Travel Vloggers Can be a Force to Promote International Travel, or Hampering it, Depending on Cultural Background

As a lifelong traveler who, due to the meeting-heavy nature of my current job, is unfortunately not able to frequently head to new places, I watch travel vlogs as one way to quench that travel thirst to some degree. With the competitive vlogging landscape that is YouTube today, plenty of people, from all sorts of cultural backgrounds, dishing up their views on the same sites, both famous and mundane. While all are united in their love of travel, how they portray the places they visit, through their visual recording and verbal explanations, illustrates how travel, as a hobby and a job, is seen so differently. 

That difference is particularly stark between Japanese and their English-speaking counterparts (mostly from the US and Western Europe). While the idea of going off the beaten path is common for all travel bloggers (after all, who does not want some extra bragging rights and eyeballs for doing dangerous stuff others will not do), the idea of the dare-devil nature of travel becomes quite skewed and forced in the Japanese context. Put bluntly, many attempt to overstate the danger they put themselves into, giving their viewers a false impression of the risk taken and thus exaggerating their own courage.

In the process, these Japanese bloggers entrench the view among the Japanese people that they live in a country with the best standard of living in the world. Some of these bloggers would deliberately compare wherever they are with the Japanese equivalent, directly telling their viewers that they are lucky that Japan is not nearly as impoverished, inconvenient, dangerous, filthy, and disorderly. Rather than encouraging viewers to travel like they do, they almost imply that global travel is indeed dangerous and should be left to professional travel vloggers.

In contrast, Western travel bloggers do the opposite, beckoning more people to go out and see the real world, rather than be lied to by the mainstream media. While Japanese bloggers are busy amplifying the "truth" espoused by the majority and the mainstream media in Japan that the world outside Japan is dangerous, Western bloggers work hard to discredit the media, priding themselves as the source of the real truth that the majority would not and never bother to understand. They, unlike their Japanese counterparts, see themselves as pioneers of worthy places to travel that many simply don't know about.

While the Japanese-Western dichotomy among travel bloggers is by no means monolithic and applicable to all, the general trends reflect cultural differences that go beyond travel and YouTube. Having an audience that grew up in a collectivist and conformist culture means that Japanese bloggers are mindful of the need to adhere to socially mainstream ideas to succeed. Arrogant bloggers who believe that their countrymen are all idiots being manipulated by the media and groupthink would likely attract much more criticism than YouTube subscribers. 

Critical thinking, however, is much more respected by the general population in the West. People determining their own truths without outside influence, turbocharged by the likes of Trump who wear the distrust of mainstream media as a badge of pride, have helped to create an environment, for better or worse, of common people seeking out their own firsthand evidence to support their views. Travel bloggers, if immersed in this way of thinking, would continue to look for evidence to persuade themselves and others that a globetrotting lifestyle is a worthwhile pursuit.

There is no right and wrong between these two viewpoints. But the impact of differing narratives on the general population's attitude toward travel is clear. As the Japanese become more inward-looking for financial reasons, Japanese vloggers do not need to push them too much to convince them that overseas trips are simply not worth the expense. Western vloggers, with their enthusiastic endorsement of even the most obscure destinations, will continue to lower the mental barrier for new generations of Western travelers to seek out their own hidden truths about how the world is better than what the media say.

The biggest losers in this dichotomy is the Japanese general public. A self-perpetuating belief of the world being dangerous will only make them less able and inclined to learn foreign languages, cultures, and pack those bags for even short trips outside their home country. A population with less global experiences and convinced, through the work of media and vloggers, that the world out there is dangerous, will only continue to make the Japanese mentality more insular. Such insularity will not help Japanese people or firms increase their presence around the world.