Japan: Final Thoughts
Author: Samuel Peterson
Date Published
2018-05-20 (ISO 8601)
73-05-20 (Post Bomb)
The last three posts on Japan just featured our main activities. This post will cover much of what I thought about the trip: the general look and feel of where we went, my impressions of the people, the food, and anything else that comes to mind. So what do I think about japan?
Japan is weird, man.
Speaking as one from the US, traveling from Germany to Japan makes Germany seem like another state in the union. If we were to discount the difference in language, a typical exchange with someone in Germany is likely to be virtually identical as with an American in terms of things as basic as body language and the unspoken rules of etiquette. Not so with the Japanese. For instance: I did not know how to respond after being told thank you for the third time upon leaving a restaurant, nor did I know if I was supposed to wave back at the strangers in the buses and boats that crossed my path, even something as simple as giving cash to a clerk involves a weird two-handed clasp that just reminds you that you are in a foreign land. In addition to the strangeness, basically all the differences in custom and manner in Japan lead to an increase in tension; very little seems aimed at putting you at ease. This could be because I just get up-tight when I'm in foreign environs, or it could be an actual feature of Japanese customs.
I don't want to seem too down on the feel of the country. Part of the charm to travel is seeing different modes of life, and we certainly got that with this trip. The intent of the above paragraph is just to say that we were not in Kansas anymore; We were on the other side of the world, and it was apparent.
Other than basically everything being somewhere between a little to a lot different, Japanese manners need special mention. There is a difference between politeness and warmth. To be polite, one just needs to strictly adhere to a set of social rules. Warmth has less to do with protocol and more to do with the intent of making other people at ease. The Japanese seem to be an extremely polite people, but from what I've seen of their dramatic productions, from what I know of their history, and from the tense nature of their particular brand of etiquette, I would not call them a particularly warm people in general. It just seemed like their were a lot of rules of conduct, and I'm pretty sure we broke most of them by accident.
By contrast, I would also not call the Germans particularly warm either (at least not particularly inviting) but at least it seems like there are fewer social rules. Maybe this is just because I'm so used to western manners that I don't even notice them, but that is certainly the impression.
Another stereotype which held true in general was the cleanliness of the cities. Despite the virtual absence of public trash bins (or maybe in some ways because of it) Tokyo and Kyoto seemed to be immaculately groomed. Aizu a little less so, but only a little. Also virtually absent were the bums. Vagrancy appeared to be a social ill which didn't exist. Even Berlin, which compared with any US city of comparable size has surprisingly few, has its share. I don't think we saw ANY in either Aizu, Kyoto or Tokyo, the last two being cities much larger than Berlin.
As alien as all of these things were to me, nothing made me feel as out of place as the writing.
10 days of illiteracy
I have been to three countries for extended periods of time where I knew virtually nothing about the spoken language: The Czech Republic, Greece, and Japan. The first two of these countries differed from Japan in one very crucial aspect: I could at the very least vocalize what was written. As small as that capability may seem, it's absence makes it very clear how non-trivial it really is. For starters, you can't look words up: they are just scribbles. The best you can do is to take a picture and have google translate have a go at it.1 A bit more subtle a difference is how much harder it is to remember words (at least for me) without a visual handle on them -- and the unfamiliar pictographs are damned hard to remember without any study. Perhaps worst of all is that you are reduced to pointing as your only means of communication, unless English is spoken which was not something you can count on.
I'd like to take this opportunity to excoriate the Japanese writing system. Japanese writing consists of 2 phonetic alphabets, Hirigana and Katagana of 46 and 48 characters respectively, as well as a pictographic alphabet, Kanji, which numbers in the thousands, including thousands which are obscure even to the Japanese. Almost no words are usually spelled out with any single alphabet, and most have at least one Kanji. If that smells fishy, it gets worse: children's books are usually written almost completely in Hirigana for the obvious reason that they don't know enough Kanji to make sense of adult script. So it's not as if Japanese just haven't thought of the idea of using a phonetic script as it was intended... You know, as a powerful and versatile writing system with universal extensibility. Yet at some point they ditch the concept and use a convoluted writing scheme which is a pain in the ass to learn, or even to index.
I can only describe this collective behavior as criminal obtuseness. It also betrays a disturbing lack of youthful rebellion. How on earth there hasn't been any influential Japanese youths refusing to give up their Hirigana texts is beyond me, especially considering this ridiculous mix of alphabets has been around since ~1100 BB (~800 AD). I thought regression towards laziness was a pretty constant law of language.
One argument that I've heard in favour of the Japanese writing system goes like this: it requires so much effort that it sharpens students' minds, or something silly like that. Nonsense! There's a bunch of stuff more worth memorizing than a needlessly complicated alphabet. I can only make sense of it as a system deliberately designed to obstruct the proliferation of literacy back in Feudal times. Of course I know that now Japanese literacy is universal as it is in most industrialized nations, but that comes at the price of years of study.
Despite the above rant, I think it's a very pretty script. I may very well look through and learn some of the more attractive Kanji just for fun -- for all the inconveniences of the Japanese way of life, they have a talent for aesthetics which is second to none.
Everything is pretty
I found the look of the countryside, the landscaping, the architecture (the non-utilitarian architecture at any rate), and the native cuisine, to be an absolute joy to look at. I say the native cuisine, because I also saw the most hideous pizza in recent memory there.
I think the pinnacle of Japanese skill in this regard lies in their landscaping. You can see some examples of this in the photos from the previous posts. My favorite part of the trip, I think was walking through the grounds of the castle in Aizu, because of the awesome display of cherry blossoms -- they really ran with that theme there. However I think that in the other 50 weeks of the year, the beauty of the place would take a distant second to the grounds in Nijo castle.
One peculiar thing I noticed was that the presence of parks in the cityscapes we went to were rather sparse compared to Berlin. Berlin has a large number of small parks and trees planted in most of the streets. Neither is the case with Aizu, Kyoto or Tokyo. They seem to have decided upon the model of a smaller number of truly special gardens. This probably has something to do with the space constraints of the country.
There are some rather strange and funny rituals which the Japanese have to appreciate their natural beauty. An instance of this that sticks to mind is from our first day in Japan on the road to Aizu. The organizers of Amanda's conference had chartered a bus from Tokyo to Aizu, and the itinerary included some scenic stops along the way. Among these stops was the train station at Yunokami-Onsen. The station was located in a nice cherry blossom grove with picturesque mountains in the background. When we arrived, there we looked around, appreciating the grounds until some people started gathering by the train-tracks with their cameras out. Apparently taking a picture of the train going by was a custom. Fair enough, it was a nice situation for a bit of train spotting, So we took our position by the train tracks. What was particularly amusing however was that when the train stopped, a crowd of people filed quickly out of the train, immediately taking their own positions by the tracks with their cameras out and started snapping photos of their own. What the passengers did after the train left, I don't know. Either that's where they lived, or they just took the next train after spotting the one they were already on. Either way it seemed absurd. We didn't have the presence of mind to photograph this last part of the spectacle (in our defence we had been awake for more than 24 hours by this point), but we did catch a nice photo of the train in its approach.
Train spotting at Yunokami-Onsen station
Fabulous Fishy Food
Before going to Japan, I was already a big fan of the cuisine there. Or at least, the Japanese cuisine as it is represented in the US and Germany. I was curious to see how my impressions of Japanese food compared to that served in the actual country. To my surprise, there was little significant difference between the Japanese food served in the good places in the US and the food we had during our trip: The American notion of Katsu, Tempura, Sushi, (good) Ramen, Donburi, and Onigiri seem to be more or less accurate. That being said, American versions of Japanese food just offer a faithful rendition of a subset of Japanese cuisine. For instance, horse meat is a specialty of Aizu, which you would not see in an American establishment... at least openly; there may be some horsemeat in your meatballs, depending on the place.
One difference that stands out is the variety and quantity of green-tea-based confections. While matcha was originally the tea consumed in ceremonial contexts, I'm convinced that it's true place is in sweets such as cakes, mochi, and ice cream. We went matcha-wild during our trip. Amanda simply adored the green tea ice cream (and thank goodness at least that is available outside Japan), while I took a great liking to a rather wonderful matcha flavored jelly-like mochi called Warabi. In addition there were some nice cakes, chocolates, sweet drinks, donuts, and cookies. We went a little overboard.
Talk about the Television!
OK, the television in Japan was amusing, and I'll mention a few of the peculiarities of it here. Before I go on, I must mention that we just had access to the basic broadcast TV; I am assuming there were a lot more programs available with their equivalents to cable or satellite programs.
One peculiar practice of theirs is that a lot of the non-dramatic programs featured a panel of people who you could see watching the program in a little window on one corner of the screen. They mostly just watched silently, with occasional exclamations like "ah-so" and whatnot. Included in these programs were: a show about bowel movements and colon health, a show about asparagus with some really excellent looking dishes, and a show about travel in Berlin of all places.
Another channel we saw a lot because Elliott was a fan: the children's channel. This featured a collection of strange cartoons mixed with an array of surprisingly well-made educational material ranging from Mathematics, Geology, Physics, English language, German language.
And of course we saw a bit of a game show, which the Japanese are notorious for, at least in the US. It was a strange thing called lovemageddon. I think this was the game's schtick: Get 10 women who, I'm pretty sure, were selected for ugliness, and get 11 men. The men and the women sit across from each other, and each selects a person from the other end with whom they would like to be matched. If one selects someone who in turn selected them, then they get matched and move off the table to some sort of... throne? Then the game repeats until all of the women have been paired with a man, leaving one man unpaired who I think is the loser. What the stakes are or what happens next I'm not entirely sure. It was a little confusing.
How did Elliott do?
While Elliott, who was 16 months old at the time of the trip, did about as well as someone his age could fare, I cannot recommend traveling to Japan with one so young. It was overall quite stressful for him. I mention this point in case its omission might be interpreted as an endorsement for such a travel age. One group that was happy that Elliott came along: Old Japanese ladies. They were positively fawning over the little fellow. Everywhere we went we heard "quwai" (cute), as Elliott managed to pierce the stereotypical Japanese reserve. For instance: one lady needed to pick him up at the train station, and later showed us pictures of her grand-children; several people asked to take pictures of him; and one lady thanked us profusely at dinner for letting her shake his hand. So yeah, the grandmas loved him.
What's my final verdict?
I enjoyed my Japanese expedition. If I were to give advice to an American wanting to make visit I'd say the following:
- If you don't know the language, and you have the means, consider getting a guide. And not those dumb group tour guides. Ideally, get a friend who knows the language and who's tastes roughly align with yours. This wouldn't be as important for travel in Europe, but Japan is different enough that I thought it would have greatly improved our experience there.
- Focus on the natural beauty of the place. Go during a sunny time. If you can, go when the cherry blossoms are out. One idea which I find to be very appealing is to take the Nakasendo trail: a walking path of 329 miles connecting Kyoto and Tokyo, interspersed with rest stops. That trip would be for the lion's share of a month if you were to do it all on foot, but I hear it is quite pretty.
So that's about it. It was certainly an adventure, and one that I'm still digesting it.
Footnotes
1: Although the technology is not quite there yet, it could be that our smart phones, and other small electronics could make the language barrier virtually obsolete.