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Comment by icelancer | Hacker News Reader

Oh, indeed - and sometimes worse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

> is a sense of extreme disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected

> The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution ... derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting

uhhh, what?? just from being disappointed in a place you're visiting? I had to double check the link to make sure it wasn't some satirical site.

I think it’s just extreme culture shock. Some Japanese people, and likely the kind to follow a romanticised dream of visiting Paris, are very sheltered. If your first experience of a country other than Japan (a very ordered place with powerful social norms) is the actual Paris (where the environment is comparably a lot more chaotic and people are not exactly friendly) then I can see how you might lose your mind a bit with shock.

What you need to understand is how Paris is horrible in the exact ways Japanese cities are nice.

Paris is dirt, aggressive, expensive, with horrible customer service. All things Japanese city has and would never think to include in a tourism pitch.

Japanese Tourists expect Paris to be a Regular (Japanese) City + Romanticism. What they get has no romance, and a city even regular French people consider rude.

well its relative. for instance japanese parks are horrible. paris parks are a thing of beauty. the mayor is indeed contributing to make it a dirty agressive and expensive city by not fighting crime, mass tourism (she loves it. somehow she hates french people having cars but she is fine with rich tourists riding cabs in paris) and all the theft that is related to mass tourism... customer service is not at the level of japan but at least its not at the level of usa where everything is a transaction and every word is fake.

She? Come on, Paris has always been like that.

between her and her mentor its been a single power in place since 2001 so I don't know what you define by "always" but it definitly got worse from 2001 and so on with a sharp acceleration when she got into power. paris debt too.

Since when are Japanese parks horrible? There are a several good parks in/around Tokyo.

fyi. Paris syndrome is heavily disputed among scientist, because the causality was never proven and the original author has 'vanished' from the scene.

i.e. do mental people visit Paris or does Paris cause mental illness?

> "But some of them end up in tears, swearing they’ll never come back."

How I feel when my favorite bakery in Paris is out of pain au chocolat.

I don't see it in the wiki article, but I wonder if this happens with other cities/locales? And surely this can't be something that only people from east asia feel?

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