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.
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.
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.