There is a moment that happens to most first-time visitors to East Asia – usually around day three, standing in a convenience store at midnight buying something that appears to be a rice ball wrapped in seaweed while a perfectly orchestrated playlist of ambient jazz plays overhead and every surface around you is immaculately clean – when it becomes clear that something is fundamentally different here. Not different in a challenging way. Different in a way that makes you wonder why you spent so many years going to the same European cities and calling yourself well-traveled.
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Moving Down the Peninsula at Speed
One of the more quietly impressive aspects of visiting South Korea is discovering that the country has invested in infrastructure with a seriousness that makes getting around feel like the easy part of travel rather than the stressful part. The Seoul to Busan train on the KTX high-speed service covers 430 kilometres in two hours and thirty minutes, arriving in South Korea’s second city and main port with enough time to eat lunch, walk the Gamcheon Culture Village.
a hillside neighbourhood of colourful painted houses above the port that has been developing as an arts community since the 2000s, and get back to Seoul for dinner if the itinerary demands it. Busan is a city that rewards its own dedicated time rather than a day trip treatment, with a fish market at Jagalchi that is one of the largest and most active in Asia, beaches at Haeundae that function as genuine urban beach culture rather than resort infrastructure, and a food scene built around raw fish, pork soup, and milmyeon cold noodles that is distinct from Seoul’s in ways worth exploring.
Gyeongju, an hour further east from Busan on the KTX with a short change, is the city that makes South Korea’s historical depth legible in a way that Seoul’s vertical modernity sometimes obscures. The Silla kingdom’s capital for nearly a thousand years, the city contains burial mounds, stone observatories from the seventh century, and temple complexes distributed through the urban fabric with a casualness that suggests the inhabitants have simply made their peace with living inside an archaeological site.
Bulguksa temple on the hillside above the city, reached by bus in twenty minutes, has a spatial progression through successive courtyards that takes visitors gradually upward toward the main halls in a sequence that is as carefully considered as any formal garden design.
The Numbers First – Because They Are Genuinely Remarkable
Before getting into the food and the temples and the trains that run to the second, it is worth acknowledging that the popularity of South Korea and Japan as travel destinations is not a vibe or a trend but a statistical reality. Japan welcomed a record 36.8 million international visitors in 2024, surpassing its previous record by a margin that surprised even the Japanese tourism authorities.
South Korea is not far behind, with Seoul consistently ranking among the top ten most visited cities in the world and the Korean tourism board reporting year-on-year growth that has continued without interruption except for the period when a global pandemic temporarily made international travel inadvisable. The reasons for this growth are multiple and interconnected.
The global spread of Korean and Japanese popular culture, the development of direct flight routes from an increasing number of cities, the strength of social media as a travel inspiration platform, and the straightforward fact that both countries are genuinely excellent to visit in ways that repeat visitors confirm and first-timers discover with something approaching disbelief.
South Korea – Efficient, Delicious and Slightly Overwhelming in the Best Way
Seoul is a city that operates at a frequency most other cities cannot match. The subway system covers 23 lines and runs with a punctuality that makes European metro systems look like they are working from a rough suggestion rather than a timetable. The food is available at every price point and every hour – the convenience stores stock hot food around the clock, the street stalls in Myeongdong serve tteokbokki and hotteok until well past midnight, and the restaurants in the Gangnam district have tasting menus that compete with anything in Tokyo or Copenhagen.
The skincare industry has produced a retail environment in areas like Myeongdong and Hongdae where twelve-step routines are explained with the seriousness usually reserved for pharmaceutical consultations, and the beauty products available are genuinely more varied and more sophisticated than what most Western pharmacies stock.
The palaces of Seoul are the part of the city that most visitors underestimate before arrival and spend more time in than planned once there. Gyeongbokgung, the main Joseon dynasty palace built in 1395 and sitting at the northern end of the city with mountains directly behind it, is large enough that the crowds distribute across the complex and the outer courtyards retain a sense of scale and silence even on busy weekends.
The changing of the guard ceremony at the main gate happens twice daily and involves enough elaborate costuming and choreography to hold the attention of people who would not normally describe themselves as interested in ceremonial military traditions. Bukchon Hanok Village, between Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung palaces, has the most photographed streetscapes in Seoul – the traditional wooden courtyard houses stepping up the hillside toward the mountains – and the photographs are accurate, which is not always the case with heavily photographed places.
Japan – The Country That Has Somehow Made Perfection Seem Normal
Japan operates on a set of implicit standards that visitors absorb gradually over the first few days and then find it impossible to stop noticing. Trains that arrive at the exact minute displayed on the platform board, not within a minute of it. For example, the Osaka to Kyoto train on the Hankyu Kyoto line takes forty-five minutes and costs around four dollars, which means basing in Osaka and treating Kyoto as a day trip – or multiple day trips – is entirely feasible and gives access to both cities without committing to either for the full duration.
Convenience store food that is genuinely good – onigiri, sandwiches, hot foods kept at precise temperatures – rather than the emergency calorie delivery that convenience store food represents in most countries. Craft and attention applied to things that other cultures have decided do not require craft and attention – the packaging of a simple gift, the folding of a department store bag, the presentation of a bowl of noodles that costs eight dollars. Japan does not market itself on these standards. It simply maintains them, and visitors arrive and notice.
Tokyo is the entry point for most international visitors and the city that produces the most immediate sensory overload – not because it is chaotic, which it is not, but because the density of information, options, and experience per square block is higher than most urban environments deliver. Shinjuku alone, one of the city’s thirty-three wards, contains a train station used by three and a half million people daily, a red-light district, a government building with a free observation deck,
department stores that descend six floors underground and rise fifteen above ground, and a park designed by a Meiji-era landscape architect that contains 10,000 trees and functions as one of the most visited hanami spots in Tokyo during cherry blossom season. The neighbourhood of Yanaka in the northeast, largely untouched by postwar reconstruction, gives the most accurate sense of what Tokyo looked like before the twentieth century decided to have several dramatic events in quick succession.
The Osaka to Kyoto Question
The debate among repeat visitors to Japan about whether to base in Osaka or Kyoto for the Kansai region is the kind of conversation that sounds trivial and turns out to involve genuine considerations. Kyoto has the temple density – over 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines – and the preserved historic districts of Gion and Higashiyama that represent what most people picture when they think of traditional Japan. Osaka has the food culture, the directness, the standing bars where you eat skewered things alongside salarymen on their way home, and a personality that Kyoto, for all its beauty, consciously restrains. Kyoto rewards early mornings with a consistency that few cities can claim.
Fushimi Inari, the shrine with thousands of orange torii gates climbing the mountain behind it, is at its most visually striking and least crowded before seven in the morning – the light through the gates at dawn is the version that the best photographs capture, and the path beyond the first two hundred gates, where most visitors turn back, continues through cedar forest to the mountain summit and back down the other side in a circuit that takes three hours and involves almost nobody beyond the first kilometre.
Arashiyama’s bamboo grove, fifteen minutes west of central Kyoto by the Randen tram, operates on similar principles – the grove itself is genuinely impressive, and the approach through the Tenryu-ji temple garden before entering it adds context that the grove alone cannot provide.
Why Both Countries Are Getting More Crowded and Why That Is Not a Reason to Wait
The success of Japan and South Korea as travel destinations has created the problem that success always creates – the places that are most worth visiting are increasingly full of people who have also decided they are worth visiting. Kyoto’s visitor management challenges are well documented, and Seoul’s most photographed neighbourhoods on weekend mornings have a density that the streets were not designed to accommodate.
The response to this is not to wait for the crowds to diminish, because they will not diminish – the correct response is to arrive earlier than everyone else, stay longer than a weekend, move to the places that the current wave of visitors has not yet reached, and accept that sharing a remarkable place with other people who have also recognised it as remarkable is a reasonable trade for the experience of being there.
Both countries are investing in infrastructure to manage the growth – Kyoto has introduced entrance fees at several previously free sites, Japan has implemented tourist taxes at the municipal level in several cities, and both countries are actively promoting regional destinations away from the main tourist corridors. The Tohoku region of northern Honshu, the San’in coast along the Sea of Japan, and the island of Shikoku in Japan, and South Korea’s Jeollado province and the eastern coastal route, all offer what the famous places offer – history, food, natural scenery, craftsmanship – without the volume of people that the famous places now carry.
The Practical Reality of Visiting
Both Japan and South Korea are among the easiest countries in the world to visit independently. English signage on the transport networks is thorough, the accommodation range covers every budget category, and the safety record of both countries is such that the standard precautions required in most international destinations are largely unnecessary.
Japan’s IC card system – a rechargeable card used across trains, buses, and convenience stores in a single tap – is the most elegant solution to urban transit payment that currently exists anywhere, and South Korea’s T-money card operates on the same principle with equal efficiency. The food is safe, the water is drinkable, and the healthcare systems in both countries are functional in ways that matter if something goes wrong.
The cost question is the one that stops some potential visitors, and it is worth addressing directly. Japan became significantly more expensive for international visitors when the yen weakened against the dollar and euro between 2022 and 2024 – the accommodation, food, and transport costs that were already reasonable became, briefly, genuinely affordable in a way that contributed to the record visitor numbers.
The yen has partially recovered since, but Japan remains competitive with Western European destinations at most price points and significantly cheaper at the budget end of the accommodation spectrum. South Korea runs slightly cheaper than Japan across most categories and considerably cheaper for food if you eat at the level Koreans actually eat rather than at the international-facing restaurants that price accordingly.
Conclusion
East Asia is booming as a travel destination because Japan and South Korea are genuinely among the best places in the world to visit – not because an algorithm decided they were, not because a particular demographic has adopted them as the correct choice, but because the food is extraordinary, the transport works, the history is deep, the contemporary culture is interesting, and the experience of being in either country delivers something that most other destinations do not.
The crowds are real, and the overtourism concerns are legitimate, but both countries have enough depth – enough cities, enough regions, enough restaurants, enough temples, enough side streets and mountain paths and coastal towns – to absorb the interest without exhausting what they offer. Go soon, go for longer than a week, go to the places that are not on the list yet, and go back. The East is booming for reasons that hold up under examination, and the examination is most productively conducted in person.
