As a Swede living in Japan, I get this a lot from both directions! It goes further than "wellness" too.

My pet peeve is getting asked "I [heard/read] that people put chips in their arms there?!" (presumably for payments..?) - both by Swedes about Japan and Japanese about Sweden.

One difference I absolutely do see is what it means to "go camping". Growing up it usually meant bring your gear, hike out, picking some spot in the wilderness. In Japan that's something that is quite rare, "camping" almost always involves campsites.

Might have to do with Scandinavia's vastly different population density and right to camp wherever you want in the Fjell (made possible by said population density).

I really don't think so - outside of the metro and city areas, Japan has no shortage of really rural areas. If anything I wonder if it can have to do with topology and vegetation (Sweden being flat in comparison and most of the fjäll are still quite campable due to sparse vegetation).

It's also a bit of chicken-and-egg thing with normalization in the culture - wherever you go in Japan you can generally find affordable accommodation not too far, whereas in Sweden it's more of a luxury.

I also live in Japan, and IMO topology (mountain slopes are not ideal to camp, most of the flat areas being owned, you'll get the police called on you), fauna (bears, poisonous snakes, big wasps/bees, monkeys), overgrown vegetation(in the really wild areas), the possibility of natural disasters (floods, mud/land slides, ...) explain why the the risk-wary Japanese people prefer campsites.

Campsites are also great because you can rent all the equipment you'll only need once a year, for the summer camp few days with your family as the Japanese working force does not have a lot of holidays.

Also the equipment can get expensive fast if you want to camp comfortably, and would require storing space the Japanese people do not have at home and thus would need to rent ...

Nevetheless, I think camping is getting popular and more and more people are buying equipment.

Yeah, that's along what I think as well - apart from that I think the "getting police called on you" factor is neither a real risk nor something that really stops people from doing it.

And it has indeed been a growing trend in the last couple of years, specifically with heavy imagery and inspiration from Scandinavia.

Also camping in campsites, hiking on trails, etc is much more sustainable now that there are 9 billion of us. Perhaps a greater sense of conservation?

> But "Follow the Japanese art of forest bathing" is a much better headline than "try going for a walk in the forest".

Though poorly-worded, it can challenge us to look at mundane things with a fresh point of view.

Yes it's still a simple walk in the forest. No, there's no magical Avatar-style glow of light envelopping us and varying with each step we take in the forest.

But in a world where everything is edulcorated by marketing and by superlatives (think Instagram "perfectness"), it can be easy to loose sight of how wonderful a simple walk in a humble forest can be.

The same trail in the same woods will never look the same twice. Same trees that don't move, yet things change in subtle ways with both fauna and flora which evolve within this life-sustaining playground.

I have never heard this described as "the Japanese art of forest bathing", yet that describes a walk in the woods rather well.

Of course, like any new novelty that comes our way, it's always possible to just cargo-cult it because it sounds cool and not realize what it's trying to get at. And you are right, this is further encouraged by the wellness clickbait. But I'd like to suggest it's possible to look beyond that.

"Orientalism"? Exoticism?

The wellness industry is particularly prone to it, but in general there's a weird social proof thing that humans are prone to doing where ideas and practices aren't evaluated on their own merits but by who's doing them. So people end up roleplaying or cosplaying their imagined version of some other country.