This study analyzed how Japanese native speakers evaluate the utterances of Korean tour guides speaking Japanese during tours. Video data from four tours from Lee (2013) was showed to Japanese native speakers for the evaluation. The analysis employed Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson 1987) as its framework. The results show that five factors gave good impressions of the tour guides’ Japanese to the native listeners, which were “promotion of understanding”, “fun”, “set the nice atmosphere”, “familiarity” and “interactiveness”. There were also four factors that led to bad impressions, which were “distance”, “noninteractiveness”, “lack of fun”, and “lack of politeness”. Moreover, it was implied that using positive politeness strategies to express sympathy and familiarity is also important to the Japanese listeners, along with negative politeness strategies such as honorifics and polite speech levels.