"Turn imagination into reality ... Japan awaits."

While leafing through stories on Instagram, I stumbled upon these six words written at the top of an ad from All Nippon Airways.

In recent weeks, the ad has appeared repeatedly on my feed with different images: a bento box on an airplane tray table, a woman looking at a drawing of a person wearing a kimono at the foot of a bamboo forest. Yet, each iteration — mashups of photographs and illustrations — includes the slogan, and advertises travel to Japan, now possible for tourists from last week, after more than 2½ years of varying levels of restrictions.

But one version of the ad that caught my eye has received attention online for all the wrong reasons: two foreign women — real, photographed — sit on a plane, served by an animated, presumably Japanese, stewardess. While the campaign attempts to say, "Look! What you see in manga, anime and social media can become real if you travel," it instead turns Japan and its living, breathing populace into a cartoon or, even, a fantasy.

"What if Japanese ppl were real?" one person tweeted in response.

"But Japan is not Toontown..." another tweeted in Japanese.

The critics have a point. As I've written about before, many of us are quick to judge and essentialize, and the ad surely has issues. But it can also be the starting point for a question — one I’ve thought about again and again as the excitement, apprehension and fear surrounding the country's reopening has dominated discourse in Japan’s international community.

As the borders open to tourists, as friends in New York who have never set foot in Japan plan trips, and as others prepare and hope, enticed by the weak yen, how will the current perception of Japan — which changed slightly over the past couple of years as most people were kept out — influence tourism?

'Techno-Orientalism'

To those abroad, Japan has been watched, gazed upon, imagined and created since goods from the country first flowed into the West centuries ago. But as Bloomberg Opinion columnist Gearoid Reidy argued in April, recent border restrictions may have furthered this foreign imagination — this “invention” — of Japan by preventing real-life experiences.

“Japan’s out of sight, and threatens to become out of mind with one of its main lines of communication to the world still cut — the tens of millions of tourists who returned home each year with gushing tales of encounters with the country’s people, culture and food,” Reidy wrote.

However, I reckon that many abroad continued to connect with Japan during the pandemic. Rather than doing so with feet on the ground, or butts on the stools in ramen joints, they have consumed the country via pop culture. They’ve watched the Oscar-winning “Drive My Car” and got lost in the animated films of Studio Ghibli; read Haruki Murakami or whatever manga they could get their hands on; or they binged old TV shows like “Old Enough” or “Midnight Diner” while locked down at home during a third, fourth or fifth wave of COVID-19. They have also satiated their curiosity for the country through various forms of social media.

And while many of the means through which we connect to Japan go back to the 20th century — with the country’s cultural exports having “transformed our tastes, our dreams, and eventually our realities,” as writer Matt Alt wrote in his 2020 book “Pure Invention” — social media is a more recent invention. It began in the late 1990s and only gained widespread usage in the past decade, with the pandemic increasing both screen time and social media usage globally.

There are innumerable views into Japan on social media, just as there are countless lenses into America, or anywhere else, but I am interested in one type of video: the “foreign influencer clip.”

Not to be confused with a large portion of non-Japanese content that delves into the nuances, complexities and reality of life in Japan, the clips I have in mind feel more performative than informative — Japan appears as a theatrical backdrop, with Japanese people as extras. You may follow a few of these accounts: a foreign resident in Japan records the tasty, the cute and the photographically aesthetic, their subjects often including temples, cherry blossoms or the Mario Kart racers. They may explain to their audiences “how to survive in Japan” or “how to order ramen” or “how to ride the metro during rush hour.”

The influencers also look at the supposedly futuristic: clips of robot cafes, washlets or shinkansen, overlaid with a variation of the line “Japan is living in the future.” In one clip of this “techno-Orientalism,” a computerized cart carries food to a diner in the center of a restaurant; in another, a user shows self-check in a store without a worker, something that Amazon has started in such cities as New York.

In early October, soon after Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s September announcement that borders would reopen to most tourists, an ad from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which took cues from these clips, appeared on my social media feed.

“Want to explore Tokyo?” it asked, before moving through the expected tropes: A uniformed robot flashed across the screen, followed by clips of teamLab installations with the words “Discover robots with character and immersive arts.” Next, a woman walks up a set of stairs, surrounded by vermilion torii; seen from behind, she re-creates a social media favorite: the wondrous walk through Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Shrine. “Discover beautiful scenes in Tokyo,” reads the text. “You don’t have to go to Kyoto to get this Instagrammable experience,” reads the subtext.

I was drawn to these clips because they offer a glimpse of a highly mediated, edited and manufactured view of Japan. And given their popularity — many of the accounts have upward of 100,000 followers — people want to see this content; more importantly, they want to live this content.

As visitors set foot on the ground, hang cameras around their necks and run into the middle of the Shibuya Scramble to shoot a selfie, it will be iterations of the “foreign influencer clip” that might determine where Japan’s next wave of tourists is likely to go, eat and explore. (The vibe now? “Avoid Kyoto and get off the beaten path ... my video will show you how to get there.”)

Visitors will surely use other sources, too, but as one New York Times journalist wrote in 2015, social media “has become my compass, my way of navigating the world.”

A Supreme experience?

If social media is your “compass,” what sort of Japan will you experience? Will it be the Japan of their phones that they watched from thousands of miles away? A curated slice of Japan that, with its borders closed, became as exclusive as a Supreme hoodie or a Birkin bag? Rebecca Jennings recently wrote for Vox that, “The problem of travel at this particular moment is not too many people traveling in general, it is too many people wanting to experience the exact same thing because they all went to the same websites and read the same reviews.”

Global tourism’s cookie cutter nature is not new and, in Japan as everywhere else, tourists swarmed the same spaces long before the arrival of social media, and far before the pandemic. But I also wonder if all of these clips — perhaps watched on repeat — haven’t made Japan more desirable to a certain subset of tourist in search of the perfect selfie.

As Amanda Mull recently wrote in The Atlantic, dining out fills a void, a desire for something exclusive and cool — a marker of status possibly lost through the rise of the web. “You can digitize access to reservations, but the proper dine-in experience itself must be had in the physical realm,” she wrote, citing an interview with W. David Marx for his recent book “Status and Culture.”

Does tourism not require the same presence? Maybe All Nippon Airways should have gone with the tagline, “Turn Instagram into reality ... Japan awaits.”

The Foreign Agenda section of Community is intended to voice the opinions of Japan’s international community.