Having lived in Japan for over a decade, I think the west generally over-elevates/-mystifies Japan. Capitalists gonna capitalist. They can do more work with fewer people and make more money. Most Japanese consumers also do not care at all about generative AI. It's in the train stations, city offices, and everywhere else as a part of the normal.

There's a big difference between what's happening in the commercial world and art circles. I can't speak for food but with regards to the topic here, Japan has a huge creator market and that market responds very differently. A year back, their biggest creator fair had a few "artists" selling AI "art" but essentially no one was interested and they hardly sold anything while others had sprawling queues. This year there was pretty much 0 as a result.

Yeah, it does seem inconsistent with the view that anything AI touches must obviously look awful.

Maybe they have high standards for what they generate, use the models as "fillers" or "finishers" (broadly adding details or patterns to a base sketch, then touching up on any errors or ungeneratable details), or rely on models they've vetted for consistent quality? I doubt they're all using a piss filter chatgpt text to image gen.

Japanese creatives are now heavily split on LLMs. What with half taken to defend their work with watermarks and proofs of timelapses and manual processes, and there's fierce loyalty for Miyazaki et. al. While others are either playing with dozens of LLMs to produce even animations, churning out thirst traps by the dozen, and still others "enhancing" game screenshots of their player characters in poses and skimpy clothing.

Have you considered that wherever you're from is the weird place? They are much more optimistic about AI in Asia.

you might spend a small fortune on a couple of strawberries

Isn't that mostly because their farms are so far behind and producing such low volumes that they can only survive with artisanal hand picked/whatever products