Free museums were a culture shock for me.

well, obviously the solution here is to reduce the material security of the working class so much they can't afford to travel abroad, to ratchet up global tensions through militarism and "warnings" to make traveling abroad seem more dangerous than it is, and to increase the bureaucratic hoop-jumping around gathering/maintaining the documentation necessary to travel abroad.

It took me years to realize what I liked about Japan was the walkable city and good public transportation. I can fill up on anime slop at home, but I couldn't place it for years that what really made me love living there was the fact that as a teenager I could just go out to a place and just do stuff. I ended up being in really good shape and lost basically all the excess weight at the same time. There was also a lot more of a community in the local block I lived on, small neighborhood events that you'd do with the neighbors for a night just to kinda stay familiar not to mention the more culturally Japanese things like 回覧板 where you're just passing around a notice from household to household so you kinda have to interact with your neighbors a bit.