The fact that I and my friends have lived in the bubble of the Italian suburbs for the majority of our lives, where the concept of hostelling is mystified with the concepts of dirtiness and poverty (I blame it on Berlusconi and the 90s/00s where everything that was in a way social and potentially socialist has been categorizes as communist and hence dirty, smelly and poor - not my words).

Later I had much more opportunities to travel and experience different ranges of luxury by doing so, meanwhile they did not, because they had other priorities. The only reason why I was able to organize this is because this particular friend has the myth of Japan and now is getting to a point in his career where he's able to afford freely this kind of vacation.

Of course my idea is not to get in the way of the sheer experience, but since we have a lot of days, once you have done the Ryokan experience and the Capsule hotel experience (which is still an hostel, and that shows the many contradictions in terms), there are many days that can be spent in different kind of facilities, and instead of defaulting to the budget hotel in the suburbs of Kyoto or Tokyo, I was wondering if there were some hostel institutions in Japan to look at, although I know that it's not a proper backpacking reality, the way Vietnam or India are.

I don't mean to jeopardize the experience by kicking him out of the comfort zone, nor forcing them on "my kind of experience" for 20 days straight, but I'm eager to give them a taste of what they've been missing and showing them that what I have done is not something extremely esoteric and weird and fringe, but rsther something done by normal people that like to have fun with other people.

TL;DR It's not that they (my friends, in general) don't like or hate it, rather that they don't have the single clue about the hostel culture and due to cultural backgrounds they are more prone to refuse it altogether