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作成日: 2024/12/30 11:23

更新日: 2025/12/08 07:31

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The top 10 annoying foreign tourist behaviors on trains, as chosen by Japanese people：Survey
Casey Baseel

Survey finds 10 things to avoid as Japan experiences record-breaking, sometimes patience-testing levels of inbound international tourism.

Japan is seeing more inbound foreign tourists than ever these days, which also means more inbound foreign tourists than ever on public transportation. But as locals and Japanese residents increasingly rub elbows on trains, that also means more chances for tourist behavior to rub locals the wrong way.

As part of its annual study on train/station etiquette, the Japan Private Railway Association collected responses from 5,314 participants via an online survey. 62.9 percent of the respondents said they’d been bothered by impolite behavior by foreign tourists, and the survey then asked them to designate up to two specific complaints, resulting in the following top 10 list (technically top 11, if you count the entry of “other”).

11. Eating or drinking on the train (chosen by 3.3 percent of respondents)

Though pretty much every station having at least a kiosk where you can buy snacks and drinks, if not a full-on convenience store or bento boxed lunch shop, eating onboard trains is generally frowned upon in Japan. It’s not absolutely forbidden, but there’s a general understanding that the only things you should eat on most trains are bite-sized snacks, ones small enough that you can pop them whole into your mouth without anyone having to see them, and also that there should be no audible chewing or crunching, and no noticeable smell either. So tiny rice crackers or cookies you might be able to get away with, but chowing down on a Mos Burger is a no-no.

An exception is made for the Shinkansen and other obviously leisure travel-oriented lines, which often have fold-down seat trays (like the ones on airplanes) for passengers to use, but otherwise, eating anything large enough to be considered a meal, or to require multiple visible bites to consume, is likely to be seen as slovenly.

For drinks, the gray area is wider, but the same principles apply: if you’re going to drink something, it should be something you can drink quietly and that doesn’t have a detectable aroma. Alcoholic beverages are OK on the Shinkansen and sightseeing trains, but widely considered crass for commuter and local lines.

10. Sitting on the floor of the train (4.2 percent)

Yeah, maybe your legs are worn out after spending all morning touring temple in Kyoto. Perhaps you’re doing a backpacker-style trip across Japan, staying in hostels, washing your clothes in the sink, and otherwise enjoying roughing it as you experience the country’s rustic charms. Doesn’t matter. If there are no empty seats on the train, you’re supposed to stand, since sitting on the floor takes up extra space, makes it hard for others to get on or off the train, and just looks sloppy.

9. Bad manners regarding priority seats (4.4 percent)

At the corner of many train cars in Japan is a short bench designated as priority seats (often with a sign above them with the kanji characters 優先席). These are meant to be used by elderly, injured, or disabled passengers, as well as those who are pregnant of traveling with small children. Other people aren’t necessarily prohibited from using those seats, though, which is where things get kind of tricky. You might think that even if you’re not part of any of those groups, it’s fine to sit in the priority seat and simply give it up if someone asks for it. However, some people in Japan believe that it’s inconsiderate to make someone else ask, and it becomes even more complicated since physical ailments aren’t always visually obvious. If a 60-year-old senior citizen with a bad back boards a train car and sees a much younger man sitting on a full priority seat bench, he might assume the younger man is, for example, recovering from a knee injury and needs to sit, and so not ask him for his seat. Meanwhile, the younger man might not actually have any such need to use the priority seat, but also might not be able to tell that the senior has back problems just from looking at him, so he won’t offer his seat either.

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