They aren't really world travellers though. Only 23% hold a passport. Then there is the language barrier (low English skill), weak yen, perception of foreign countries as dangerous, and the inability to take a week or more of vacation time.

What percentage of Americans hold a passport? I'd guess it's similar.

37% of American adults have passports. [0]

[0]: https://today.yougov.com/topics/travel/articles-reports/2021...

The number is above 50% according to gov data https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...

Edit, it took me so long to post this I was beaten to it by 12 minutes.

Interesting that polling data is different from State Department issuance data. I wonder what the difference is?

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...

It's legal to have two US passports.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/have-pa...

I have to believe that's in the noise. It's for some very specific purposes and, as I recall, when I looked it up at one point for no particular reason, it was fairly burdensome to do.

Perhaps, but the passport cards aren't at all difficult or rare; you can apply for both in the same form.

> 21,995,760 (includes 3,361,037 passport cards)

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/need-pa...

Fair enough. I forgot that you could apply to get both (which basically gives you a spare federal photo ID which is also good for entering Canada or Mexico). I have a Global Entry card so I didn't bother.

Not sure what the other stats are counting as passports and if they're double-counting or not.

You can also get two passport books--basically for visiting countries that may do visa stamps and which won't admit people with the "wrong" visa stamp--which is what I was talking about.

I think a bigger reason for having multi US passports is how much of a black hole sending your passport to a foreign embassy for a visa can take.

A common problem for those that do training/sales around the world for short trips.

Sometimes quite amazing how long an embassy can take when it’s one of the country’s big industries you’re heading to to train them on the expensive thing they surely want to maintain…

Although I'm not sure the degree to which getting multiple passports plays into this. Maybe it's easier to get multiple passports these days.

Pre-pandemic, I canceled a couple of trips to India for visa issues--wouldn't get back in time for other trips--although my understanding is the situation has improved.

Passport cards are now more readily available since state DMVs can process them as part of the RealID initiative. They're cheaper than a proper passport but I would venture many passport holders have one for convenience.

Some of the purposes I remember were:

- When needing a passport while the other passport was in visa processing

- When needing to travel to a country A that denies entry based on having a passport stamp from country B. Like Azerbaijan/Armenia and Israel/Some Arab countries.

For many years I had two US passports; my civilian Blue and my official Maroon. Not quite the same as that link, but there are reasons.

For a while my family of four had seven passports, though three of those would be counted for Japan.

A bit of googling suggests you can have 3 or 4, but I can’t find a US government source on that.

Wouldn't be surprising. Up to two normal passport books, an additional passport card, and a special issuance one (diplomatic, military). Can't use the special ones for personal travel so you'd need both forms.

Closer to 45 or 50% of Americans. 152 million valid passports in 2022 [0] vs 333 million people[1], of which ~93% are citizens [2]. The “Americans don’t have passports” idea seems to mostly be a holdover from the early 2000’s [3].

[0]: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...

[1]: https://www.census.gov/popclock/

[2]: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-ci...

[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42586638.amp

It was probably accurate at the time; but with the recent push to require passports for domestic travel, it's natural that the US has seen an increase in the number of people getting one.

Ehh, most people seem to be getting RealIDs where possible and the new deadline is in 2025.

Yeah, if people don't see a need for a passport, they'll just get a RealID-compliant driver's license which is probably cheaper and doesn't involve carrying an additional card to fly (eventually).

When was it required to have a passport for domestic travel? I think everyone just uses a driver's license.

Not everyone has a driver's license.

Every state (I assume) will issue a state ID that is not a driver's license.

Just because it's available doesn't mean everyone has one.

And what does that have to do with the upthread claim that there's a push to require passports for domestic travel? Which is simply untrue.

Some people who do need a legal document for travel favor getting a passport? But that doesn't mean everyone has a state ID.

In theory, Any Day Now, you will be required to have a RealID (tm) to board a fight. Of course, the deadline has been pushed back yet again.

Not all drivers licenses meet that criteria, but a passport does.

> you will be required to have a RealID to board a fight.

Which law says that?

It is possible to fly domestic without ID. I did it twice and TSA had me sign a form which basically declared that I am not a problem.

The ID check is to make it difficult to resell frequent flier award travel. So the TSA ID-checkers are the airline's revenue helpers.

Last summer I put a bunch of transparent tape over the picture on my passport to see what would happen with TSA. The TSA lady asked me to peel it off. That was going slowly so she called a supervisor who simply waved me through.

I have flown without government ID--somehow lost my license between the car and the airport door. Unclear that will remain the case once RealID requirement goes into effect or at least to what degree it will be at the whim of a TSA supervisor.

No, I think the thing that really changed things was when Canada and Mexico started requiring passports for US Citizens. Before that, Americans could just drive across the border. Lots of Americans don't travel overseas, but go to Canada/Mexico frequently, especially if they live near the border.

"The pace of growth accelerated further in January 2007 when U.S. citizens traveling by air between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Bermuda were required to have a valid passport. Previously, it was possible for them to enter those countries without one"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/01/11/the-sh...

According to this infographic from the State Department [1], in 2019 44.5% of US citizens had passports (146 million valid passports in circulation). That rose to over 150 million in 2022 [2] but I can't find a percentage.

For non-citizens the numbers are even higher and they're not evenly distributed by state. Last I checked almost two thirds of Californians had valid passports, whereas states like Arkansas were more in line with the Japanese rate.

[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/travel/CA-By-the-Number...

[2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...

We're talking about Japan. Not everything has to be about America.

I'm clearly wrong, judging from the responses, but my point in bringing it up was that Americans somehow show up around the world even though there are huge groups of us who never leave even their own state.

What I'm personally annoyed about is the "but what about..." conversations. To me these are quite annoying and derail the conversation. There are proper ways to bring up comparisons. For example "I wonder if other countries have similarly low passport rates?" There's also the aspect that a lot of conversations end up being particularly Americentric. But let's remember that America doesn't have to be brought into every conversation. It isn't helpful. In particular here it just seemed like you wanted to shit on America. There's plenty of reasons to do so, but this was just out of the blue. It is common, but that doesn't mean it is acceptable behavior.

>low English skill

As a native English speaker, especially if you travel mostly to Europe or generally urban/tourist track areas elsewhere, it's pretty easy to get the impression that an at least minimally resourceful and adaptable person can generally get by even without English-speaking guides and other travel resources. But that's not really true for a lot of people in other countries, especially if their languages don't use Roman script and they don't really know any foreign languages.

Their education system is quite poorly suited to teaching a foreign language effectively (as with any other), but there is also this very low exposure to English (or any other foreign language) due to the abundance of translated material.

Not just translated, but presumably dubbed?

I have some eastern euro relatives that owe their English skill (moreso vocab than grammar) to local-language subtitled TV/movies (too poor to dub).

Just one of the many reasons subs are superior.

> I have some eastern euro relatives that owe their English skill (moreso vocab than grammar) to local-language subtitled TV/movies (too poor to dub).

Can confirm, it was the same for me and many of my peers when growing up (and video games for those that partook). However today everything is dubbed on TV, your only chance of subtitles to learn is on new releases in the cinemas.

I'm an American, native English speaker, no real other languages at a conversational level other than some High-School Spanish and a couple hundred words of Korean due to marriage. The further you get away from areas with familiar scripts, language cognates, and speakers, the more lost one can feel very quickly. Parts of Hungary, for example, were quite difficult even though they use Latin script, are European, and usually have lots of English speakers around.

One of the things I found that made Japan remarkable was how easy it was to get around as a non-Japanese speaker. Until you end up off the mainline tourist bits, then things can get quickly pretty dicey. I don't think the inverse is true for the average Japanese person in even the most tourist friendly spots elsewhere. Everywhere is opaque, and there aren't enough Japanese speaking tourists to make it worthwhile to add it to all of the signage and menus to make it work out.

>perception of foreign countries as dangerous

Foreign countries are dangerous, compared to Japan. You can see it in all the national crime rates. Only a few places are as safe, such as Singapore, and some rich micronations in Europe.

Multiples of a very low number is still a pretty low number. That said, having returned fairly recently from an event in an unfamiliar US city with a reputation for being relatively dangerous (Detroit), I'll say that I didn't feel very comfortable in spite of it probably being mostly safe enough objectively. So it's understandable that an obvious tourist who doesn't speak the language at all in a US or European city might feel at risk.

With America, it entirely depends on where you go. Some parts of a single city might be dangerous, and other parts nearby much less so. Detroit has a bad reputation, but isn't unsafe everyhwere.

That said, every place in the US is generally less safe than many other countries just because of the usage of cars, and their typical high speeds compared to other places. Over 30k people die in the US every year in car crashes. Usually, people think of crime when the word "unsafe" is used, but they forget all the danger with cars.

Switzerland and Denmark are not micronations but are comparatively safe or safer.

They're not micronations but they're tiny compared to Japan. The two of them combined have less than half the population of Tokyo.

None of that sounds any different than the US really…

Wait- if you are sick on your annual leave, is that not treated as sick leave in your country?

Not that I know of (UK here). I've never expected time back when I'll on paid leave anymore than is expect an employer to give me extra leave for being ill at the weekend. Maybe I've been missing out…

Not in Australia. My colleague is actually in Japan right now on annual leave sick with Covid.

Yes in Australia. Look up the labor laws they are required to change it to sick leave. I did it last year when I got Covid over Christmas.

Wow this is news to me thanks

Apparently you can, not that I ever have:

https://www.fairwork.gov.au/tools-and-resources/library/K600...

Nope in many companies.

Are you German? I know in Germany it's treated that way - sick during vacation days? Then you're on sick leave, not vacation...

I’m in the US and have never heard of such a thing. If you’re sick on vacation then that’s not eligible for sick leave.

At my employer in the US, sick leave was drawn from your vacation days... hence very sick people always coming into the office to work.

That’s common. School teachers face the same problem. They don’t quality for sick leave until they’ve used up all their PTO first.

My father, a high school teacher, has some absurd >1000 day sick day balance right now. He keeps putting off retirement for some unknown reason despite complaining about how terrible the system is, and a common response from my siblings is "maybe you should just be sick for three years…"

I suspect this varies by state, but the idea that sick leave for teachers is lacking has never been a common theme for any of the teachers in my family.

There's been a general shift in the US from a system where large organizations had separate pools for sick time and vacation to a common PTO pool. But you still see organizations, either because of inertia or union contracts, still have the prior system in place. And, yeah, the traditional system tended to have more sick days than anyone would use outside of serious illness or injury although, as I recall, there usually wasn't carry-over.

The US is an exception though, since having any kind of leave at all is a gift of of the employer and not defined in law.

For the rest of the world, the idea that an employer can arbitrarily decide it is not possible for someone to be ill more than a certain number of days per year is bonkers.

In the US these days, Paid Time Off is often a single pooled block for vacation/personal time/sick leave. (Although short term disability and long term disability are separate things if they exist.) But even if sick time were separate I wouldn't expect to be able to use it instead of vacation time if I got sick on vacation.

I think the idea of Japanese being avid travellers was something from the 80's when their economy was booming (article also mentions 70's). Recently/until Covid hit, if you saw a large group of East Asian tourists, they'd most likely be Chinese.

This. A large number of businesses which built out around "Japanese spoken here" swung to Manderin in the last 4-8 year window and a lot of that isn't coming back because of both Covid, and AU-CN trade/politics concerns. That said, there is a huge chinese mainland diaspora based in Australia this last decade, so I suspect family reunion will encourage more of this tourism/travel back, given time.

(Australia is 40% direct migrant, or children of migrants. There is often a lot of tension over which non-anglo community now has financial muscle, buys homes, sets cultural trends. It's been about Italy, The Balts, Greeks, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese. The New Zealanders mostly sailed under the radar until a recent government started cancelling residency visa left right and centre for crimes of one kind or another and ANZUS as a political belief in unity across the tasman sea died a bit.)

Yes, the throngs of Japanese tourists around the world ended in the 1990s with the downturn of their economy. It had nothing to do with health concerns. Strange that it is being talked about as a recent thing.

The last decade or so has seen throngs of PRC tourists, seemingly less concerned with photo-documenting the world than with seeking out brand name merchandise.

I don't think germophobia is an adequate explanation for increased reluctance to travel, at least for the Japanese. For one thing, they tend to be more influenced by the risk of enduring any kind of hassles in travel, which have increased dramatically since 9/11. For another thing, the shine of popular destinations has worn off somewhat in the last few years. I've heard from talking to/about university students in South Korea that the heavily negative social news about the USA has caused travel there to lose much of its appeal.

A number of countries have a sub-group that travel a huge amount, and a majority that rarely does.

Which is partly just wealth, but also just variation in how aware people are of the outside world. Few people are going to visit a country they have no interest in, and can't locate on a map.

I think this is a misperception that doesn't really reflect the reality. One of my long-term clients is a large Japanese company and I work with a lot of Japanese people regularly + have been to Japan several times. In my experience there's a small percentage of Japanese people who really like to travel and these are the ones you see, so it seems like there's a more general trend than there is. The majority of Japanese people don't really seem to care all that much about international travel.

That matches my experience too, and Japan has a pretty big population too so that small percentage who love to travel will still be a lot of people.

Selection bias. Those that work internationally and learnt English properly have a different attitude than those that stay, they usually spend enormous amount of effort learning the language because they don’t fit in or don’t want to.

I’ve traveled around with Japanese and they definitely appreciate cleanliness and politeness more than any others. I’ve had multiple Japanese people cry saying how lucky they are to have been born in Japan when they have a short stay in pretty well off countries.

This doesn’t mean that they can’t be dirty, I’ve seen bones for ramen cracked on the streets here. Just that they appreciate cleanliness a lot. I think red mold popping up everywhere all the time makes you more careful, at least I became more aware after moving here.

> who wants to be sick and quarantined in a foreign country

There's also the higher than normal risk of needing medical treatment in a country with either higher medical costs or lower healthcare quality.

In my country of birth, covid treatment is free* in state owned hospitals for citizens and non citizens. But it's not the case in other countries.

*Taxpayer funded