Japan

After spending two and a half weeks wandering around Japan, I am, naturally, an acknowledged expert on all things Japanese. Not. All the same, working the "fresh pair of eyes" principle to its bones, I've decided to list here some of the things which struck me about the country. Anybody who actually knows what they're talking about is more than welcome to correct me in the comments. So, in no particular order:

Japanese men could be the best-dressed men in the world. Remember when you found out that Paul Smith had, like, 400 stores in Japan and couldn't send enough of his clothes there? And when you thought that was just one of those weird things like David Hasselhoff being big in Germany? Wrong. It's because Japanese men are incredibly well dressed. Hop on the Tokyo underground, and most of the men will be wearing suits, and nearly all those will be super-nattily dressed, with impeccably tailored shirts, ties, and suits. From afar, it's easy to stereotype the gaggle of Japanese businessmen in their identical dark suits; look a bit closer, and you'll find they're not nearly as dull as you might think.

In fact, more broadly, average is much better in Japan than it is anywhere else. Yes, Japan is an expensive country, especially if you're spending depreciated dollars: a t-shirt at Aizu Wakamatsu castle, for instance, can cost ¥7,200. But, most of the time, you still get value for your money. The cheapest lunch in town might be a ¥750 bowl of noodles, but what noodles they'll be! And although the fruit is insanely expensive, it's also insanely delicious. Also, lunch dishes are enormous, surprisingly enough. I was expecting tiny portions of everything in Japan, but the ramen and the sake, for starters, come in huge portions: three sake cups, and you're definitely drunk. (Coffee is an exception: if you want much of it, you have to go to Starbucks.) Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be any concept of "bargain basement" or "cheap and nasty" in Japan: if they're going to do something, they're going to do it right, and charge accordingly.

For instance, not only does everybody have a mobile phone, but everybody has a cameraphone. And uses it. I've already blogged the sight of thousands of people celebrating the cherry blossoms in Ueno Park by taking photos of them with their cameraphones, but it wasn't just in Tokyo. Everywhere you go in the country, people are taking photos of each other with their phones, or else simply capturing the tourist sights. Conventional cameras are barely to be seen any more.
I rented a mobile phone for while I was in Japan, and the experience was wonderfully smooth and easy: I got the number in advance, it was waiting for me in Tokyo, it worked everywhere (even on the Tokyo subway) – such a contrast from the nightmares I always have when I try to use my pay-as-you-go phone in England.

Even though mobile phones are ubiquitous, however, you never hear them ring. Phones are clearly made for messaging other people first and foremost: the vast majority of phone use is people staring down at their handsets, either reading or tapping out a message. It's much less common to see someone walking down the street talking on their phone. In fact, I've heard (and have no idea whether or not it's true) that in some circles it's considered rude to call someone out of the blue: the done thing is to message them first, asking if now might be a convenient time to ring them.
That said, the Japanese will message the whole time. In fact, personal computers are much less common in Japan than they are in the west precisely because they're not needed for the killer app of email. I swear I saw one guy riding his bicycle, messaging a friend with one hand, and holding an umbrella over his head with the other. How he was steering I'm still not entirely sure.

It's worth noting here that in Japan, bicycles are a bit like mobile phones: familiar objects used in a unique manner. For one thing, they're ridden on the sidewalk, rather than the road. Which is great for cars, who don't need to worry about running over cyclists, but not so great for pedestrians. Personally, if I moved to Japan and bought a bicycle, I'd go doolally crawling down the sidewalk at about a third of my natural speed, dodging peds. But the Japanese seem to consider a bike to be something which naturally goes at maybe half or a third of the speed of the average bike in New York.
The vast majority of bikes, too, are crappy old things, which are so inherently undesirable that they're either left out on the street completely unlocked, or else are secured with only the flimsiest of locks which wouldn't deter any self-respecting bicycle thief for a second. Seeing dozens of bikes lined up outside a subway station with nary a lock between them is to feel automatic nostalgia for the white bicycles experiment in Amsterdam in the 60s.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Japanese seem uniquely willing to pay insane prices for certain items. The difference in handbag costs between Tokyo and Paris or Milan is well known, and probably explains why Prada's second global epicenter was built in the fashionable Aoyama district. But there are fashionistas all over the world who will shell out large sums for Prada gear. What I'm talking about are the ¥11,000 musk melons in the food courts of all the big Tokyo department stores, which look to the naked eye for all the world like your common-or-garden cantaloupe. Or the ¥400,000 per person that salarymen spend on geisha-hosted evenings in Kyoto. Or the ¥1 million bowl that I saw for sale in a ceramics shop in Kanazawa: very simple, maybe four inches high, brand new, with a nice white glaze. The sort of thing where if you saw it at a flea market you'd pay a couple of bucks for it, and if you were told it was made by a famous Japanese ceramicist you might think it was worth a couple of hundred.

The really crazy thing is that most of this stuff, even at the very high end, is paid for in cash. The Japanese are famous for the amount of cash that they carry on them, as well as for their honesty: stories are legion of wallets containing seven-figure sums (in yen, but still) being left on the train and returned, with all cash intact, to their owners at the lost and found. More generally, Japan is surely the safest place I've ever been. I didn't think twice about leaving my bags – even containing passports and stuff – in unlocked rooms, especially after seeing all those unlocked bicycles on the street in Tokyo. And when one of the people we met explained that she used to live in Sao Paulo but wouldn't go back there because it was too dangerous, I understood completely. While I generally scoff at such an attitude in westerners, there really is a huge gulf between safety and security in Japan and Brazil – one which most Japanese people might well feel problems trying to bridge.

Talking of culture gaps, I made the compulsory Lost In Translation pilgramage to the Park Hyatt Tokyo to have a Suntory whisky, and it turns out that the 17-year-old Hibiki – the one Bill Murray shills in the film – is surprsingly excellent. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that this particular Japanese whisky is the best blended whisky I've ever tasted. Caveat: I'm not a great fan of blended whisky, and haven't tasted all that much of it. In any case, the 17-year-old is not even anywhere near the top of the range: in fact, it's at the bottom of the Hibiki ladder, and I assume that the 30-year-old, at ¥80,000 a bottle, is significantly better. (The 35-year-old, at ¥1 million a bottle, I assume is some kind of collector's item.) Of course, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to find out: even the 17-year-old was ¥2,300 a glass at the Park Hyatt.

If you want to see a real waste of money, however, all you need to do is go travelling around the country by shinkansen – the fabled bullet train. For while most Japanese architecture is pretty samey, the train stations, even in minor, off-the-beaten-track cities, are ridiculously over-the-top. I'm sure it's all part of the various economic stimulus programmes that successive Japanese governments have embarked upon over the years, combined with pork-barrel spending on important political constituencies. But the result is that Japan has reinvented the art of turning the local train station into the proud heart of any city – something I had thought a relic of the Victorian era. Kyoto station is a minor city unto itself, and Niigata station is easily the grandest thing for miles around. In Tokyo, not much can be done to the old train station, a rather charming brick building opposite the Imperial Palace, but they have built the absolutely stunning Tokyo International Forum right next door.

But in a way it's easy to see why this should be the case: the Japanese are justly proud of their trains. The shinkansen, with its slogan "Ambitious Japan", is something any country would love. Just look at the numbers: the Acela Express does the 190 miles between Boston and New York in 205 minutes, while the Eurostar does the 213 miles between Paris and London in 195 minutes. The shinkansen does the 229 miles between Tokyo and Kyoto in 142 minutes. It's an incredibly smooth, silent (at least for those inside the train) and efficient ride, on tracks dedicated to bullet trains and bullet trains only. On a lot of the trains, passengers sit five across – something I haven't seen on any other trains – in seats which rotate in seconds to face the opposite direction, meaning that there's no laborious turning of trains around at termini, and no one ever needs to face backwards while travelling.

And once you get off the shinkansen main line, the lower-level trains are just as efficient, and some are even more comfortable. The basic seats in the "Sonic" class trains in Kyushu, for instance, put the first-class accommodations anywhere else to shame. What's more, you don't need to worry about missing your stop, since the trains literally run like clockwork: I actually set my watch by our arrival at a station once. Just get off the train at whatever time it's due to arrive at your destination, and you'll be in the right place. It's not just the trains, either: there was no trouble catching the 12:45 train from Aso after taking a bus to the station which was scheduled to arrive at 12:40. Everything in Japan, it seems, runs like clockwork.
Japan's trains are so well run, in fact, that there are even private train lines all over the country which, I assume, make a decent profit for their owners. It's a bit of a pain if you're travelling on a Japan Rail pass, but it's still very impressive: I assumed that any system as large as Japan's trains must lose an absolute fortune every year. If private owners can compete, however, then maybe not.

The rail system in Japan does wonders for national productivity, and they're still building it out: the latest stretch of shinkansen track, in southern Kyushu, has only just opened. Other sources of national pride, however, can only be a drain on productivity. One of the most obvious is rice. Wherever you go in Japan, no matter how valuable the land, you're never very far from a rice paddy. The rice is farmed at huge expense: even with 490% tariffs on imported rice, US producers (not even, say, Indonesians) can still sell their product at prices 20% cheaper than medium-grade Japanese rice and half that of top-grade Japanese rice.
Rice is, of course, the true staple of Japanese cuisine, and the Japanese can taste subtleties I'm sure most of us would never dream existed. But the amount of effort which goes in to the crop is truly astounding, for negligible economic benefit.

One of the more interesting sources of Japanese pride is how expensive the country is: as I understand it, a staple of Japanese television programmes is people touring the rest of the world and marvelling at how cheap everything is. The fact that things cost much more in Japan than they do elsewhere does not seem to indicate inefficiency so much as national superiority.

By far the most unproductive source of Japanese national pride, however, is not rice, but kanji. In fact, Japanese orthography in general is a complete nightmare, where certain words can be "spelled" in any one of half a dozen different ways, using three different scripts – four, if you include romaji, the transliteration of Japanese words into our alphabet. Japanese kids learn 500 different kanji characters per year, every year they're in school, and then, if they're keen, go on to learn even more after they graduate. As Jack Halpern says, "because of the large number of orthographic variants and easily confused homophones, the Japanese writing system is an order of magnitude more complex than any other major language, including Chinese."
What this means in practice is vast amounts of effort within the Japanese educational system being put towards learning something of steadily diminishing use. New kanji, as I understand it, are not being coined, and most new words are simply borrowed from the English or some other foreign language and written down in a more-or-less unpredictable way in katakana, one of those three scripts. Yet despite the fact that people use less and less kanji, as references to mobile phones outnumber references to whatever it was that Chinese people cared about a millennium or so ago, everybody in Japan still needs to go through the laborious and mind-numbing process of learning an entire ideographic system.

In fact, once you start looking for them, anachronisms are everywhere in Japan, and I'm not talking about the geishas in Kyoto, although they do still exist. Street addresses, for example, don't exist: rather than naming streets, the Japanese name blocks and districts, and even people who have lived in a city all their lives normally need to ask for directions a couple of times at the nearest police box before they can find a new place. And there's the rather disconcerting (to put it mildly) way in which large numbers of Japanese women – including some youngsters in their 20s – seem to engineer their lower limbs so that they walk in an extremely artificial knock-kneed fashion. They're incapable of running, but it seems to be considered attractive.

Independent women seem to have a hard time of things in general in Japan: chauvinism runs rampant everywhere you look. The sheer number of hostess bars in any major city boggles the mind: far from being the seedy kind of places they'd be in the west, they seem to be the natural place for a group of salarymen to go after work. (But not their female colleagues, of course.) The average man's idea of an ideal woman is far more subservient than in the west, it would seem, and I was told that if a Japanese woman is serious about having a career, she must basically give up any hope of ever finding a husband – just because very few Japanese men in Japan would ever consider marrying such a person. Some Japanese men who lived abroad for some time might, but they're, well, abroad. Even in 21st century youth culture, the cute-schoolgirl look and its variants seems to remain by far the most popular look among girls, while miniskirts are shorter in Japan, on average, than I've seen anywhere else – and not in a postmodern "empowering" way, either.

But at least there are looks for young people in Japan. Urban tribes are alive and well in major Japanese cities, despite having pretty much died out in the west. The Japanese are the true heirs of the mods and the rockers, the punks and the hillbillies. The kids in western cities are depressingly similar most of the time, dressing to all intents and purposes alike, and no new fashion tribe has emerged in over two decades. In Japan, however, youthful self-identification through sartorial extremism is alive and well.

Maybe it's because society as a whole presents more to rebel against in Japan. When the Sex Pistols released "God Save The Queen", it was a revolutionary and shocking act. Nowadays, we live in a much more anything-goes culture, and the world is basically being run by people who turned 18 somewhere between 1968 and 1977. They're not going to be too shocked by seeing a man walk down the street wearing lots of makeup. In Japan, on the other hand, society as a whole remains extremely homogenous, and not-standing-out is a very important part of being Japanese. One of the reasons I think that kanji is going to stay around for a long time yet is precisely because it helps serve the purpose of keeping the gaijin out of Japanese society – and one thing that seems to be usual among foreigners who spend a lot of time in Japan is a feeling that they're never really going to be welcomed into society.
Travelling around the country, too, you see a lot of bus tours and other groups of people – much more than you would in the west. I had thought that the buses full of Japanese tourists in Paris and London were a function of the language barrier, and the fact that these people were at the mercy of their tour guides to get them around and get them food and accommodation. Not so: such tours are equally common domestically. You also notice that there aren't big houses on the hills or other forms of architectural ostentation: with the exception of those train stations, most buildings in Japan are extremely similar. And just look at the reception that the Japanese hostages in Iraq got when they returned home: worse, it would seem, than being kidnapped in the first place. They stood out, and so they should be censured.

Certainly, in the cities, things are changing: they have to. But they're changing slowly, and in the countryside, it's still not uncommon to find public baths where women are barred from entering if they have any tattoos. Outside the tourist centers, things are certainly not geared up for tourists: I banged my head more times than I could possibly count, and in the countryside we gaijin got our fair share of stares from the local children. The thing which I never understood, however, was the deal with slippers. I'm fine with leaving my shoes at the door – but after doing that, I was inevitably presented with a minuscule pair of slippers to walk about in indoors. Maybe it's a bit like chopsticks and you pick it up after a while, but I simply couldn't do it: my feet were far too big, and the slippers were very uncomfortable. But if I tried just walking around in my socks, I got very disapproving stares and got pointed to a pair of slippers. Are socks just as rude as shoes? Or did these people think that they were protecting my feet from the cold floor?

And if Japanese customs make little sense, they're nothing compared to the western customs – real and imaginary – which have been imported into the country. Japanese coffee shops, for instance, primarily the ubiquitous Mister Donut, have taken to heart the idea that they should serve only cream and no milk for people who want some dairy in their morning coffee. It's an annoying custom in the west, and it's even weirder to find it in Japan. Even more bizarre is the fact that you have to make reservations to eat at KFC on Christmas Day in Japan, on the grounds that it's so popular. Apparently the Japanese think that westerners all eat fried chicken on Christmas Day, so that's what they do – in droves – themselves.

And while we're on the subject of food and drink, I think it's worth mentioning that in rural Japan, the tap water is absolutely delicious – the best tap water I've ever tasted. I missed switching to Volvic once my water bottle of Aizu Tadaka tap water ran out, and the city of Kanazawa has parlayed the quality of its water into a stranglehold on the country's gold leaf market. Meanwhile, in Beppu, a small town with lots of hot springs in Kyushu, they even have water taps on the train station platform so that you can have a last taste before heading out. The guidebook calls Beppu the Las Vegas of onsens (spas), but this is the only real similarity I saw – analagous to the slot machines in the departure lounges at Las Vegas airport.
The flipside of the tapwater situation can be found in Tokyo, however, where it's undrinkably disgusting. Yet the bottled-water phenomenon hasn't taken off in Tokyo to nearly the same degree as it has in the US: it's available, but not in large quantities, and normally only in the form of French imports, weirdly enough.

Actually, there is another similarity between Beppu and Vegas, although it's a similarity that Beppu shares with the rest of the country. The neon signs, just about anywhere you go in Japan, are of astonishingly high quality. And more generally, the whole country is permanently brand spanking new. Things which might get replaced every five years in the west are replaced every two years in Japan – not only neon signs, but cars, too. The second-hand car market is almost nonexistent, and if your car has any kind of dents or scratches, you'll probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. Japan leads the world in gadgetry, I think, largely because the Japanese will happily upgrade to the latest and greatest model at the drop of a feather – and pay through the nose for the privilege. Go to Akihabara in Tokyo, and the sheer quantity of electronics available – from cellphone attachments to monoblock tube amplifiers – is staggering.

And in general, the Japanese seem to have a very strong propensity towards spending money – which is a subtly different thing from the fact that there are lots of expensive things in the country. Everywhere you go, for instance, you're met with admission fees – ¥700 to get into this little museum, ¥600 for a look around that castle. The pride and joy of Kanazawa is its huge and gorgeous central garden, and yet locals can't go for a walk there whenever they like: it's ¥350 to get in every time you want a look around. Even the peace museum in Hiroshima charges a nominal ¥50 admission, which can barely cover the cost of collecting it. It's as though there's some kind of shame or loss of stature to being free – major free attractions like Tate Britain, or even Central Park, for that matter, don't seem to exist in Japan.

Of course, the most typical way of spending money is to do so in a vending machine. We bought wishes from one, at a temple, food tickets from many (rather than ordering your food directly, you pay for a food ticket at a vending machine, and give that too the waitress, so she never handles the cash), and even paid for one hotel room at a vending machine which took ¥10,000 bills and spat out a ¥1,000 bill in change.

And if vending machines are everywhere in Japan, so are disembodied voices telling you everything you might conceivably want to know, and then some. There are loudspeakers on the street, in trains, in buses – even in gondolas. A voice, usually female, never seems to stop talking: where you are, what's coming up, fun facts and figures – actually, I have no idea what she was saying most of the time, since I don't speak Japanese. But the Japanese don't seem to have any problem screening it out: it's just another information flow which can be optionally accessed whenever you feel the need.

This kind of invasive and ubiquitous technology extends even to the very landscape in Japan – at one point, I even wondered if the Japanese really have any conception of natural beauty. Every last square inch of Japan has been built on or cultivated in some way, and one of the walks we took up a mountain was paved the whole way, much of it with actual stairs. In the cities, the gardens are prized for their artificiality, and there are actually very few English-style parks which are simply open space. There's certainly a certain amount of cognitive disconnect involved in standing on the top of a mountain, looking at a beautiful smoking volcano, and hearing jingles from the strip mall which was built to accommodate all the tourists who have come to look at (not climb, mind) the mountain you're standing on top of. In the thin mountain air, sound can travel an astonishingly long way.

If I take away one abiding memory of my trip to Japan, however, it will be of the people, and the many wonderful experiences I had both interacting with them and just watching them. I think everybody who's been to Japan has stories of Japanese people going above and beyond what any other person would normally do in order to help you out and make your visit as wonderful as possible – I'm no exception. Helpfulness and friendliness at an extremely high level is definitely the rule rather than the exception, and the country as a whole is a pleasure to travel in.

It's also interesting watching small children in Japan: they seem to be happier than the kids anywhere else I've been in the world. The kids always seem to be running around with enormous grins on their faces, benignly overseen by their mother and/or grandmother. I was told that children are spoiled rotten in their preschool years precisely because of the insane amount of discipline and hard work which is thrust upon them once they enter the educational system, but these kids didn't seem spoiled rotten – just happy. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that most of them grow up with parents and grandparents in the same house, I have no idea. Certainly it's another thing which makes travelling in Japan a very happy experience.

So weird, yes, and slightly alien, but a wonderful place to visit. If you haven't been, and you have some spare money (it's certainly not cheap), I can highly recommend Japan. Get away from the Tokyo-Kyoto-Nara tourist route, too: my best memories are of places like Kanazawa and Kyushu. And the language barrier really isn't all that much of a problem: for one thing, most restaurants in the country seem to have plastic food out front, complete with prices. Just point to what you want, or pick something at random: it's bound to be delicious!

Posted by Felix at 19:59 EST

Comments

Boy, imagine how much you might have written had you stayed there a month.

Posted by: Matthew at 11:43 EST, April 30, 2004

Also, Japanese rock music has always been bizarrely fun but has recently gotten really, really good.

Check out Melt Banana, and also Mad Capsule Markets. Just plain good. Scary good. Wacky good.

Posted by: Simian at 2:43 EST, May 04, 2004

Ah Japan... I'm hungry for noodles right now! I will never forget all the different flavors I tasted and know I will never taste them anywhere else except Japan.

Next time I will walk into a noodle shop with pride as I dump my cash into the vending machine, grab my ticket, sit down at the counter and slurp loudly as I eat fabulous tasting ramen, omen, soba or udon... delicious!

Posted by: Michelle at 9:18 EST, May 04, 2004

Excellent. Better than my Lonely Planet guide book. Here in Trinidad, thousands of imported Japanese used cars flood the market every year, prized for the fact that they are so new-looking. They're called "foreign-used" to differentiate them from "local-used". So that's where they go - to become luxury vehicles in the Third World.

Posted by: Robin at 18:28 EST, January 09, 2006

What a wonderful article! I was searching for some descriptions of a 'typical' japanese lunch, that is, not what we here in the states think of as lunch but what a salaryman might do, etc...and was rewarded with your upbeat descriptions of all sorts of sights. You sound like a fun travel companion. Thanks for the read, amg

Posted by: Ana Maria at 21:43 EST, April 10, 2006