Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

Well well, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?! Already I’m sitting in my hotel room in Narita, wearing an amusing branded dressing-gown-yukata-thing after a luxurious bath, preparing to enjoy one final night of trashy Japanese TV – and I barely booked the place half a month ago! OK when I say ‘booked’, I mean ‘went through all the normal rigmarole online, including payment, and therefore expect my reservation to have at the very least been communicated to the hotel relatively soon afterwards’. This, apparently, was too much to ask of whoever processed my reservation, since the brief Anglo-Japanese conversation I had with the staff member at reception here when I arrived strongly implied that they’d never heard of me, didn’t know it was possible to book without going through their own website, and generally were totally unprepared for my arrival. A couple of phonecalls later (by them, not me), it transpired that I do in fact exist, that I had submitted a perfectly legitimate reservation, and that there was a room available. And again, when I say ‘room’, I mean ‘space no wider than the door you enter from the corridor by, at the end of which is a bed several square miles too big for the room, and next to which is a bathroom evidently designed for hobbits’. I’m fairly sure I have the smallest room in the hotel by a significant margin, but then that appears to be something of a holiday tradition as well, thinking back to the Portland Square Hotel I stayed in during New York ’08, where my room was so cramped it was physically impossible for me to fit both myself and my suitcase through the door at the same time… This one at least has some room to move, and since I’m only staying for a night and planning on leaving early tomorrow morning, I could have done a good deal worse.

Having passed my room inspection by the Sakura House auditor with flying colours, I battled my way to Toritsudaigaku station, rucksack on my back, monstrously heavy suitcase pounding along beside me, and a plastic bag of food and drink for tonight and tomorrow pre-flight in my other hand. Because the auditor was a full hour late, I managed to miss the timescale I’d set myself to meet up with a school/uni friend for lunch in Shibuya, so I took the Hibiya line direct to Ueno, and switched to the Keisei line up towards Narita Airport. The journey took over two hours in total – so I’m very glad I did it today rather than tomorrow, when I’ll be stressing before the flight – and it gave me a chance to think about what the 3 things are that I will miss most about Japan.

1. The metro. It puts every other underground transport system in the world to shame – not even its minimalist Toronto or grandiose Moscow rivals can hope to compete, and London Underground can frankly crawl into a corner and hide for shame. The best part of it, I’ve decided, are the information screens: they show you the destination, next station, name of current and alternative lines, the bit of the metro network you’re on, a diagram of the train with your coach shaded, the direction of travel, a bird’s-eye-view of the upcoming platform complete with exit directions, lifts and escalators – and all in hiragana/katakana, kanji and romaji. Simply genius – a lot better than the vague LED signs Europe is still dealing in.
2. The safety. I have not have a single moment in the last two months where I felt remotely in danger of injury, robbery or other infringements of my rights and liberty – it is quite literally possible to leave your belongings at a table where you are sitting in a pub or restaurant and go to the toilet for a significant period of time, and come back to find everything exactly where you left it. Even better, this non-criminal mentality doesn’t appear to stem from any more significant police presence around the city than in other developed countries – the police here, while dogmatically earnest in the execution of their tasks, are more static than elsewhere (i.e. they stay in their koban rather than go ‘on the beat’), but their visible numbers are comparable to the UK or France, though perhaps not to Russia or the USA. In other words, the Japanese are just more honest and honourable than other cultures, and they don’t need a large scaremongering state to achieve this artificially.
3. The politeness. Probably linked to the safety point, but the difference in the quality of social interaction between Japan and Western countries is almost absurd. For whatever cocktail of cultural reasons, the Japanese just treat each other with so much more respect than the people in countries closer to home – this is not to say that the Japanese enjoy a stronger sense of community than other national groups, since I’m pretty sure individualism and heterogeneity (if they could be quantified) would be on comparable levels here and there, but more that Japanese people are less inclined to aggressively challenge the boundaries of the self-defined private spheres of action of the people with whom they passively or actively interact in the name of any definition of liberty.

For those of you who might be surprised at the absence of Japanese food in this list, I should point out that, while it may be possible to find a shop somewhere in the UK that sells imported sushi or bento of not embarrassingly inferior quality to the variants found here, the above 3 things are sadly ones that are too alien to the English way of life ever to be imported along with the foodstuffs. Similarly, and in the interests of balanced coverage, there are a further 3 things that I will not miss about Japan:

1. The prices. I thought London was expensive – but then I came to Tokyo. I have honestly never seen cash evaporate from my wallet so quickly in shops as I have here – even though ATMs only give out cash in multiples of 10 000 yen (£75), which in any other economy could be anything up to 2 or 3 weeks of average expenditure but here melts away in a week at most. I ranted about this in a previous post, so I won’t regurgitate everything again – but suffice it to say that I’m very glad food and transport prices back home are not at the cripplingly insane levels they are here.
2. The weather. Boiling, boiling, boiling, boiling, boiling, tolerable, monsoon, monsoon, monsoon, monsoon… you get the point. Japan just does extreme weather – it sits at the junction of no less than four tectonic plates, which explains why Okinawa and Hokkaido seem to be wobbling like jelly pretty much constantly, and it gets the dubious benefit of an entire ocean’s worth of meteorological bumf as well. I know and (sort of) appreciate that this may well have been a freak year – but like many Oriental countries, Japan has a strong tendency towards two seasons, hot and cold, both of which are characterised by the presence of far too much water in the atmosphere, whether as humidity or precipitation. I am just not built for weather conditions like these – it is not surprising that the days I enjoyed the most were the ones on which the weather most nearly resembled early spring in Europe…
3. The insects. Yes, that’s right, there’s no way I’m leaving this country without a final broadside at the 6-legged pests that make everyone’s life a misery here. Though the cicadas have all disappeared now the weather’s dropped below their ideal temperature, there are still more than enough mosquitoes to go around – I’ve luckily managed to avoid the worst of the bites (I’ve generally been surrounded either by people with better-tasting blood or mosquito nets on the windows), but the ones I have received have been all the more annoying because of that. The worst we get in Europe is irritating flies, slightly mental wasps or pathetically inept daddy-long-legs – but none of these seem to exist here, and what Japan has replaced them with are effectively angry ninja versions of these creatures with serious inferiority complexes. Sting, bite, buzz, flap, splat, squish, machine-gun. An odd motto, I agree, but one that seems to have kept most of the slavering hordes at bay…

It’s time for the final sign-off: as Pushkin says, Пора, мой друг, пора! покоя сердце просит, “’Tis time, my dear, ‘tis time. The heart demands repose.” I’ve deeply and thoroughly enjoyed my time in Japan, even if the daily grind may have occasionally become a little much to bear – I’m already looking forward to the next time I come over to this part of the world, when I will hopefully get to explore both more of this country (Osaka, Kyoto, Sapporo…) and of selected neighbours (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China…). For now, however, it has to be sayonara, 左様なら, from me – and matte kudasai, 舞って下さい, “please wait” for the next travel journal. Where will it be? Who knows…