12/05/2026
We all know Facebook is full of fake AI “dream Japan” images at this point.
Impossible cherry blossom landscapes.
Fantasy onsen villages.
Mount Fuji magically appearing behind everything.
But what genuinely stopped me in my tracks this week was seeing the same thing starting to appear in actual travel marketing.
I’d just read an article about tourists travelling to attractions that literally do not exist. AI-generated cable cars. Fake Christmas markets. Entirely fictional destinations spreading online as though they are real places.
Then, while scrolling my news feed, I got served an advert for Japan holidays using the image below.
Looks beautiful, doesn’t it?
There’s just one problem:
that view does not exist.
Osaka Castle is in the middle of Osaka city. Mount Fuji is nowhere near it. The image quietly rewrites Japanese geography into a kind of emotionally perfect “dream Japan”.
And honestly, most people probably wouldn’t notice.
That’s the part I find fascinating.
Because Japan has always looked slightly unreal anyway. Years ago, when I worked on Japan brochure design, my boss kept accusing my images of being Photoshopped because the autumn leaves looked “too red” and the cherry blossom looked “too perfect”.
Back then, the challenge was convincing people real Japan actually looked like that.
Now we seem to be entering a strange new era where even real travel companies are drifting away from showing actual places, and towards selling a feeling instead.
I explore this idea a bit further, here:
https://www.donttakemetotokyo.com/blog/the-strange-future-of-japan-travel-photography
