but I do see the logic.

I don’t. What are they going to do? A lot of people I know who live abroad have done so for decades and have no living family in the US. All it would do is introduce a bunch of homeless people to the US and destroy lives. I voted against the current administration and disagree with everything they do. Guess they should just make my wife homeless, get my house repossessed, destroy my career, and probably just end with me killing myself because of where I was born. Must be big fans of ICEs work, I guess.

Deport all Americans back to their native soil.

I haven’t lived there in a decade and only maintain citizenship to have access to my parents in cases of emergency. Why on earth would you send me back to that hell-hole? All that accomplishes is destroying my family, my business, my wife’s ability to live, etc.

The problem is the locals get priced out. Capitalism gonna capitalism (and, less cynically, more workers = more labor costs are needed to meet demand), so prices will rise to get max profits and cover additional costs. Japan’s wages have been stagnant for ages. Since corona, we got hit with huge inflation and price increases years in the making. Some employers have increased salaries, but others not. Basically no increases are keeping up with inflation for those who get it. This is even worse for those on fixed incomes.

What this means is that overtourism is causing a few things. One is that (often illegal) short-term rentals are being created and people are buying entire buildings, jacking up the rent, and forcing out tenants and increasing rents generally. This especially hurts the elderly and those on fixed incomes. People are also buying vacation houses which further reduces the housing stock and drives up prices where locals cannot compete with the deep pockets of those whom are not residents. These people get pushed out into more hellish commutes and into other areas, basically becoming second-class people in their own country. Some laws are being drafted to address this (and better enforcement of illegal short-term rentals is needed), but all the people who got screwed over aren’t going to get anything out of this.

Restaurants also end up increasing prices that tourists can afford but locals cannot. Hotels are doing the same. People have to live further away from work, eat out less (or not at all), not go on vacations as much or at all due to hotel prices, etc. It’s also resulted in hiring foreign-language staff whose salaries are more expensive in some cases. Tourists also get tax free shopping in some cases which means some of the money they spend isn’t even helping deal with these issues. (I’m in favor of abolishing that tax free program, personally).

So, again, this isn’t about fleecing any tourists. There are a number of problems caused by those whose currencies go a long way in Japan making life harder and more expensive for locals. Tiered pricing for tourists is one potential way to handle some aspects of this. Believe me, as a long-term (more than a decade and now holding permanent residency), this would still be annoying as we’d have to be presenting ID everywhere. It’s further murky because many Japanese still don’t even have a photo ID (though it’s effectively becoming mandatory for at least adults now) so the implementation is quite annoying.

Further, the price on foreign resident administrative fees is being jacked up by wild amounts to be “in line with europe” with some of that money going to overtourism (note what I said about salaries above; the median annual salary in a lot of Japan is below 5 million yen which is around 30k USD as I write this). This is just idiotic policy in my mind, but it shows that the government is trying to shift the pain away from Japanese citizens)

This is also not a problem unique to Japan and many countries have faced it. Some of those countries did indeed decide on tiered pricing. Some use certain entry taxes. I’m sure there are other programs as well. My point is that overtourism is hurting residents in a number of ways and something needs to be done to address this; tourism should not make life unaffordable for the average resident (and, to be clear, I’m not talking luxury resorts or something here).

I think people being able to afford to go out to eat in their own neighborhoods or travel in their own country is more important. It’s not some desire to “fleece tourists”; Japan is not your Disney world and its residents aren’t actors.

Edit: no, autocorrect, I did no mean “it’s” for the possessive

(二二二二二)

/ Still not great I guess

I enjoyed season one of the show but bethesda has been back to doing so much dumb shit I haven’t watched the second at all and don’t really feel any desire to. I see watching it as supporting a company that has bad leadership and shady practices, and that’s just not cool.in my mind.

I grew up with the ‘e’ in there, at least so far as I can remember. That I consider the version without an ‘e’ to be wrong would reenforce that.

Firefox mobile. Input the homepage URL into the address bar from this post. Went, scrolled the page a bit, and hit back. Came straight back here

The wording is weird. Like a 5 year won’t have an ID and therefore can’t eat? I assume they only mean those ordering drinks, but why not say that?

Yeah, i think metro areas make more sense for many things. There’s the 23ku, but also the rest of (non-marintime) Tokyo pref., much of kanagawa pref., and parts of Chiba and Saitama prefs.

The daytime population of the 23ku is crazy, but not everyone lives therein.

I should have taken a pic his morning. In northeast Japan, they make a paste of walnut, sugar, and I think butter and put it over mochi. It’s amazing.

I learned that upgrading mint broke my video editing software and I had to go back to windows to work on one of my jobs. I also had some issues with networked SNES emulation (for ALTTPR) that I could never work out.

I can survive without SNES games, but not being able to update my os without worrying about breaking things I must do for my job is a deal breaker (I have 2 jobs as well, one of which is my own farm business, so time is a luxury I don’t have).

I can’t wait for this to stop being an issue and move fully to linux

That’s just a fancy way of saying a tomato smoothie on bread/pastry

People are much more likely to write a complaint letter than a praising one. Same as it ever was but internet version.

I worked for a company that had a post karma system before reddit ever existed. It was no different then. No matter how much we said that the downvote button is not a dislike button, it changed nothing.

I use ground pork these days and it tastes just fine. Even better is venison or something local.

I live in Japan. The weak yen meant it was hard to afford traveling overseas even to see my family. Now, thanks to overtourism, it’s hard to even travel domestically because hotels and places increase prices to get tourist money pricing locals out. In this context, I’m perfectly happy to have resident vs tourist tiered pricing. Some hotel prices have doubled.or even tripled compared to when I got here and my salary has certainly not made that same jump (and indeed my salary converted to USD is more like what I made 20+ years ago in the US).

Discounts for seniors (health copays here even drop with age), disabled, students, etc. make sense to me.

I am not a fan of loyalty-card-based discounts or anything like that.

Payment methods I get because the processors take a cut. I have a small business so I either punish people paying with cash by raising all prices or have other payment methods priced to offset the processor’s cut (I sell produce from my tiny farm). I don’t want to punish people paying in cash to support card payments. Cashless societies have a lot of dangers and punish those suffering from being unhoused and other issues, but that’s a whole other story.

I was born in the US. Until reading this thread about it’s legal usage, I would have assumed the one without the ‘e’ was a mistake.

Both. Anything not in the normal set (milk, salad, peanuts, tofu, natto, bananas,.and sweet pepper) gets written down immediately when I know we used up the previous one or need something for a particular recipe. We also get sushi and ice cream once a week (usually on Friday) unless we’re going out to eat.

Got to Norwegian A2 level in about two months and some change. My small farm business had its first sales.

I use wasabi grinding paper all the time!