The internet loves a clapback, so when writer Melissa Martin shared a few snappy responses from a monk named Daniel Kimura to less-than-positive reviews of a temple doubling as lodging on Mount Koya, Twitter embraced it. The tweet garnered more than 17,000 retweets and 38,000 likes, with many digitally swooning over the religious devotee’s comebacks at tourists complaining about impersonal staff and bland food (“yeah, it’s Japanese monastic cuisine, you uneducated f---”).
It wasn’t just journalists and rapper Talib Kweli applauding the monk. Plenty of foreign residents in Japan also shared it. Anecdotally, nearly a dozen Tokyo-based people I follow retweeted it the morning it emerged. I imagine far more did, too, mostly because few topics excite this demographic more than complaining about tourists.
This year has been a big one for “tourism pollution” in Japan as the number of folks coming to the nation keeps rising. Mount Koya’s influx of foreign visitors already had monks salty before one took to Booking.com. Tourists have vandalized bamboo in Kyoto and taken pictures of people without their consent. The start of 2018 saw a double whammy of perceived bad behavior, first with Logan Paul’s YouTube misadventures (he still hasn’t quite learned from them) and that was followed by a fuss over a GoPro that was placed on a sushi conveyor belt.
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