has been to Japan many times, I find izakaya to be extremely intimidating. I only go to them if I have someone local to go with.

That's some hot cordware. Stick a NSFW tag on those fine jugs.

Tourism has its own negative externalities (i.e. it's own kind of "polution") that negativelly affect the rest of the Economy if it gets too much and might even kill the very things which attract tourists. This is generally manifested as a rising cost of housing and general cost of living in touristic areas which pushes out the local residents and businesses.

Also tourism doesn't employ highly qualified people, but rather people with basic education.

So it's only good for economies up to a certain level of tourism and how much that is depends on how much that's a high value added Economy (roughly, how wealthy and developed a nation is) - much higher levels of Tourism are still a good thing in, say, a mid-development level Economy with basic universal education where before Tourism most people worked in the Primary sector, than they are in an Economy of high value added industries employing higly qualified people: a country can have an Economy where Tourism is a high percentage to pull itself up to about the level of the poorer European countries, but no matter how much you have of it Tourism will never turn a country into a high tech powerhouse, beyond a certain point quite the contrary (not least because high costs of living due to it kill starting companies, even high tech ones, because they make the costs of business go up at multiple levels).

A bit of Tourism can be a good thing, a lot of Tourism is only a good thing if the alternative was an economy of mostly Primary sector activities.

Okay, good points, but have you had to live where tourists visit?

The comments of the OP can be read like it's the fault of izakaya for not adapting to Tourism, but in the actual article it seems more like Japan has broader problems which are causing a fall in purchasing powers which has hit the clientele of izakaya and the flaw of izakaya was not taking advantage of Tourism to make up for the fall in local clientele causes by those problems in Japan which are not the fault of izakaya (or tourists).

I come from Lisbon in Portugal, which has also become extremelly touristic in the last 2 decades, and there Tourism is actually killing the rest of the Economy (mainly indirectly, by pushing up house prices and the cost of living more broadly, which in turn make it too expensive to live or operate a business in Lisbon). Anyways, my point is that anybody who expects more than a handful of establish traditional mom & pop restauration businesses to be capable of adapting by marketting themselves and catering to tourists, has no fucking clue of the kind of people who own and operate those businesses. I mean, sure they'll serve tourists (in broken English or maybe French), but actually adjusting to look more appealing to Tourists (lets just say that good traditional food and fancy looks are uncorrelated, possibly even negativelly correlated, in the Portuguese restauration business), much less any form of marketing other than word of mouth, is beyond most of them.

The impression I get is that izakayas are also old fashioned, so I bet they're run by the very same kind of old fashioned people from humble origins who grew up back when Education was less universal, that run most restaurants in Portugal.

I live near a big city. I like tourism for the city because it has the infrastructure to handle it. Some tourists come farther out and that is fine but you don't want the same numbers as downtown go to some smaller town in the vinicity because it simply does not have that level of infrastructure. Also organized things are easier like concerts or such.

I'm pretty sure there's a truck that's supposed to take you to them.

It's insane.

They also don't sell weapons after I spread a rumor that they do. 1/10, would not go back.

Weirdly enough i was never turned away from any establishment. I was in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, and Himeji. Maybe I was lucky, maybe its more of a rural issue?

like $2k+ econo-hell airfare for like 14 hours is a muuuuuuuch bigger barrier.

I feel the same way about South America.

It's expensive af to go to Brazil or Peru from India.

We recently got round trip flights for $450 through Alaska Air.

If you can get approved for a high end travel card and meet the spending requirements of the sign up offer, the bonus points will get you a round trip ticket to almost anywhere. Considering the annual fee on the card, as long as you don't keep the card for more than a year, it's something like 50-80% off the cost of the airfare.