Japan Gets There First

Everyone loves Japan.

For a variety of reasons. Some people enjoy Japanese anime, film or fashion. Others admire the polite culture. Food lovers love the cuisine. Urban planners praise Tokyo's walkability. Travelers feel safe on Japanese streets. Even the toilets are unique. Everyone finds their own reason to love Japan.

I love Japan because it shows me what's coming. Japan is a time machine. The Japanese live our future first.

For some reason, the Japanese consistently arrive decades ahead of everyone else on social, demographic, and technological trends. Don't ask me why this happens. Maybe it’s special superpowers they received after being the only country that has had a nuclear bomb dropped on them.

Consider the case of birthrates. The entire world now panics about falling fertility rates. Demographers worry about the future of countries with shrinking births, high debt, pension plans to pay for old people, etc. Remember when experts obsessed over Japan's low birthrate 15 years ago (it didn’t work, btw)?

Japan's fertility collapsed earlier and more sharply than Europe or America experienced. They got there first. Today Japan produces more babies than China or Korea. Japan simply arrived first.

The list of Japan as an early signal goes on and on.

• Japan was the world's first "super-aged society" (more people over 65 than under 15) while other developed nations didn’t notice it. Those countries now face the same demographic issue.

• Japan accumulated the world's highest public debt, 242% in 2023. Every developed country now wrestles with unsustainable debt loads.

• Japan built solo dining culture and solo entertainment (single booths in restaurants, capsule hotels, private karaoke boxes) when loneliness and individualism barely registered in Western societies. Americans now embrace these same trends as the loneliness epidemic has hit America.

  

• Japan experienced plummeting marriage rates, decline in couples, and declining sexual interest, before these patterns emerged elsewhere in other countries.

  

• Japan invested heavily in factory robotics when other countries relied on human labor. Japan developed service robots, robotic pets, automated receptionists, elderly companions while the West dismissed these as science fiction. Now Elon Musk stakes Tesla's future on robotics and calls them humanity's future.

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• Japan experienced intense urban hyper-centralization around Tokyo alongside the rapid depopulation and abandonment of its rural towns and villages (akiya), long before "regional inequality" and "left-behind areas" became dominant political issues in Europe and North America. Now, Western nations grapple with their own versions of akiya and the stark political divides between thriving megacities and declining heartlands

• Japan implemented strict immigration policies and tough crime measures when other nations pursued opposite approaches. The west has moved to restrictive immigration policies now. Although Japan may be changing again due to demographic issues

Basically, Japan gets there first. So it makes sense to look at what’s happening in their society to figure out what may be happening over here soon. The answer may be surprising to people.

Japan and the Travel Boom

Remember Japan's tourist boom from the 1980s and 1990s?

Japan's bubble economy created massive disposable incomes in the late '80s and early '90s. Foreign travel became a mass activity for the first time. Japanese tourists traveled in large groups, cameras ready, becoming such a global phenomenon that Hollywood turned them into constant movie gags, comedy sketches, and advertisements.

Everyone assumed this marked the beginning of a new era. Japan would become a permanent source of global tourists, with numbers growing forever as the country got richer.

Then everything changed.

Economic stagnation followed. But even as Japan's economy stabilized, something deeper had shifted. Japanese people simply lost interest in traveling abroad.

Today, only 17% of Japanese citizens hold passports. That’s a 15% decline from 2019. You rarely see the mass Japanese tourism that once defined international travel. What looked like a new era of ever-expanding Japanese travel actually peaked and declined.

The amount of Japanese tourists to the USA halved in 20 years.

Japan's retreat from mass tourism didn't turn it into North Korea. The country remains globally connected. It exports culture, fashion, art. It imports ideas. It welcomes foreign visitors. Japanese companies still operate worldwide. Foreign brands still thrive in Tokyo. Cultural exchange continues. It’s just that fewer people travel abroad.

In many ways, it’s returned to what America was like 20 years ago.

The Global Tourism Assumption

Right now we are living in the golden age of mass travel. It seems like everyone you know is traveling somewhere. Social media feeds overflow with passport stamps and location tags. "Love to travel" has become the default personality trait on dating profiles. People measure their worth by countries visited, turning wanderlust into identity.

The numbers are staggering: international arrivals will jump 6.5% in 2025, visitor spending will hit $2.1 trillion, and the travel industry will support 371 million jobs worldwide. Industry analysts assume this growth will continue exponentially forever.

Sound familiar?

This mirrors exactly what experts predicted about Japanese tourism in the 1990s, endless growth as prosperity increased. Yet Japan's travel boom simply ended, even as the country remained wealthy and connected.

But cracks are showing. Travel costs have surged. Airbnbs are expensive. Plane flights are expensive. Now even people in the countries where all the tourists are going are not traveling as much.

As world GDP rises, more & more people want to go to a finite number of places: Las Vegas, Zermatt, Bali, Goa, Prague, London, Venice, Fr. Riviera, Trastevere, Florence, Manhattan, Paris (1,2,4,6), Central Vienna, Dubai, DC. In big cities, there may not be anything unique to see anymore. A homogenization has set in, where every major city boasts the same Starbucks, Zara, and Instagram-worthy rooftop bars, making Paris, Barcelona, and London feel increasingly identical. The planet is too small & everybody wants to go to Venice.

This is compounded by an overtourism backlash, where popular destinations now actively discourage visitors through taxes, restrictions, and locals who are increasingly hostile to the crowds.

There’s even a cultural backlash grows against "travel as personality" culture, not against travel itself, but against the performed authenticity it represents.

And maybe it’s a good thing that mass travel ends. It’s not Lindy. Mass tourism does weird things to society. Real estate go up but those future generations of people are priced out of the market. Natives move out, jet setters own empty apartments.

And while tourism does help the economy of the local place a little bit, no country got rich from tourism, and in many ways it serves as a way to keep countries underdeveloped without having to develop real industries. It becomes a crutch.

If the Japanese prediction is right, it doesn’t mean travel is going away. It’ll always be here. People will always go to faraway lands to visit. Just perhaps less in the future. Maybe travel will regain it’s mostly romantic allure.

Japan, the first non-Western society to flood the world with tourists, became the first to retreat from that role. This signaled a deeper cultural shift from "we want to see the world" to "we are content with our own."

Just as Japan predicted aging societies, debt crises, and solo culture, it may now be showing us tourism's future: not endless growth, but eventual contentment with home.

In This Newsletter

Watching Japan's retreat from mass tourism changed how I view my own travels. I started to ask a different question at the end of each trip: What did this teach me about home? We assume its value is in learning about the other, but its greatest power is in holding a mirror up to ourselves. After years of travel, I didn't come back with a deeper understanding of Japan or Italy; I came back with a startlingly clear picture of America

Here are 4 things I learned about America traveling:

1) Americans aren't materialistic, They Just Have More Money

2) America Builds the World's Best Suburbs

3) Why Do Americans Stay Optimistic 

4) The Biggest Insult You Can Throw at an American

Americans Aren't as Materialistic as You Think

We tell ourselves this story about Americans. We say they're uniquely obsessed with stuff. With accumulating objects. With consumption as identity. The narrative writes itself, two-car garages stuffed with kayaks nobody uses, McMansions filled with Williams Sonoma gadgets that collect dust, credit card debt spiraling into financial ruin because someone needed the newest iPhone.

But this story misses something fundamental. Americans aren't more materialistic than anyone else. They just have more money.

Consider what happens when foreigners move to America. Take any immigrant family, doesn't matter if they're from Lagos or Mumbai or Sao Paulo, and watch what they do when they get access to American wages. They don't choose the cramped city apartment and the bicycle commute. They don't opt for minimalism and public transportation. They move to the suburbs. They buy the house with the two-car garage. They get the second refrigerator, the riding mower, the SUV. They become "extra-large Americans."

This isn't some corruption of their original values. This is their actual values being produced with the purchasing power of an American.

Travel helps you understand this. Outside the wealthy West and you see it everywhere.

@flyentertains

Are Singaporeans more materialistic than Americans? @Wulander @Bobby Tonelli

In Bangkok, successful businessmen wear Rolex watches that cost more than most Americans' cars. In Dubai, status demands gold-plated supercars and private jets. In Eastern Europe, displaying wealth becomes an art form, the designer handbags, the conspicuous jewelry, the expensive dinners that announce your arrival into the middle class. Go to any emerging economy and observe how the newly wealthy behave. They don't choose restraint. They choose display.

In most of the world, conspicuous consumption remains the privilege of elites. In America, the suburban house and the two-car lifestyle represent middle-class attainability. What looks like uniquely American materialism is actually just democratized access to the symbols that represent success everywhere else.

We've been measuring American materialism against the wrong baseline. We compare Americans to Scandinavians, small, homogeneous societies with robust social safety nets and centuries of cultural conditioning around egalitarianism. Of course Americans look materialistic next to Norwegians.

The real test is whether Americans, given the same economic opportunities as people from other cultures, behave differently. The evidence suggests they don't. They just live in a society where more people have access to the stuff that people everywhere want.

America Builds the World's Best Suburbs

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