Japan: (Last)ing Impressions

We’ve regressed to the mean somewhat. People are louder than I claimed 10 days ago. The other day I saw Japanese people, no joke, playing in the park, talking, laughing, even practicing musical instruments right next to a sign listing all of those activities as prohibited. A guy and a girl were doing acroyoga. A proud statue of an athletic nude female effortlessly holding a toddler in an outstretched hand glared at them threateningly to no avail. I was about to report them all to the police for making a liar out of me when I spotted a policeman relaxing on the sidelines, like some degenerate Westerner.

In the early hours of the morning though, before someone breaks the spell, the streets are full of people but blissfully quiet. And clean. And what is that incredible smell? Just regular air minus the smell of weed and urine? How quaint for a big city!

One thing that has been consistent throughout our trip is how safe we’ve felt in the three biggest cities in Japan. I feel like I could walk anywhere at night without a second thought. Elementary school kids walk around Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka without chaperones. This is incredible to me, who once ran home by myself from kindergarten and almost caused an international incident, in a town with 0 violent crime.

Another constant is the ubiquitous masking, outside, inside, in the shower, everywhere. ChatGPT claims it’s a cultural thing, with a recent +2 power-up from Covid, and that a mask could mean any number of things (commitment issues, Mr. Chat?). Someone could be sick and be wearing one to protect others, or to protect themselves, or for privacy and anonymity or even just to avoid unwanted social interactions.

If all Asians look the same to you, masks don’t help a bit. The following was overheard by people standing next to us in the hotel reception line a few days ago:

Yuanyuan: hey, that’s the same guy that stored our luggage yesterday.

Me: what? It’s a completely different guy.

Yuanyuan: same guy!

Me: shit, you’re right. It’s the leaf blower guy. That guy’s managing our whole trip in Japan!

I can’t believe these are the same people who created Godzilla. Everything else here is tiny. Rooms are small. Restaurants are small. Bars are small. A typical bar/restaurant is the size of a single bed dorm room and has 5 seats, 4 of which are reserved for regulars. Supermarkets have hilariously small baskets. You’d have to engage your core to get two apples to fit in that basket. Also, there are normal sized baskets that are not hilarious at all and should be banned.

Tiny salads. Tiny escalators, sometimes right next to regular size escalators. Tiny sidewalks. Tiny action figures in tiny vending machines. Tiny coke bottles. Tiny Starbucks cups…oops, no, just regular Godzilla-sized Starbucks cups.

I could spend a month here just walking around saying “What is this? A tissue for ants?”

Some other fun experiences that probably aren’t representative of Japan as a whole:

One night, we stayed at a hotel with private onsens. There were no shoes allowed in the whole hotel. There was a big locker room at reception where you could store your shoes, after which you walked around barefoot or in socks. Slippers were provided, but only for emergency use, like if an earthquake, tsunami and an alien invasion coincided. It was like sleeping over at the TSA’s house, but fun and without Patriot Act posters over your head.

The private onsen was an interesting experience. It was a little room with a pseudo-cavern for a bathing pool, filled with hot water, and a view on the city. A sign reminds you before you walk in that “you MUST be naked” in the onsen, which I instantly added to my Amazon cart. Past the bathing pool was a balcony. A match made in heaven for exhibitionists and voyeurs, though we didn’t spot any voyeurs. Maybe we need to exercise more.

Ichiran Ramen was a fun dining experience and made me watchful of other instances where the Japanese try to remove human interaction from the equation. If at another restaurant there was a button to call a human waiter, this one had ~0 human interaction. You walk in, place your order on a machine, then go sit in one of a row of little half-open booths/cubicles. When your food is ready, a shutter opens and it gets pushed through. You see a hint of an elbow, blurred by the mist from the steaming bowl of ramen as the shutter closes, and you remember that glimpsing a bare ankle used to be an erotic experience, back before people’s shorts climbed all the way up past their butt cheeks. Good Lord, what a gorgeous elbow, you think, as the shutter snaps shut on your dreams.

On the right side of your booth hang 4 little wooden tablets with a phrase inscribed on each, Japanese on one side and English on the other:

“I’m not done yet, I’m just leaving my seat for a moment.”

“I don’t know the ordering process.” (I assume this is the eject seat tablet)

“It’s too noisy.”

“I’d like a kids bowl and utensils.”

I lurve this gimmick. I instantly imagined making a bunch of these when I got home and passive-aggressively handing them to people. “It’s too noisy,” to Dad at dinner. “I don’t know the ordering process,” to my wife in bed. “I’m not done yet, just leaving my seat for a moment,” to whoever’s in line for the bathroom in the airplane. “I’d like a kids bowl and utensils,” to my wife in bed. The possibilities are endless.

A few other random observations:

In New York, people crowd the intersection like they want their toes clipped. People in Japan stand three feet inside the sidewalk until the light turns. Also, no one jaywalks. When in Rome, don’t what the Romans don’t, I told myself for the first few days, but finally broke down, went back and re-jaywalked every intersection. I ended up saving like 30 seconds. No wonder Japanese people work such long hours.

The JR pass is a mixed blessing. Exchanging it on arrival can take an hour and a half.

All the cars in Japan are self driving…or so I thought until I realized they drive on the left and the driver sits on the other side. I gave maybe 10 empty passenger seats a thank you nod when they stopped to let me cross.

Kakigori, Japanese shaved ice, is even better than bingsu, Korean shaved ice, which itself is fantastic. We went into a kakigori place because I saw an older woman sitting inside with what looked like a volleyball of ice cream in front of her, and I wanted to be there in case I had to call 911. To not waste time, Yuanyuan and I ordered one too, and it was like a delicious cotton-candy snowball, huge and tasty and disappearing all too quickly. Highly recommended.

There are lots of unsweetened tea drinks in the supermarket. Vending machines are also full of them. It was very unamerican, in the best way.

There are also tons of hot bottled drinks in the supermarkets and vending machines, which I was highly skeptical of, given they’re all in plastic bottles.

There are often arrows drawn on the ground for where to go and where to line up, in the subway and other places. Nobody cuts anyone. Later, when I got to China, all that naive respect for lines that I imbibed in Japan meant I was last in line no matter how many people started out behind me.

Nude statues are common, like in Europe, and unlike in America.

In many of the buses we rode, the announcers were super chirpy, like anime characters. Every sentence went up and down in pitch like a rollercoaster and ended with an exclamation point. It was hilarious how exciting they made “hold on to the handrail” sound.

Overall, the trip was fun, but I didn’t experience as much culture shock as I’d hoped. Maybe it was because I didn’t try hard enough to break through the smiling face of the service industry to the meat of someone’s actual personality. Some day I’d love to just Freaky Friday into a Japanese family for a few weeks, see what it’s really like on the inside, commit every cultural faux pas, feel what they feel, be concerned with their concerns. But this was just window-shopping, as my vacations typically are. And I wasn’t going away empty-handed. As I got off the plane at my next stop, Beijing, I handed the Japanese stewardess a wooden tablet: “I’m not done yet, I’m just leaving my seat for a moment.”