Whenever I read either an English article about a Japanese business doing well or highly paid Japanese gig worker saying how much he earns (always from Tokyo an

Whenever I read either an English article about a Japanese business doing well or highly paid Japanese gig worker saying how much he earns (always from Tokyo and not the conservative parts of Japan) I always get suspicious. I'm suspicious because often these are publicity stunts (as covered before in Japanese media) using Western audience to test the waters before legitimizing themselves in Japan. The neural-pathways are almost always the same in the japanese psyche: "gaijins stealing our X is bad, if Western media talk about it then it must be true so we must protect our X"