I will start with this post, in which I try to give an explanation of what it is like to be in Japan. Subsequent posts will address other topics of interest to people thinking of travelling to Japan or simply interested in the normal topics of this blog.
TL;DR - you should visit Japan. You should visit it now.
This experience is common in Japan. It is normal to go to a supermarket and see individually wrapped fruit, each one perfectly ripe and free from blemish. One can just turn up a restaurant that serves wonderful, opulent sushi for lunch, or have dinner without a reservation in one of those private dining rooms with a sliding door favoured by villains in Bond films. The experience of ordinary life as a traveller in Japan can be rather like being a plutocrat who spends their time in the best shops and cafés in London and Paris.
Neither of these was the outfit she was wearing when they made the yakuza joke but they are every bit as modest, restrained in colour and in good taste as what she was wearing (a smart navy suit, as I recall).
What is it like to be in Japan?
I was there for pleasure, not work, so I can tell you (next to) nothing about professional life in Japan. What I can tell you is that, for the European traveller at least, Japan is supremely civilised. To be in Japan is to experience a particular type of refined and discreet type of luxury as a matter of course.
As a traveller, you experience a country principally through (in no particular order):
- the places you visit or wander about,
- the people who work in various customer-facing jobs,
- the transportation you take,
- the food you eat,
- the bathrooms you use,
- the sights you see and
- how much it all costs.
Japan is top notch on all these fronts, as I shall explain below, taking each in turn.
Japanese interiors as experienced by the traveller - that is to say, not only those of accommodation, restaurants and shops but also those one sees in historical sights - are almost universally pleasing. If you imagine a Japanese interior, you are bound to think of paper screens, sliding walls and tatami mats (the house in My Neighbour Totoro, for example). That simple, clean, well-proportioned aesthetic endures to this day; there appears to be no desire for fussiness in Japan. (By contrast, think of China, England and France, each of which yearns to adorn and decorate interior spaces.)
More than that, in Japan one often comes across the kind of experience of beautifully presented things that one sees only in very high end shops in the West. To take an example, Kanazawa, a provincial town with a similar population to that of Bristol, has a station with a kind of food court at which one can buy bento boxes to eat on train journeys. It is, therefore, the functional equivalent of that bit of a British station concourse on which you find an Upper Crust, a Costa Coffee and a Boots. But in Kanazawa it is as beautifully presented and enticing as Harrods Food Hall. Here is my photo, which wholly fails to do justice to the size and loveliness of the whole or the delicious nature of the goods on offer, but I hope shows you at least the neatness of presentation.
Wandering the streets is somewhat different because Japan is often a crowded place. But the people are considerate in public: quiet, soberly dressed and restrained in their movements. There is a large amount of cycling on the pavement in Tokyo, but it is done with care and consideration (and no cycle helmets). The clothing is worthy of comment: the palate of colours is far more muted than that in, say, London; one rarely sees slogans or gaudy patterns on T-shirts; women's clothing is noticeably less revealing and less form-fitting than that of Westerners. I was there in the rainy season (i.e., it was hot and humid): there was much mopping of brows (by men) and much use of handheld fans, but (and I apologise for lowering the tone) hardly any visible sweat (except on tourists) and little exposed skin. (Many Japanese women even wear separate arm coverings.) Walking the streets of Tokyo is to see a lot of people, but a lot of civilised people, trying to make their way without inconveniencing others by their presence, sound, smell or appearance. It helps that everywhere is clean, in good repair and free from the eyesores of Western cities (graffiti, litter, tied bags of rubbish, dog mess, pavement weeds and so on).
At this point, I am going to bring up a rather second-rate Japanese film that I watched on the plane because it illustrates a couple of the points I have been making. The film is called Analog and concerns the romance between a woman who does not have a mobile phone (hence the title) and a man she meets in a coffee shop.
First: interiors. The man (Satoru) is an architect, which is the typical job for a romantic lead in the West too, as that means he can be both creative/sensitive but also professionally successful. But in Analog he is not really what we would call an architect: rather, he is a designer of interiors. Our couple meets in a coffee shop, the interior of which he designed, and his sensitive design is part of what attracts her to him. We then see him design the interiors of a restaurant and a hotel lobby. Having been in a number of Japanese interiors, the idea that a sensitive and creative romantic lead might be (in effect) an interior designer for commercial premises is actually entirely plausible.
Second: dress. When our hero's friends first see his love interest, they joke that she might be a Yakuza's girlfriend, what with her being a bit of a catch and all that. Imagine a gangster's moll in the West. Now see Miyuki:
Neither of these was the outfit she was wearing when they made the yakuza joke but they are every bit as modest, restrained in colour and in good taste as what she was wearing (a smart navy suit, as I recall).
So that's the places you visit and wander about (although I will have more to say about the outside of Japanese buildings in due course). Turning then to the other points I mentioned:
- Service is, as you would expect, polite and attentive. Moreover, it is normally fast: food arrives quickly (and not all at once) and there is never a wait for a bill. Shops and other customer-facing positions are over-staffed: it is exceptionally rare to have to wait to be served anywhere, which (again) adds to the impression of living a luxurious and civilised life. (As an aside, more relevant to later posts than this one, I observed that there are plenty of women working in customer-facing roles and, in Tokyo at least, a reasonable number of people who are not of Japanese ethnicity: I won't gainsay what that the statistics say about female participation in the Japanese workforce or Japanese immigration, but I would suggest that you don't base your impressions of these matters on out-of-date stereotypes.)
- Transport is, of course, utterly reliable, punctual, air-conditioned, safe, modern and brilliant. Civilised thought is apparent here too: I had not realised how much leg room there is on the shinkansen (bullet train), for example, nor that their seats are all rotated at the end of each journey so that everyone faces forward at all times. People wait for trains and buses by queuing in lines carefully marked on the platform or pavement. The Tokyo rail network is very easy to navigate for anyone who speaks English or simply has access to a smartphone.
To foreshadow material for later posts, I was also surprised at how lavish the infrastructure is for private travel as much as for the public kind (Hamburg, in its own, more modest way, is similarly strong for both public transport and cars): Tokyo has lots of wide roads, many with multiple flyovers too. I did not notice traffic jams or even much waiting at red lights. Perhaps a clue here is that one of the tourist sights of Tokyo is that big zebra crossing at Shibuya near the Hachikō statue (I've used the crossing a few times now and can confirm that it is indeed a busy place to cross the road): notice how many lanes of traffic there are on the roads in this busy shopping district and contrast that with, say, Oxford Street. As with staff in customer-facing jobs, Japan is likely over-provided with roads: travel in Tokyo is so fast that they may have succeeded in building more roads than even a megacity needs. Outside Tokyo the situation is even more marked: I noticed that the roads to Kanazawa, which are already pretty hefty bits of infrastructure, going through mountains in tunnels and over valleys on bridges, were virtually empty but nonetheless are being augmented by further tunnels and building works - I am sure that this kind of infrastructure investment is not justifiable on normal cost-benefit grounds (or would not be in this country).
- The food is uniformly excellent - including Western food. Just to go back to Analog for a moment, at one point our courting couple go out for German food and eat a dish called "German potatoes", which leads to this exchange:
In case you can't see the text, Satoru comments that "Germans are lucky to have such delicious food" but Miyuki has to break it to him that "They don't have German potatoes in Germany". (She then adds that she was shocked too: the fact that she has been to Germany is relevant to the plot for reasons I won't bore you with.)
Even the presentation of food is polite: more than once I was asked if I wished wasabi to be omitted from sushi; I was told that many things that might be considered a strong flavour are left on the side of a dish, to be added to taste; in a burger restaurant, I was politely asked to take the first bite without adding ketchup or mustard because it had been appropriately seasoned by the chef (they must have had experience with some real philistines in the past).
- Bathrooms. Well, of course, you know all about Japanese lavatories. I have been a convert ever since coming across them in Korea. But here is something different (and, again, not unusual): a urinal with a little hook to hang your umbrella. As I say, civilised.
- The sights: I think I want to write a little bit more about how Japanese sight-seeing - or rather, what the sights are - varies from the European kind, but I should just say that historical sights (temples, gardens, museums etc) are, in my experience, every bit as clean and well-organised as the rest of Japan. Exhibits in museums are well-labelled and well-lit, for example. The experience of sight-seeing is further enhanced by appropriate air-conditioning, free water stations, frequent and clean lavatories, and all the other ancillary facilities being deeply civilised.
Before getting to the cost of all this, I should just point to some other miscellaneous glimpses of civilisation that you might not have considered. Caps still come off plastic bottles in Japan and straws are made of plastic. It is common to expect shoes to be taken off in many places and so hotels and tourist sites will have shoe horns available (not tied down or chained up, just loose shoe horns, because you are a civilised person and you won't steal a shoe horn). Umbrellas are not only hung up in urinals but may be left outside small restaurants (and certainly won't be taken inside). Restaurants - even cheap, fast-food type ones - will often have little stands for your bags to keep them off the floor. Bus drivers and shop staff show no impatience with tourists fumbling through unfamiliar money and indeed will help with every appearance of to be of assistance. Rental e-scooters are not abandoned on the pavement but neatly parked in designated bays. There is virtually no tipping!
(I say civilised advisedly: Japanese ways are not our ways. As the bottle caps and plastic straws examples might suggest, they seem to be much less concerned about environmental matters - or at least environmental signalling - than Europeans are. I was not asked to separate much of my rubbish for recycling, for example, with a lot (even paper) being baldly described as "burnable"; food packaging is lavish; nothing seems to be advertised on the basis that it is GMO free, organic, sustainable, carbon neutral, slavery-free, natural or anything like that; food additives in the (delicious) convenience store food are many and varied. But I think of all this as driven by a kind of gentlemanly instinct: no gentleman would ask a gentleman to sort through his rubbish and no gentleman would ask a lady to use a straw that dissolves on contact with liquid. There is, I am sure, much more to say on this topic.)
- Cost: I am delighted to say that Japan is very reasonably priced. ¥1000 is worth about £5. ¥1000 is also (broadly) how much you can expect to pay for a bowl of tasty ramen in a restaurant (no tipping, remember), one of those bento boxes I mentioned earlier, about 5 journeys on the Tokyo metro, a man's haircut, adult entry to the Tokyo National Museum or one of these t-shirts (2 for under ¥1000 each - and notice the characteristic Japanese range of colours). Bargain. Absolute bargain.
That, I hope, is sufficient to explain quite how nice it is simply to be in Japan. In my next post, I hope to explain why I have started in this way.
Excellent post. Interesting and informative. Now what are the downsides of Japan....?
ReplyDeleteThank you. I'll come on to that, I think. (I would say that if you are physically very large or perhaps highly dyspraxic then it's probably not a great place for you.)
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