> They really do think they need to hire a tour guide for a week to get around in a foreign country.

TBF I've done single day small tour groups with local guides, and when the guide is good, the experience has been amazing.

Doing it first day in Mexico City was actually super useful to get myself orientated and to get a good overview of the mass transit system there, and also to get a list of other things I should do.

Plenty of people from all around the world go on "tour bus" types of tours though, I'd say that before Google Maps and online resources, such tours were likely more popular. You still see huge tour groups at any popular destination, oftentimes grouped together by nationality.

I've done two-week trips of Central Europe, the UK and Ireland, southern Spain and Portugal, and the Low Countries/Normandy with no guides (except for local city guides to see interesting bits of history) and no assistance - land, rent car, drive to hotels, drive between cities, usually change itinerary partway through.

So I'm not averse to doing things that way. And I'm not doing some &^#$Q@ bus tour. But if you want to see the countryside and stay in an onsen* and all that, it's not quite as simple as "someone has good English". I've encountered places in all those where nobody around spoke good English, and we made do in another language and Google Translate. Assuming that, of course, you have good cell service - which was a problem when I tried to drive into a restricted area of old town Krakow. The police officer was polite and helpful, but we didn't share a language and cell service was slooooooow. And Google Maps was absolutely dead wrong about routing and cost me an hour of driving around in a circle (it was rush hour, so traffic, and it though certain roads were connected when they were not - this was only five or six years ago, so not ancient history). My hotel was in that area, so they let me through.

My concerns may be overblown, but they're not arising out of some complete ignorance of how the world works.

It just seems like a real perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good way of approaching it. Going to Japan would take a lot of money, so you need to spend a lot more money on a guide (does that really get you more bang for your buck than accepting that you might occasionally lose a few hours to getting lost)? You want authentic experiences that you feel would be too risky without a guide, so you'll hire a guide (never mind that that will itself destroy the authenticity of those experiences)? All of that is too expensive, so you won't go at all? I'm hardly a fan of the bus tours, but it sounds like at the end of the day they'll see a lot more of Japan than you.

When I first traveled to Japan as a tourist, it was dirt cheap. The only expensive thing was the airfare, though the shinkansen tickets I guess weren't that cheap, but compared to rental car prices in the US they actually were. Everything else was really cheap. But I didn't travel like an entitled American, and certainly didn't hire a guide; how ridiculous. If you need a guide to get around a safe, highly-developed country in the age of Google Maps and Google Translate, then maybe you should stick to bus tours, but still that's not a horrible way to travel I think if you need hand-holding. They take you to all the best tourist spots and arrange things for you; the main problem is you're surrounded by people just like you and don't have to actually interact with the locals and figure out how to get around on your own, and end up going to the places the tour group wants to go instead of places you want to go.