Foreign YouTubers recently boasted about taking the free train in Japan, a new example of the dubious antics of certain visitors to the archipelago that irritate the local population, allergic to incivility.
“I apologize to the Japanese if I made them feel uncomfortable, that was not our goal!” said YouTuber Fidias Panayiotou on Tuesday, October 24, in a comment to his own video published this weekend on his online channel with 2, 38 million subscribers. .
In this video, which as of Tuesday had 381,000 views, this Cypriot and three friends took on a challenge: racing each other throughout Japan, but traveling without paying.
At one point, Phidias hides in the bathroom of a shinkansen, the Japanese high-speed train, pretending to be sick to escape the conductor. He then changes trains and uses the same ploy.
He is also seen entering a hotel and posing as a guest to receive a free breakfast. The four YouTubers also have fun asking passers-by for money to pay for their transportation tickets.
“We are aware of this matter, we are investigating the facts,” a spokeswoman for the JR Kyushu railway company, which operates in southwestern Japan, told AFP. The company is considering turning to the police, she added.
“We don’t want it anymore”
On Japanese social media, reactions to Phidias’ video were often outraged, with many calling for its authors to be arrested to prevent others from imitating them.
“Japan is one of the safest countries in the world. I don’t want visitors to destroy this environment. If there are many foreigners like that, we don’t want them anymore,” reacted a Japanese Internet user.
This new incident comes after another streamer, American Ismael Ramsey Khalid, alias Johnny Somali, was arrested at the end of September in Japan for illegally entering a construction site.
Johnny Somali burst into the scene in costume, shouting “Fukushima!” several times, in reference to the 2011 nuclear accident in northeastern Japan, as a video taken at the time shows.
In another of his videos in Japan, the streamer harassed passengers on a train, making reference to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which left at least 210,000 victims in 1945.
Numerous precedents
In 2017, the American YouTuber Logan Paul had already caused a scandal by having fun finding a lifeless body in a forest at the foot of Mount Fuji, known as the favorite place for suicides in Japan.
Incidents on public roads involving foreign visitors periodically irritate Japan. And this phenomenon has re-emerged this year as tourists return en masse to the archipelago, which was closed for more than two years to international visitors due to the Covid-19 pandemic. To the point that the government is now working on measures against “overtourism”.
For fear of excesses, the city council of the modern Tokyo district of Shibuya advised against celebrating Halloween later this month around its main station.
Source: BFM TV
