Perpetual Change

How Japan is NOT like anywhere else

I don’t know where to begin for this last blog in the series. The Japanese surprised me in many ways, such as:
they love donuts;
the language is related to Turkish;
it has a phonetic system (like an Alphabet. You never thought of how one might order a dictionary in Chinese, have you?!);
they have so many coins;
on the street, they hand out tissue packets with ads on them;
the tea is different than Chinese;
and they have Ukrainian-style pizza! (I thought I wrote a blog about this way back at the beginning, but I couldn't find it just now. Basically, one time I ordered this dough for lunch during training and thought it was quite good, so I tried out my new language skills to ask what it was. Pizza was the answer, much to my surprise.)

They also do everything on the left – drive, walk, stairs, escalators (though not completely consistently.) On the sidewalk, you must walk on the left and overtake people on the right; you must also walk past people on the stairs so they are on your right. You wouldn’t believe how ingrained the other way is. There are plenty of stairs between shopping malls, subways, and pedestrian overpasses, and I often had that little funny dance with someone, when you don’t know which way they are going to go; though in these cases, I was the one messing up. It even happened with a cyclist once or twice. I always wondered about this in England, but could never detect a trend in the general population. The Japanese are much clearer and for some reason if they want it the other way (which is occasional on the subway stairs), they clearly mark the floors and stairs with lines and arrows.

Japan has borrowed many words and symbols from Chinese, but usually if they have borrowed a symbol, it retains its meaning, but is pronounced completely differently, and vice versa. An interesting example is that one of Japan’s original capitals was Kyoto; this means “Capital of All”. Tokyo means “the Eastern Capital”. Although the Chinese don’t share these sentiments nor pronunciations, the symbols they use do reflect these definitions!

They have so many drink machines on the street – pretty much at every corner - but no trash on the streets. Trash cans are a bit easier to find than in the other two places, but still not common. Neither is grime or smog. My cough cleared up here. There are almost no scooters, which was a huge surprise, and I saw workers vacuuming up outdoor stairs and curbs; they don’t sweep. I didn’t see any dirty panty vending machines, either.

The Subway system is daunting and HUGE! There are several different companies that run lines, and the fundamental set up is different. Whereas, it seems to me, that most subways seek to consolidate people into the major city centers and common thoroughfares, the Tokyo one seeks to distribute everyone over the whole city. This can mean a lot of changing. There is almost always room to sit. I’ve never seen this before. There really are no major lines, and there are stops in just a couple blocks in several directions at almost any point in the city, but you have to pay close attention to which lines they are on, because walking 10 minutes in one direction as opposed to the other, could mean an hour’s difference in subway travel time to your destination because of the circuitous path that would be required by taking a neighboring line. And there is no lining up for the incoming trains, like in the other cities. This is one aspect of organization that the Japanese seem uninterested in.

I have never been in a city where I felt safer. There is almost no crime or shoplifting. I find this unbelievable, because they are almost inviting it. I mean they have a public toilet in every 7-11 (of which there are thousands) where you could easily hide something that you had picked up. The stores are busy and the attendants always busy at the counter, and there are racks of small merchandise items out on the sidewalk!

One thing that I didn’t find so admirable was the Museum of Military History. The samurai info was interesting, and they participated in WWI (which shows my ignorance and explains why it is called a World War). The vast majority of the museum (space wise) is on WWII, though. They call it The Greater East Asian War, and declare that it was on Britain and the USA. They make a (rather strong) argument, that we wanted them to declare war on us. The museum didn’t quite have the same feeling as those in Germany. Interestingly, but unimportantly, from their calendar's perspective, we were attacked on December 8th at Pearl Harbor.

Finally, they differ greatly in how homogenous their culture, religion, language, people and customs are as compared to my other two Asian stops. All the old cultural icons have deep currents in the culture, like Geisha, Samurai, Kabuki, No, Onoy-e, etc, but I didn’t see anything about Bonsai or Origami, though I did see thousands of folded cranes at one temple, and they sculpt almost every tree in their yards to some degree.

It was a fascinating place.

Labels: asia

posted by jjs @ 11:05 AM