"Japan Is So Cheap Right Now." In Niseko, Locals Have a Word for It: Colony.
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Let me translate the honne behind the ¥2,000 ramen.
If you’ve planned a Japan trip lately, you’ve heard the line — probably said it yourself. The yen is so weak, Japan is basically on sale. It’s true. It’s also, from the other side of the counter, the start of a much less comfortable conversation — one happening in Japanese that you’re not seeing.
Let me translate it. Not to make you feel bad — you’re not the villain here — but because the honne is more interesting than either headline. In Niseko, locals already have a word for what the weak yen built up the mountain. It isn’t a flattering one.
What’s actually happening in Niseko
Niseko, in Hokkaido, has some of the best powder snow on earth. Over the last decade it has also become the clearest example of what tourist money does to a Japanese town when it arrives all at once.
When Kyodo News reported from Niseko in early 2025, the signage in the Hirafu resort area was almost entirely in English — the reporter noted there were barely any shops that seemed aimed at Japanese customers at all. The menus told the story even faster: a sushi set around ¥4,730, a sashimi teishoku (set meal) ¥9,240, a sashimi platter ¥46,200 — and, the detail that went viral in Japan, a bowl of ramen from a food truck for ¥2,000 and a steak sandwich for ¥5,000 (all prices as reported by Kyodo, early 2025).
For a visitor paying in dollars, that ramen is roughly the price of a coffee back home. For a local on a Japanese salary, it’s a bowl of noodles that costs what a sit-down restaurant lunch used to. And the crowds are real: the Niseko area — the three towns of Kutchan, Niseko and Rankoshi combined — logged roughly 740,000 foreign guest-nights in fiscal 2023, the highest on record since tracking began in 2006.
Why Niseko locals call it a “colony”
Here’s the line that gave this its name. A resident from the foot of the mountain, talking to reporters about the resort zone above:
「あそこ（スキー場周辺）は植民地みたいなもの」 “That place up there [around the ski resort] — it’s basically a colony.” — a resident at the foot of the mountain, quoted by Kyodo News (47NEWS), March 2025, transl. Ren
Sit with that word for a second. 植民地 — colony. It’s not aimed at any one tourist. It’s the feeling of a place where you no longer recognize the signs, can’t afford the food, and increasingly don’t work for the people who own things — all inside your own country.
But — and this is the part the angry version of this story always skips — Japan is not unanimous, and Japan is not mostly angry at you. The tourism money is real: jobs, wages, a town that isn’t dying like so many rural Japanese towns are. The resentment is aimed less at visitors than at being priced out, which is a different thing.
And when you ask Japanese people the obvious follow-up — should locals and tourists just pay different prices, then? — the answer surprises almost every English speaker. In a Time Out Tokyo reader poll on social media, support for “dual pricing” ran around 84% (it was 85% on Instagram). That’s a self-selected sample, not a national survey — but it’s a striking number all the same, and the common condition readers attached wasn’t outrage. It was bookkeeping:
「資金の使い道が明確なら賛成」 “I’m for it — as long as it’s clear what the money’s used for.” — a representative reader comment summarized in Time Out Tokyo’s dual-pricing writeup, transl. Ren
That’s the honne most English coverage misses: a lot of Japan isn’t asking tourists to leave. It’s asking them to pay the real, un-subsidized price — and to be honest about where the money goes.
Is dual pricing discrimination? The other side
Dual pricing isn’t a clean win, and one of the sharpest objections came from someone who’d be on the receiving end of it — a foreign-born member of Time Out Tokyo’s own English-language team:
「もし、二重価格制度が外見だけを基準に運用されるのであれば、それは極めて差別的な慣行と言わざるを得ません」 “If dual pricing is applied based on appearance alone, it’s a deeply discriminatory practice.” — a foreign-born member of Time Out Tokyo’s English-language team, transl. Ren
Which is the real knot. A price tied to a hotel booking or a foreign passport is one thing. A price tied to how Japanese your face looks is another — and it lands hardest on the long-term residents and mixed-heritage Japanese who already live here. Japan has not solved this. It’s arguing about it, out loud, right now.
The gap
Same weak yen, two completely different sentences:
- To the English-speaking traveler: “Japan is incredibly cheap right now — go before it changes.”
- To a lot of people in Japan: “We’re being priced out of our own country — and we’re trying to decide, fairly, what to do about it.”
There’s a tell in here too. A French diner at a Toyosu uni (sea urchin) restaurant, faced with a ¥15,000 seafood bowl aimed squarely at inbound tourists, shrugged it off:
「日本にいる時は、値段は問題ないです」 “When I’m in Japan, the price isn’t a problem.” — a French diner interviewed by Kansai TV, March 2024, transl. Ren
To him, ¥15,000 is a holiday splurge. To the person living next door, it’s the new normal price of their own neighborhood. Neither is lying. They’re just standing on opposite sides of the same exchange rate.
Ren’s take
(That’s the reporting. This next part is my opinion, not a fact.)
I don’t think you owe anyone an apology for visiting Japan on a strong dollar — the invitation is real and the welcome, in my experience, is mostly genuine. But “Japan is cheap” is a tourist’s sentence, not a resident’s, and the gap between those two is where all the friction lives. The travelers Japan actually warms to aren’t the ones who spend the least. They’re the ones who notice — who clock that ¥2,000 ramen means something different to the person serving it, and who pay the inbound price without acting like they’ve discovered free money. Dual pricing, done honestly, is just that instinct written into the menu. The colony feeling is what happens when nobody bothers.
Why it matters
If Japan is on your list — and with the yen where it is, it should be — the move isn’t to feel guilty. It’s to travel like you know the honne. Go to Niseko. Pay the inbound price, and don’t act like you found free money. The weak yen is a window, not a clearance sale — and the people behind the English signage clock the difference between a guest and a bargain-hunter.
And if you do go: I’d sort the lift passes and snow activities before you land — Niseko on Klook is the simplest English-language way to line them up.
Receipts below, as always. What should I decode next?
— Ren, in Tokyo