Japanese culture: what visitors should know

One people, and more than one Japan

Most of the people you meet will be Japanese by birth and upbringing, and the customs on this page are mainly theirs. That is a choice made for your sake, because theirs are the customs you will meet in shops, trains, inns and shrines, and it implies no ranking. Japan has often been described, at home and abroad, as a single, uniform people, and scholars inside and outside Japan have spent decades showing that the picture is too simple.

In the far north, the Ainu are recognised in law as an Indigenous people; the national Ainu museum, Upopoy, opened in Hokkaido in 2020. In the far south, Okinawa was the independent Ryukyu Kingdom until 1879 and keeps its own music, food and religious practice. Korean families who settled during the colonial period and their descendants form an old, established community. And Japan now has more foreign residents than ever: the people serving you in a city convenience store or hotel may come from Vietnam, Nepal or the Philippines.

Figures: Statistics Bureau of Japan, 2025 census preliminary counts; Hokkaido Government Ainu living conditions survey 2017; Immigration Services Agency, end of 2024 and end of 2025. The foreign-resident total includes the Korean special permanent residents.

The ideas beneath the manners

Three ideas explain most of what you will notice. Japanese people use the words for them every day, argue about them, and are sometimes tired of foreigners treating them as national traits. Take them as tendencies that vary by age, region and setting, not as a key to anybody’s character.

Not troubling others

Japanese city trains are known for their quiet, even at rush hour. Rail companies ask passengers to put phones on silent, take calls on the platform and carry backpacks low, and most people do. The word behind this is meiwaku: trouble or inconvenience caused to other people. Children hear hito ni meiwaku o kakenai, “don’t cause other people trouble”, early and often, and the everyday apology go-meiwaku o okake shimashita means “I’m sorry for the trouble I caused”. It sits beside an older ideal, wa, harmony within a group.

The same idea explains why so few public bins exist and people carry rubbish home, and why queues form in neat lines at platform markings. For a visitor, the practical rule is simple: in shared space, keep your noise, your luggage and your rubbish small.

Inside and outside

Japanese has a pair of words, uchi and soto, for inside and outside: my household, my company, my circle, and everyone beyond it. In Japanese Society (1970), the anthropologist Chie Nakane argued that people place each other first by the group they belong to, more than by what they do. Much of polite speech marks which side of that line someone stands on. Her picture has been criticised as too tidy, but the everyday line is real, and you can see it at any front door. In the entrance hall, the genkan, outdoor shoes come off on the lower floor before you step up into the house.

A visitor is soto almost by definition. That is why you will be treated with a formality that can feel like distance, and also why little is expected of you. You are a guest, and a guest is looked after.

Public face and true feeling

Tatemae is the stance a person takes in public; honne is what they actually feel. The psychiatrist Takeo Doi wrote about the pair in The Anatomy of Self (English edition 1986), and every culture has its version: the dinner-party compliment, the polite “we must do this again”. In Japan the public stance carries more weight in more settings, so disagreement is softened and a refusal often arrives as hesitation rather than a no.

These ideas are moving. NHK has asked the same questions about Japanese values every five years since 1973. The latest round we could find, from 2018, found that the wish for close ties with workmates, relatives and neighbours has fallen for decades. Polite speech to older people, though, is still something most people take for granted.

How Japan sees visitors

In an Asahi Shimbun poll in early 2025, 68% of people said the record number of foreign tourists was a good thing for Japan. In the same poll, more than three-quarters called overtourism a problem. Both are true at once: Japan is glad to have you, and tired of crowds in a handful of famous places.

The everyday word for a foreigner is gaikokujin, “outside-country person”. Its short form, gaijin, is the one many visitors hear. Some foreign residents find it cold or offensive, some Japanese people use it with no edge at all, and broadcasters avoid it. Views differ, so use gaikokujin yourself, and don’t assume an insult when you hear the shorter word.

There is distance too. In a 2023 government survey, 41.5% of Japanese adults said they had no foreign friends or contact with foreign people. Foreign residents, who rent homes and look for work, meet more of it. In the first national survey of foreign residents, in 2016, about three in ten said they had met discrimination in the previous five years. About four in ten who had looked for housing said landlords had refused them for being foreign.

For a visitor, the useful point is that your own conduct is the part of the encounter you control, and in Japan it is noticed. The courtesies on this page and its companion etiquette guide are the way to be the guest people are glad to see.

Sources: Asahi Shimbun poll, early 2025 (via Statista); Immigration Services Agency survey of Japanese residents, 2023, published 2024; Ministry of Justice foreign residents survey, 2016, published 2017; Shirakawa-gō residents’ survey, fiscal 2024 (via Yomiuri / The Star, January 2026).

Age, rank and the people serving you

Japanese grammar changes with the person you are speaking to. There are plain forms for friends, polite forms for strangers, and honorific forms for customers and seniors. The anthropologist Takie Lebra described the aim as each person “occupying the proper place”. Older people, teachers and senior colleagues are addressed upwards; the shop assistant who bows you out of the door is speaking upwards to you.

The bow does the same work as a handshake, a thank-you and a goodbye. Staff bow deeply because you are the customer, not because you have done anything special, and nobody expects a visitor to match the angle. A small nod of the head returns it well.

Visitors often notice how much distance strangers keep: conversations with strangers on trains are rare, and so is touch between adults who are not close. Do not read that reserve as coldness. Ask for help, slowly and with a phrase or two, and you will usually find people willing to give it.

Two habits make most of the difference. Address people by family name with -san (Tanaka-san) unless invited otherwise, and never add it to your own name. Give way to older people on trains and in queues; priority seats are marked and are meant to stay free. Parents will find children welcomed warmly, and expected to keep quiet on trains like everyone else.

Language, and reading the air

Japanese is the language of daily life everywhere. In the big cities, station and street signs usually carry English and many menus have pictures; our guide to getting around Japan covers the transport side. In tests of adult English, Japanese reading scores run well ahead of speaking, so writing a word down or showing your phone often works when speech does not. Away from the main visitor areas, a translation app becomes essential.

Much of what matters is never said. Kūki o yomu, “reading the air”, means picking up the mood of a room and acting on it without being told. Someone who cannot is teased as KY, short for kūki ga yomenai, “can’t read the air”. For you, it means listening for the soft no. “That’s a little difficult” (chotto muzukashii desu) usually means it cannot be done. Accept it graciously and don’t push; pressing for a clear yes or no makes both of you lose face.

Food and the table

A Japanese meal opens with itadakimasu, “I humbly receive”, and ends with gochisōsama deshita, a thank-you for the work that went into it. Most chopstick rules are about tidiness, but the two serious ones touch death. Rice with chopsticks standing upright in it is an offering to the dead, and passing food from one pair of chopsticks to another recalls the way families pass a relative’s bones after cremation. Those are the two to avoid above all.

Our companion etiquette guide covers the table in detail, Tasting Japan covers what to eat, and the tea ceremony shows the same care taken to its height.

Festivals, the sacred and the seasons

Ask people in Japan whether they are religious and many will say no. Then at New Year they queue at a shrine, in summer they welcome their ancestors home, and in spring they sit under the blossom with everyone they know. In Japan the sacred, the seasons and the calendar of family life are one turning year, and a visitor meets it constantly, as crowds, closures, food and quiet ritual.

The sacred in everyday practice

In a large 2024 survey by Doshisha and Hokkaido universities, 53% of people called themselves Buddhist and 13% Shinto, while almost a third chose neither; people could pick more than one. Yet shrine and temple rituals are common among people who say they have no religion. Practice comes before belief. Shrines honour kami, the deities and spirits of a place, a mountain, a family line; temples are Buddhist and look after the dead. Most people use both, and our guide to temples and shrines explains how to tell them apart.

What links many rituals is purity. Shinto treats kegare, pollution, as a state that clings to people through contact with death, blood or sickness, not as sin, and it is washed away rather than forgiven. You meet the idea at the stone basin inside a shrine gate, where you rinse your hands and mouth before approaching, and at the step where shoes come off. Death is the strongest source, so funerals are Buddhist, and many families skip the New Year shrine visit in the year after a death.

The turning points of the year

New Year is the great family holiday. People clean house, eat special food and visit a shrine or temple in the first days of the year to pray for health and buy a fresh charm. Join the queue, then bow and offer a coin as the person in front of you does.

Obon in summer is the return of the ancestors: families tend the graves, light lanterns to guide the spirits home and gather for bon dances in temple yards, parks and town squares. Many dances are open to anyone who steps into the circle and copies the people in front.

Through the year, each neighbourhood shrine holds its own matsuri, when the kami is carried through the streets in a portable shrine and stalls sell grilled food late into the evening. Children are part of all three. The inner halls, home altars and family graves belong to priests and families; everything in the open is yours to watch.

Living by the seasons

Around the year 1000, the court writer Sei Shōnagon opened The Pillow Book by naming the best hour of each season: in spring, the dawn. Seven centuries later Bashō built his haiku on season words, and the habit still runs through ordinary life. Restaurant menus, sweets and shop windows change with the month, forecasters chart the blossom front as it moves up the country, and crowds gather to watch leaves turn as they would for a match.

Dates move with the calendar, the weather and the region. For when the blossom and the leaves arrive, see our best time to visit Japan; a guide to Japan’s festivals is in preparation.

Hospitality, gifts and money

Japanese hospitality has a name, omotenashi: anticipating a guest’s needs before they are spoken. You will see it in a department store, where staff wrap even a small purchase with care, and in inns and restaurants where staff seem to know what you need before you ask. The word has also become a national brand in tourism promotion, and some Japanese writers are wry about that. The care you meet in a good inn needs no slogan.

Gifts carry much of the work that words do elsewhere. People coming back from a trip bring omiyage, local sweets or snacks, for colleagues and family, which is why station shops sell them in neat gift boxes. If you are invited to someone’s home, which is less common than in the West, bring something small and well wrapped from home or a good shop. Give and receive with both hands, and avoid sets of four: the word for four can be read like the word for death.

Tipping is not part of Japanese custom, and Japan’s national tourist board says so plainly. Service is included in the price, and staff may hand back a tip left on the table. Say thank you instead.

Our companion page, Japan etiquette: what to do and avoid, turns all of this into situations: greetings, trains, the table, temples and shrines, homes and inns. For bathing, see onsen etiquette; for walking the old pilgrimage routes, where shrines and the seasons meet, see the Kumano Kodo.