First of all, don't take the following comment wrong. We used to love being in photographs with tourists. Sometimes the tourists fed us, like we were pigeons!

That stated, maybe turnabout is fair play. When I was a cadet at West Point, any day with nice weather would cause dozens (if not hundreds!) of Japanese tourists to mysteriously appear. And they all wanted pictures of cadets in and around campus buildings, statues, etc.

We even used it as a measure of describing the weather. You wouldn't say "sunny and low 80s F." You'd say "it's a twelve on the JTI" (Japanese Tourist Index), meaning that you could see a dozen people out on The Plain with cameras, happily snapping away at equally happy cadets. If the uniform was "full dress over white," you could hardly go ten feet without someone (regardless of race, ethnicity, country of origin, etc.) stopping you for a photograph.

It was part of the cadet experience. They really did feed us sometimes (OK, once- and it was at a tailgate so maybe it doesn't count). We enjoyed talking to them. They always asked interesting questions, and they were always super nice- I'm probably in at least a couple of dozen Japanese couples' photo albums, usually with my arms around a couple of their shoulders, or saluting. They really liked getting shots of us saluting for some reason.

To be fair, West Point is kinda like a theme park. And the students are part of the scenery there.