Tokyo, 17 October, /AJMEDIA/
As the number of foreign tourists to Japan soars to record highs, so to do the number of overseas travelers caught behaving badly during their visits. With higher-than-usual cases being reported, the Japanese media has even coined a term for it, meiwaku gaikokujin, which translates as “nuisance foreigner,” and the latest case involves a tourist who was seen doing pull-ups on a torii gate at a Japanese shrine.
The incident was captured on film less than a week ago by the woman doing the pull-ups, who shared the video on social media. According to local news reports, the woman is of Chilean nationality and was visiting Japan for sightseeing with her sister when the two of them stopped by a shrine in Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido. This is where one of the sisters pulled herself up on a torii gate and performed dance movements to a popular TikTok song with her chin raised above the lower bar. The other sister also shared a video of herself at the shrine, and she too caused an uproar with viewers as she performed a handstand at the main torii gate at the entrance to the shrine.
The two sisters have a shared Instagram account with over 130,000 followers, and this is where they posted the videos of their shrine visit. It didn’t take long for their antics to go viral, with media outlets in the sisters’ hometown quickly picking up on the story, with one headline reading: “Anger at a Chilean woman who did pull-ups on a Japanese torii.”
The anger came from both inside and outside of Japan, with foreign tourists in Japan even expressing their disapproval, calling it rude and pointing out that shrines aren’t places for this sort of behaviour. Locals were even more incensed, because although shrines have become popular tourist sites, they are holy grounds where everything is considered sacred, and the gods, who are ever-present, can see everything you do.
Handstands and pull-ups are a sign of disrespect to the gods that no Japanese local would ever think to perform on shrine grounds, so this type of behavior from an overseas visitor has been widely criticized as being impolite to the gods, the shrine itself, and the locals and their culture.