What's new

Worst tourist attraction in Japan?

Zoo blooz

I didn't rate Ueno zoo all that much.

The Polar bears looked like they were going to die at any minute,
and they didn't have a very good selection of monkeys!

I can't think of much else I didn't like, but I've only been to Japan once (so far)...Rich
 
tasuki said:
Reading us ***** like this makes me wonder why we stay... :p

Heck, reading all this makes me wonder if I really want to go visit! Maybe I'll switch from Japanese to Italian and go visit Florence next year.
 
senseiman said:
There was a huge parking lot full of waste high weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt but not a single car. We went up to the reception building, a huge 3 story complex, and found that it was completely deserted save for one lonely person working in in the coffee shop, which had no customers. She seemed quite surprised to see that someone had actually come in and was even more taken aback when she found out that we weren't there just to ask directions, but to actually use the recreation park!

...

The amount of cobwebs on the bikes told us that we may well have been the first people to ever actually rent them. We wiped the only two we could find without flat tires off and made our way towards the dam, which marked the start of the cycling trail.

...

What could possibly be wrong with a little cycling trail, you may ask. If it were built by sane people, nothing. But the people who designed the Hattoji dam recreational park could never be accused of sanity.

...

On the way, we saw the remains of the peddle boats, their dock half submerged in the lake and the boats covered in filth. When we arrived at the beach we found that it had been turned into one of Japan's many illegal dump sites, with piles of garbage littering the whole expanse.

...

The whole experience was quite interesting. The two of us had a multi million dollar recreation park that was designed for our enjoyment entirely to ourselves and yet were not able to find a single thing in it that wasn't depressing, let alone enjoyable.
how spooky. any rats into it?
 
that original post seems like a cool adventure
i like that sort of ****
the whole idea of places that were once prosperous but are now wasteland appeal to me
like an end of the world survival type thing

i went to western mura in nikko, at one point there were only two people of us there
in the whole place
there were staff of course but we couldnt see them
in one place we could here them taliking but couldnt actually see them
it was bizarre
like going to an empty disneyland where all the moving attractions had stopped moving

western mura for those who dont know is like edo mura but with a cowboy theme

i heard many of these theme places sprung up during the bubble economy
but like many golf courses and bowling alleys
closed down in the recession
 
Bramicus said:
Heck, reading all this makes me wonder if I really want to go visit! Maybe I'll switch from Japanese to Italian and go visit Florence next year.
florence is amazing
not that i remember it too well

if you go check out a shop called vivoli gelato - wow
 
廃墟

deadhippo said:
that original post seems like a cool adventure
i like that sort of ****
the whole idea of places that were once prosperous but are now wasteland appeal to me
like an end of the world survival type thing
Gunkanjima
 
aww... reading about kyoto is a real shame. :( I'm planning on studying abroad there for spring '08 semester. Is it really so terrible that I shouldn't go there? I'd be studying at Doshisha, with a focus on Japanese Language and Culture.

My other options are University if Tsukuba, Sophia University, and the International Christian University. I believe Sophia and ICU are located in Tokyo. I don't like ICU because i've seen the campus, and it's nothing but just these rectangular, old concrete buildings (which sounds an awful lot like the new station). And Sophia has a really really small section set aside for international students, and it seems so... not up to date w/ technology. Their website only has phone numbers for contact information, and NO course summaries or ANYTHING.

I think the only alternative I would consider would be Tsukuba, but that would be in the Fall, and I need to make sure I can meet the language requirement deadline in time. Not to mention the deadline for application is November.... er... something-or-other... ^_^"

So any advice?
 
Kyoto is a horrible place if you are expecting it to be somehow frozen in time several hundred years ago, without much modernization or urbanization.

If you are more realistic, then Kyoto is a tremendously beautiful city with plenty to offer. Don't listen only to the naysayers; keep an open mind, but above all, keep in mind the fact that Kyoto was the official residence of the Emporer until only about 150 years ago. To think that the cultural center of Japan wouldn't adapt with the times is just naive.
 
I agree Mikawa O., I have always enjoyed going there, having visited there 9 times already (of all the seasons, I think winter is the best, as it is the quietest time). Of course, not all of the city is a delight to visit, but I could say that about quite a few places.
 
okay, that's fine... I wasn't expecting it to be completely old-fashioned or anything. Just so long as there's still some form of culture and stuff. I just don't want to a concrete zombie city (haha... I hope that made sense @_@)

And every city has its bad parts, it's just a matter of avoiding them I guess. Like I live in LA, but I never go to the downtown area for obvious reasons.
 
What is the worst tourist attraction you have been to in Japan? I'd like to share my own story and see who can top it.
My worst tourist attraction would have to be the Hattoji Dam recreational park in rural Okayama. My wife and I were staying at an international villa for a few days nearby and we found this brochure for the dam complex. It was full of pictures of lots of attractive happy people swimming on an artificial lake, riding peddle boats shaped like ducks and having a good time. Normally a dam isn't my idea of a good place to visit, but we wanted to go for a swim, so we decided why not.
When we got to the place, the first thing we realized was that the pictures in the brochure were all taken about 10 years ago when the park opened. We showed up on a sunny Sunday afternoon, but didn't find any happy attractive people. Or any disgruntled ugly people for that matter. There was a huge parking lot full of waste high weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt but not a single car. We went up to the reception building, a huge 3 story complex, and found that it was completely deserted save for one lonely person working in in the coffee shop, which had no customers. She seemed quite surprised to see that someone had actually come in and was even more taken aback when she found out that we weren't there just to ask directions, but to actually use the recreation park!
We asked what we could do, and she suggested renting some bicycles and going for a ride around the lake. My wife asked about the paddle boats, but was told they were not available at the moment, so we agreed to pay the 500 yen fee for the bikes instead. She gave us 2 keys and told us to go to the garage in the back of the building to choose some bikes.
The amount of cobwebs on the bikes told us that we may well have been the first people to ever actually rent them. We wiped the only two we could find without flat tires off and made our way towards the dam, which marked the start of the cycling trail.
The lake itself could have been not too bad looking even with the dam. It was surrounded by lush green mountains on all sides. Unfortunately the designers had decided that a cycling trail was absolutely necessary to the parks succes and this ruined the scenery completely. What could possibly be wrong with a little cycling trail, you may ask. If it were built by sane people, nothing. But the people who designed the Hattoji dam recreational park could never be accused of sanity. The cycling trail is built along a range of beautiful mountains, about 100-200 metres below the peaks. The engineers decided it would be a good idea to clear cut all of the forests on the mountainside located above the cycling trail and encase the remains in concrete to prevent landslides. As the cycling trail runs for several kilometres, this meant that about half a dozen mountains got buzz cuts and there isn't a single attractive peak left in the whole area! All this to protect a measly 2 metre wide track that nobody ever uses. What could have been a bicycle ride through a lovely forest was in reality about as appealing as a bicycle ride through a highway interchange.
Undaunted, we decided to follow the cycling trail to its finish, where there was a really nice beach according to the map we had. On the way, we saw the remains of the peddle boats, their dock half submerged in the lake and the boats covered in filth. When we arrived at the beach we found that it had been turned into one of Japan's many illegal dump sites, with piles of garbage littering the whole expanse. We decided to give swimming a miss and call it a day.
The whole experience was quite interesting. The two of us had a multi million dollar recreation park that was designed for our enjoyment entirely to ourselves and yet were not able to find a single thing in it that wasn't depressing, let alone enjoyable. It is hard to beat that level of incompetence, I really think these small towns have too much money on their hands!
Sometimes the old posts are still the best! (This is the OP to this thread, and this post is probably the single biggest reason I became interested in Jref in the first place. I couldn't stop laughing, because these places really do exist!)
 
The tourist attractions in Japan are, in most part, built for Japanese tourists. I can totally understand how visitors from foreign countries (AND some natives including myself) find these places rather tacky and un-traditional but that is just the way it is. They perfectly reflect the aesthetics shared by majority of our people of the post war Japan.
Kyoto, for example, with its garish neon signs and all, is what a major city is supposed to look like. Powerlines and vending machines might be eye-sores for visitors who are expecting to see sceneries straight out of Hokusai paintings, but to a lot of us, that is Japan we have grown up in... and love. The real Japan is rarely found in tourist attractions anyway. I know it's a cliche but It IS all about co-existing of the old and the new. It is true that the new is not so slowly wiping out the old... but if you look, there still is plenty of the old Japan left.
I now live in Tochigi surrounded by mountains. I only have to drive for 20 minutes to go to places where the nature still reigns. You see a few small shacks where people live the same way they did 60 years ago. Vegetable gardens right next to the houses where they grow Nappa cabbages and Daikons... Family graves up on the hill behind the houses... You look REAL close and you will also see a satelite disk sitting crooked on the roofs and pink Nissan Cubes with menageries of stuffed Disney characters on their dashboards parked behind the drying clothes. THAT, to this former ex-patriot who has just come home after 20 years, is heartbreakingly Japanese.
OK, back to the topic of the worst tourist attraction in Japan. KYOTO. Everytime I visit Kyoto, I sense this overly conscious efforts made by the local merchants (or anyone who makes money off tourists) to appear oh-so-traditionally Japanese. I mean, I don't expect genuineness in the way retail people interact with the cusotmers but someting about the way it's done in places like Kyoto... the way so called Traditional Japan is packaged and marketed to foreign visitors is quite off-putting and embarrassing to me. ...and Yes, the chip on my shoulder IS very heavy. lol :smoke:
 
What is the worst tourist attraction you have been to in Japan? I'd like to share my own story and see who can top it.
My worst tourist attraction would have to be the Hattoji Dam recreational park in rural Okayama. My wife and I were staying at an international villa for a few days nearby and we found this brochure for the dam complex. It was full of pictures of lots of attractive happy people swimming on an artificial lake, riding peddle boats shaped like ducks and having a good time. Normally a dam isn't my idea of a good place to visit, but we wanted to go for a swim, so we decided why not.
When we got to the place, the first thing we realized was that the pictures in the brochure were all taken about 10 years ago when the park opened. We showed up on a sunny Sunday afternoon, but didn't find any happy attractive people. Or any disgruntled ugly people for that matter. There was a huge parking lot full of waste high weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt but not a single car. We went up to the reception building, a huge 3 story complex, and found that it was completely deserted save for one lonely person working in in the coffee shop, which had no customers. She seemed quite surprised to see that someone had actually come in and was even more taken aback when she found out that we weren't there just to ask directions, but to actually use the recreation park!
We asked what we could do, and she suggested renting some bicycles and going for a ride around the lake. My wife asked about the paddle boats, but was told they were not available at the moment, so we agreed to pay the 500 yen fee for the bikes instead. She gave us 2 keys and told us to go to the garage in the back of the building to choose some bikes.
The amount of cobwebs on the bikes told us that we may well have been the first people to ever actually rent them. We wiped the only two we could find without flat tires off and made our way towards the dam, which marked the start of the cycling trail.
The lake itself could have been not too bad looking even with the dam. It was surrounded by lush green mountains on all sides. Unfortunately the designers had decided that a cycling trail was absolutely necessary to the parks succes and this ruined the scenery completely. What could possibly be wrong with a little cycling trail, you may ask. If it were built by sane people, nothing. But the people who designed the Hattoji dam recreational park could never be accused of sanity. The cycling trail is built along a range of beautiful mountains, about 100-200 metres below the peaks. The engineers decided it would be a good idea to clear cut all of the forests on the mountainside located above the cycling trail and encase the remains in concrete to prevent landslides. As the cycling trail runs for several kilometres, this meant that about half a dozen mountains got buzz cuts and there isn't a single attractive peak left in the whole area! All this to protect a measly 2 metre wide track that nobody ever uses. What could have been a bicycle ride through a lovely forest was in reality about as appealing as a bicycle ride through a highway interchange.
Undaunted, we decided to follow the cycling trail to its finish, where there was a really nice beach according to the map we had. On the way, we saw the remains of the peddle boats, their dock half submerged in the lake and the boats covered in filth. When we arrived at the beach we found that it had been turned into one of Japan's many illegal dump sites, with piles of garbage littering the whole expanse. We decided to give swimming a miss and call it a day.
The whole experience was quite interesting. The two of us had a multi million dollar recreation park that was designed for our enjoyment entirely to ourselves and yet were not able to find a single thing in it that wasn't depressing, let alone enjoyable. It is hard to beat that level of incompetence, I really think these small towns have too much money on their hands!
LOL, the best story I have heard in a long time.
 
I don't know, but when I first got here I was taken to a Toyota museum, in Toyota, Aichi. I thought I was gonna see big machinery and latest models and race cars and robots and whatnot and all I saw was a 10-minute movie on how the company started almost a century ago.

There was a huge river in which we could drive foot-pedalled boats though. I think that was the main highlight. How sad...

Kyoto, for example, with its garish neon signs and all, is what a major city is supposed to look like. Powerlines and vending machines might be eye-sores for visitors who are expecting to see sceneries straight out of Hokusai paintings...

As for Kyoto goes....

I have only been to Kyoto once, and God, was I disappointed. First, get off at Kyoto station. The inside is beautiful but then out of it all one sees are grey buildings that haven't had maintinence in decades.

And taking a taxi in the way to one of the main tourist attractions, which was overflooded with tourists, I don't even know the name of it, all we see are decayed mansion appartments and that brought me memories for the first time since getting here to Japan of a third-world-country.

I liked the attraction a lot though, even though it was full of tourists, hmph.

I am yet to see the real Japan that existed hundreds of years ago. A non-touristy place in the mountains where I can in fact see real Japanese culture.

Mauricio
 
Wow, five years after I started this thread and its still going! All right! :)



About Kyoto, I tend to agree in terms of the city centre. Its grey and not very attractive, pretty much like every other big city in Japan. Go into the countryside surrounding the city though and you'll find some quite scenic places.
 
Just got back from a trip to Japan (Tokyo, Kamakura, Otsuki, Mt. Fuji, Yokohama, Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Himeji, Nakata, Okayama, Hiroshima). Wow, Japan looks just like China, like a Communist third world country. My previous image of Japan has been irrevocably shattered. Actually China was better than Japan in many ways, one being it's 10x cheaper, and two, China is a much larger country so it has a lot more geographic and cultural diversity. All of Honshu looked just like China's Zhejiang or Jiangsu province: humid haze, rain-stained concrete blocks, green rice paddies, hills, giant electric poles, and laundry hanging out of concrete boxes in 100% humidity. Even the train stations in Japan look the same as those in East China: ugly square blocks of dark gray tile/concrete/plastic (compare say Hangzhou New Station with Kyoto Station).

One of the worst tourist attractions? The Tokyo National Museum. I really wanted to get my money back for false advertising. That's not a museum of national caliber. But at least the war-period Honkan building looked cooler than the concrete boxes found in the rest of the city.
 
As far as I am concerned there is no bad tourist attraction in Japan. I lived there for almost 10 years and there are only wonderful memories left from all the places i went to.
 
Not exactly bad, but I didn't like Marble Beach in Rinku Town in Osaka.
SophiaY: I love your avatar! Is that wagashi?
 
Back
Top Bottom