We had unknowingly come to Japan during their special ‘Golden Week’ to celebrate Emperor Akihito’s stepping down and handing over the reign to his son, Naruhito. Instead of the usual 5-day public holiday, the whole country enjoyed an extended 10-day holiday. It was unprecedented and created a massive rush of people traveling all over the country and abroad. The stock market was even jittery leading up to this holiday, uncertain what to expect from the shutdown. In addition, this holiday coincided with Labor Day holiday in China, where people traditionally take that whole week (and the weekend before as well as the weekend after) to travel; Japan being one of the more popular destinations for these Chinese tourists. If you would imagine, everywhere we go, we were completely mobbed from all sides by the crowd, not to mention prices for accommodation and transport (bus, train, and plane) soared through the roof. A bed in a hostel that normally cost $20-$30 rose five-fold during Golden Week.
Even without the Golden Week + Labor Day madness, Japanese cities are already a heaping mass of humanity. One thing that surprised me each time I traveled east is the scale of these megacities – Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta. Do you know that Tokyo (and its surrounding neighborhoods) is the most populous metropolitan area in the world? 38 million people (equal to the population of Canada) crammed into 850 square miles.
New York may be dense, but until you experience Tokyo subway during rush hour, you haven’t really experienced what a megalopolis feels like. People are packed into the subway like sardines.
No one is pushing out of malice or resentment towards the person in front of them, but everyone is pushing their fellow commuters forward to claim every bit of space available as if we’re competing for the Guinness World Record for the maximum number of people in a train. For the next few stops, you have no choice but to be a part of this multi-layered human meatloaf. And when you get to your destination, you have to prepare yourself mentally beforehand: how to extricate yourself from the mass, which way to turn when you exit the train – left or right. Be alert, stay agile and know where you’re going, or else the crowd will push you to the nearest exit, up the elevator, as if there’s an invisible force pushing the swell of humanity from underground until we all spill out of the entrances of the subway station onto the streets. With our hiking backpacks, it took a different skill altogether to survive the subway crowd. I felt that I had to hold my breath while keep moving to stay afloat or else the swarming army of sararīman (the Japanese term for office workers, salaryman) in dark-colored suits would swallow me whole and spit me out deep into the subterranean Tokyo abyss. Good thing Gabriel is tall so I could always spot him, a familiar face above the sea of indistinguishable heads. On the other hand, he almost always lost me to the crowd and must pick me out from the mass by my bright turquoise backpack or my bright magenta pullover. We breathed a sigh of relief when we finally got out of the train station alive, hand in hand. We survived!
Claustrophobic crowds aside, Japan has been an interesting foreign country to visit. I say “foreign” because I had expected for it to be somewhat familiar – that I would understand its culture, its idiosyncrasies, its way of life – but the opposite was true. I found Japan to be as unfamiliar as a foreign country could be.
A little background: my dad studied in Japan back in the 1960s – 1970s. The experience formed such an impression on him that I grew up listening to him rhapsodize about Japan incessantly; how neat, how organized, how efficient, how orderly, how safe, how wonderful! In comparison, Indonesia is sloppy, dirty, and corrupt. I thought Japan must be the best country in the world.
As I grew up and started to form my own opinion of the world, Japan was no longer on a pedestal. But it still occupied a special place in my heart and I still felt like I knew the country, from both my dad’s stories and filled in with more contemporary details that I learned from reading the news and from my Japanese friends in college.
So for the first few days we were in Japan, I was impressed – no, mesmerized – by everything I saw. Fukuoka, where we were, felt like a Scandinavian town that had been run through a Google Translate program so everything was in Japanese and everyone was Japanese. The clean streets, the tiny minimalist apartments with space-efficient furniture, the well-connected public transport system, the preponderance of bicycles on the street, schoolchildren no older than four or five years old walking home by themselves; these are not hallmarks of Asian cities which I associated with noise, pollution and chaotic traffic jams.
Maybe my dad is right: Japan is the best country in the world.
We continued to be charmed by Fukuoka in the days after. The weather was perfect. A tad chilly, but a wonderful reprieve from the searing heat of Thailand. The streets were alive with the blooms of spring: the pink blush of cherry blossoms, the purple canopies of wisteria vines, the impossibly orange Oriental poppies, the colorful Japanese iris, and many other wild flowers vibrantly showing off their colors.
We enjoyed the onsen (hot spring), which was not as social as the Icelandic hot springs. They were quiet and sedate. Men’s and women’s baths are separate, and you’re supposed to go into the shallow pool au naturel. The only similarity between Icelandic and Japanese hot springs is that you’re supposed to shower and clean yourself thoroughly before entering the pool. It makes total sense, especially since they don’t use chlorine in the water. It was pretty amazing to see women of all ages and shapes at the onsen. I watched in awe as an old lady – she must be at least 80 years old – ambled casually aided by her cane, in the buff, from the dressing room to the pool, then gently lowering herself into the large square tub. Well I suppose these hot springs are supposed to be therapeutic and good for your joints. I wondered if Japanese women are more body positive because girls are accustomed from a young age to seeing what natural body shapes look like vs. the unrealistic media portrayal of what the ideal body shapes should be.
They aren’t. In fact, one thing about Japan that really grates on my nerves is how conformist the society is. They even have a saying that goes: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” The moral of the story being: don’t deviate from the norm, be like everyone else. Or else. When we took the subway in the morning, I was struck by how uniform everyone looked in their formal dark-colored suits. Even the ones who did not wear suits looked alike to each other with their loose blouses and loose long skirt or baggy pants. Think Eileen Fisher in mute palette: black, navy, beige, light brown, white. Everyone was wearing the same make-up: their faces caked with foundations two shades too pale, peach- or pink-colored blush across the cheekbones, thin line of pink eye shadow right above the eyelash, and a bright red lipstick. Everyone was also sporting the same hairstyle; a variation of straight-cut bob with few wisps of perfectly-teased bangs hanging right above their eyes. The same scene repeated itself in Fukuoka, Osaka, and Tokyo. Yes, even in Tokyo – the city that I associated with the epicenter of the counter-cultures in Japan! There were some areas like Shibuya and Shinjuku where you saw people dressed intricately in princess-style costumes, but I’d say those were few and far between.
While people are generally polite and friendly, I sensed a lack of warmth emanating from the overtly formal way that they addressed and interacted with each other. And I don’t know if it’s because we’re foreigners, or if it’s the impersonal nature of being in a densely-populated city, or just the culture in general, we found that the locals were pretty apathetic when you showed interest in engaging in a conversation with them. It’s a “mind your own business” attitude. We kept trying to connect with others – motorcyclists and fellow campers at the campsite, random people who were eating next to us in restaurants or at fairs, people on the trails. They would smile and nod, but overall showed no interest in figuring out what we had to say and promptly ignored us and looked away. It’s almost as if they’ve made up their minds that there wasn’t going to be any interesting conversation to be had here, so why spent the effort in this primitive way of communicating. A grocery store owner in Hongu actually shooed us away when we were about to enter the store because she wasn’t willing to waste her time figuring out what we needed from her store. And a fellow camper brusquely waved me off when he couldn’t understand what I wanted when I asked for a spoonful of oil. Perhaps because my pantomime of frying an egg was so terrible, or offensive? I don’t know. But because of this, I have grown to doubly appreciate the few encounters with strangers who took the time and effort to communicate with us despite the language barrier: the rokkū band members we met at the yatai stall in Fukuoka, the grocery store lady by the campsite in Watarase, the owner / mechanic at the motorcycle shop in Osaka, the cross-country motorcyclist dude from Hokkaido. They are the ones who I’ll remember for many years to come. And I also suspect that by the end of this trip, we would be unbeatable in Charades!
As if the language barrier wasn’t enough to make me feel as inept as a child, the public transport system in Osaka and Tokyo managed to turn me into a bumbling bumpkin, unable to figure out how to navigate my way around the city. I consider myself a pretty savvy traveler and took pride in my ability to figure out subway/train maps even when it’s in a foreign language, but Tokyo and Osaka public transport quickly showed me who’s boss. Because there are multiple train companies that run the multitude of train, subway, monorail and bus lines in the city, there is no single map that shows all the different lines and transfer stations for the city and there’s no single ticket that allows passage in these different lines. For each destination, there are multiple ways to get there, often using a combination of different lines run by different private companies, and sometimes with different options for speed: local, express and a few other options in between. For someone new to the city, it was difficult to know which combination was the most efficient, the most cost-effective. And because the whole country is so well-connected by train, missed one blink and suddenly we were in the neighboring city, where our transit pass was not accepted and we had to pay extra. There were so many times I as pretty close to tears, feeling simultaneously frustrated and defeated by the Japanese train system. I’m sure there are economic papers out there that applaud the merits of competitive public transport markets in Japan and how it brings about the private investment in infrastructure and the healthy interconnecting ecosystem of transport modalities that allows people to move about the country efficiently with relative affordability. “The virtues of free markets,” these experts would proclaim. I say to them: Bah, Humbug! Give me my inefficient, public subway back – at least they all fit in a map I could actually decipher.
Everywhere we look, there seems to be a universal quest to methodically find perfection and order, and to control nature to yield to one’s wishes. The trees that lined the street and the parks have all been pruned and cajoled to bend this way and that way – just the way the park planners intended.
The same goes with food. The level of effort that goes into food-making in Japan never ceases to amaze me. When we were in Fukuoka, I came across an article about a yakitori (grilled skewered chicken) chef who spent decades perfecting his techniques, finding the right breed of chicken and the right wood to make his charcoal, so that he could make the best yakitori. Breed of chicken? I was only aware of two breeds: egg-laying hens and broilers. Apparently there are different breeds of chickens with different fat composition, muscle tones, and flavor profile. Now isn’t that fascinating?
Well, to me, it sounded like this particular chef had an obsessive compulsive personality. But stories like these are extremely common in Japan. When we went to a kaiseki (traditional Japanese fine dining) restaurant in Tokyo, the chef bragged about the bamboo shoot we were about to eat. “It was plucked fresh this morning in Kyoto,” he said proudly via our waitstaff who also served as our translator throughout the two-hour lunch. Kyoto, by the way, is three hours away by train, six hours by car. So was the bamboo shoot flown in then, to reach us by lunch time? I could appreciate why restaurants often fly in their seafood to make sure their customers get the freshest catch. A stale fish is not as tasty as a fresh one, especially when served raw as sashimi. But bamboo shoots? Can an average human really tell how recently a bamboo shoot was picked from the ground after it’s been cooked?
It’s a recurring theme in Japan: taking a positive adjective to the extreme. We already talked about public transport and how in an effort to create the most efficient system, it turned into an unwieldy monster. Then there’s also food hygiene. I’m largely guessing here, but I believe the reason why the country uses way too much plastic is because it is obsessed with the idea of cleanliness and perfection. On the plus side, there’s very little risk of traveler’s diarrhea in Japan because food preparation is extremely hygienic. On the flip side, there’s so much plastic being used for the tiniest of things. I saw bananas and apples and mangoes in grocery stores being individually wrapped. Gifts are cocooned in layers of decorative packaging. The smallest little purchase is wrapped individually, packaged in a box, and then wrapped in plastic again. When we bought a piece of milk cookie at a food fair, we watched in horror as the lady behind the counter picked up one cookie, wrapped it in a wax paper, put it in a small plastic packaging, which goes into a slightly larger plastic bag which then goes into your standard grocery store plastic bag. At first we thought it was just that one particular store, but we learned that it happened everywhere. We had to keep saying “NO BAG, please” everywhere we went. When I researched this issue online, it turns out – like smoking – lobbying groups of convenience stores in Japan used their influence in Congress to fight against laws that would have limited the use of plastic bags for small purchases.
Perhaps it’s unfair to judge Japan’s plastic consumption when other developed countries, including the US, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway (at least by this 2010 data), consume more plastic per capita. So why am I holding Japan to a higher standard? Why am I being hyper critical about Japan’s plastic consumption level, when it is merely following the path of other developed countries: generates more waste as it grows richer?
Perhaps unconsciously all my frustrations about Japan – which are provoked by the most mundane of reasons – came from an unreasonable expectation. Perhaps I am putting Japan on a pedestal, expecting it to be unlike any other countries in Asia, or in the world for that matter. Maybe before this trip, I had believed that Japan should be exceptional – a model country that has figured out the right blend of Eastern tradition and Western progressive values.
But of course it was silly to expect any country to be perfect, and our three-week stay has not only forced me to recalibrate my perception of Japan, but also to recognize that, as unique as the country may be, it still faces the same social, environmental and economic issues common to all developed countries: an aging population and the burden it puts on the nation’s healthcare and social security system, a sluggish economy that isn’t improving despite Abenomics, environmental issues, and the rising anti-immigration sentiment as the government relaxes its immigration policy to combat labor shortage. And like many, Japan is trying to figure out its place in the fast-paced globalizing world amidst the rising powers of its Asian neighbors (notably, China) and unpredictable geopolitical trends.
All in all, I’m glad we got to spend some time in Japan. We ate a lot, walked a lot, and even caught three concerts during our time there: a super emo rock show, a heavy metal / jazz cross-over show, and a punk show. I got to catch up with two of my college friends and was pleased to know both are doing wonderfully, career-wise and family-wise. We got to spend time with Gabriel’s relatives in Tokyo, eating and exploring the city. We would definitely come back to Japan for more hiking and skiing, spend more time in the countryside vs. the cities. I’m looking forward to seeing my dad in a few weeks so we can discuss our observations about Japan with him. And who knows, maybe we’ll get to go on a quick trip to Japan with him in the future so he can help explain some of the quirks and idiosyncrasies we saw. But in the meantime: sayonara, Japan. The country is only slightly less foreign now than before our visit, but at least now we know how to order food at a vending machine restaurant.