I was riding the Ichibata Electric Railway in Shimane Prefecture when a “manners poster” caught my eye. Within a frame of Japanese and English text telling people not to do video calls on the train, a cartoon-like image showed passengers looking annoyed at a man speaking into a phone.

Manners posters are common across Japan, but the longer I looked at this one, the stranger it seemed. For one, the video caller had three arms for no clear reason — suggesting the image was AI-generated. Second, the three-armed man was blond and speaking English. Since the train I was riding stopped at local sightseeing destinations, I figured he was meant to be a foreign tourist, but this detail surprised me. As far as I knew, few international travelers visited Shimane. Had video calls by tourists become so frequent that this poster was needed?

I started asking friends connected to regional tourism about this. One said he had heard of some Asian tourists making calls on local trains. Another friend later confirmed that the poster’s image was AI generated and had been created in response to “Western tourists.” However, a decision was made to remove the poster because train staff had recently stopped seeing video callers.

Data from the Japan National Tourism Organization and prefectural sources added more context. Shimane was, in fact, one of the least-visited prefectures by international tourists in 2025 and mostly received people from Taiwan, China and South Korea.

These answers left me with more questions. Was the poster effective at reducing video calls or did the problem resolve itself? With the poster gone, would calls start again? Also, if most of Shimane’s international visitors (and at least some of the observed video callers) were Asian, why had a three-armed blond man been........

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