Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Christmas-light seekers block roads" video.

  1. The problem is leniency. There are a few ways of solving this. Something's gotta give, so expect complaints. One way is suspending the illumination for a year, and see the reaction. You can bet there will be a multitude of suggestions on how to combat the problem right away. Erase the opportunity for a nice shot for social media brownie points and people will go away. Leave the lights off until late at night when the street gets closed off for car traffic or something similar. The second is caving in and either blocking car traffic, or blocking pedestrian access during the time of the year. The problem is the mix of both, right? It is obviously clear that the strategy of putting guards shouting at people there isn't working. Particularly when all they can do is shout, not arrest. There will always be people to jump fences or disrespect more rigid laws, but at a manageable size you just put those people in jail for the night, make an example of it. Ultimately, nothing will be solved if this continues being normalized as it already is. What is the point of producing news pieces every single year if no changes are actually implemented. Just becomes fodder for prejudice and jingoism. Such is the problem of the vast majority of news that blames all problems on foreigners and tourists. I think ultimately people get this wrong. If you have a clear problem with tourists and foreigners, and no action is taken, at some point the problem is not because some tourists are disrespectful, ignorant, badly educated or whatever - the problem is that you have a clear issue there that no one is trying to actually solve. Shoving your head into the sand and expecting time to go back to a time when social networks and tons of people trying to take photos with their smartphones of things they find interesting is not a sound strategy. That's Stockholm Syndrome. The fact is that Japan is becoming increasingly tourist independent. But it doesn't want to change to fit that reality, because while people wants the benefits of mass tourism, with sector growth and foreign money pouring in, they don't want to change things to better fit the behavior of mass tourism. News pieces are produced on the bad behavior of a small percentage of those tourists, and it elevates feelings of undue prejudice, nationalism, and jingoism. Doesn't matter if you have egregious cases attributed to only 0.1% of tourists that visits the area, the perception that comes from that is that all tourists and foreigners are disrespectful, arrogant, behave badly and whatnot. Meanwhile, nothing concrete is being done to actually combat the behavior. People have to start questioning why the neighborhood association, plus government are not doing anything concrete about it if it's causing such major problems. Why are there no proposals to actually do something to stop it. Times are always changing. Those who refuse to change with times get left behind. This has already happened before with Halloween in Shinjuku, right? Does it need to get to the point it got there for changes to be implemented forcefully? An horrific case like Itaewon or similar for this case for people to wake up to the problem? This isn't a great way to solve issues like those. Waiting for major accidents to happen to only then do something about it.
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