I’ve been living in Japan for about two months now. I’ve already written about some of the differences, but there are many, many more. Here are some of them.
I now wear my shoes loosely – permanently laced up with about an inch to spare, so that I can slip them on or off when entering or leaving a building (or using a changing room when buying clothes!). Most of the time, that building is my school, where I have a pair of my own slippers stored in a locker that I wear throughout the day; in restaurants that require you to take your shoes off there are normally slippers provided (and a different set of slippers is kept in the toilet – which is the same as at home). Everybody else in Japan seems quite happy to tread down the backs of their shoes, but somehow I find myself unable to do so. I just have too much respect for the shape and form and integrity of the shoe. Which, when I think about it, is pretty weird.
I also carry a small towel around with me everywhere. When it’s hot, I use this to mop the sweat from my brow, or I wrap a cold drink in it and then press it against my neck. But mostly I just use it to dry my hands, because many public toilets in Japan don’t have any hand dryers or towels. I have yet to work out if it is considered rude to walk out of the toilet while drying your hands, though.
Japan is full of jingles. And muzak. Every single store seems to play the most insane muzakal versions of all sorts of popular hits, from a weirdly leisurely version of Britney’s Toxic to a fairly authentic rendition of some Carpenters song. 7-11 even has its own theme tune. And almost every advert on telly has an irritatingly infectious little musical accompaniment that feel like they will be burned, indelibly, on my brain: ‘amakute shoppai’ (Chip Chop salty chocolate crisps); ‘kare nabe nara hou-su!’ (curry stew); ‘if you’re sat around at home, make new friends on the telephone! 0898 55 0055 chatback! (Actually I haven’t heard that last one in Japan. Yet.) Just to make sure, my local supermarket has a television at the end of one of the aisles that plays a two-minute jingle on a loop, advertising kewpie-chan, which I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to recite with complete accuracy for the rest of my life.
Japan is also full, apparently, of announcements. During the recent elections there were plenty of politicians driving around with loudhailers on the roof of their cars, but this is far from exceptional: whenever an old person goes missing, or whenever the local fire service want to remind people not to burn down their houses, they drive around blaring it out through the streets. At the end of the summer, we’d even be treated to notices of forthcoming festivals, accompanied by fireworks. At 7 o’clock in the morning.
And on the subject of fireworks, Japan is full of them too, mostly at night, during festivals, but also, like I say, at 7am, or during the day, when all you can see are dim clouds of smoke.
One thing that Japan is certainly not full of, is pavements. There are pavements, sure, but most of the time, there aren’t, and so you have to walk along the side of the road, dodging the cars and, just as frightening, the bikes (which seem to be exempt from any laws regulating their behaviour – there was one day that I had waited patiently at the crossing outside my school, only to be prevented from crossing at the green man by a succession of cyclists). Both cyclists and car drivers seem to treat their vehicles as an extension of themselves, behaving as if they were on foot – accelerating through red lights, ignoring zebra crossings, and swerving around obstacles while emailing or chatting on their phones. My walk to work is currently only five minutes long, but those five minutes are terrifying – especially the bit where I have to walk through an archway that is just about wide enough for one car and a pedestrian to fit through, side by side.
The shops are different too, and not just because of the jingles and continuously looping adverts. They also have an amazing multitude of familiar-but-different things, from the sweet white bread (with the crusts already cut off for making sandwiches) to the tiny little wieners that pass for sausages over here (they even try to pass off some of the spicier ones as chorizo sausages, which I guess would be accurate if chorizo was a spicy frankfurter). They also sell vast quantities of dried fish, an amazing amount of instant, pre-prepared everything, and even horse meat (which makes more sense than horse shampoo anyway). Venture into a combini (ie. convenience store) and you can buy most of these things but you can also buy cigarette starter packs: a lighter, pack of cigarettes, and some glamorous and cool-looking packaging. Even when you finish your shopping you’ll find things a bit different: when buying some shelves from the hardware store that’s 50 metres from our apartment, we were given a loan of a van to drive them back; and if you buy something cold from the supermarket and have to walk home with it, they’ll give you some dry ice to keep it cold (and so that you can mess around with it after, by putting it in a bowl of water to produce magical smoke).
Other different things include: Japanese barbers, where they have one man to cut the back and sides; another to cut the top; another to finish off the trimming and do your eyebrows; and yet another to dust you down with talc. Japanese beetles are also different: they’re huge, and they’re everywhere in summer, because all the kids collect them and store them in big glass tanks along with special jelly to feed them. And I never knew tatami had a smell – just like I never knew that rice had a taste – but now that I’m living in an apartment that’s full of tatami I can tell you that it has a very strong, strange smell, and that rice in Japan tastes much better than in England (where most Japanese-style rice comes from California). I can also tell you that sitting cross-legged and upright on tatami is much more tiring than sliding back into a sofa.
They also have a very different sense of decorum over here – a very different sense of what constitutes polite behaviour. During our local orientation we were given lessons in how to sit and stand properly, how to hold cups and bowls of soup or tea, and how to bow. More enlightening was the drinks reception in the evening, where our governmental host joked to one (slightly large) JET that he should take up sumo wrestling; and to another that he was disappointed she was married.
And, finally, the television is very different. We can receive three, very snowy, channels that are all full of people eating – although there was one weekend where they had a special 24-hour telly marathon that was mostly just people dying, except for one blind girl who swam to Hokkaido and a young comedian who used the time to run about three or four full marathons, which, actually, is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen on telly. Until they showed the dog who ran 100 metres using just its hind legs.
Just another JET in Japan 