Arigato

Wary of summation, knowing the pitfalls of characterisation after the briefest of times, it is hard to describe the two weeks in Japan. Having been in Vietnam for nearly three years I know how initial impressions of a place can be tempered into something different. What seems strikingly different can turn out to be remarkably similar while cultural quirks can become intractable ticks, the slide from the unexpected to the familiar.
Whatever.It was great to be somewhere both foreign and familiar. It felt much more foreign to us than Vietnam; the lack of English spoken and the scarcity of English language signs even in parts of downtown Tokyo made communication a Manuelesque farce of hand gestures and bad mine and made navigation a confusion as we traversed stations as big as small towns each with subterranean layers of anime shops and chocolate markets.
And familiar because the use of privacy seemed so Western or do I mean British? Maybe it's in contrast to Saigon where Vietnamese, as well as a lot of SE Asians, believe that personal space is something to be shared so that on holiday it would be perfectly natural to sleep in multiples in rooms whereas in Japan we found no double beds either in the ryokans or in Hotel Halftime, a Lynchian, Murakami business hotel we stayed at in Nara.


Favourite moments have to be cycling around our ryokan through the blaze of sakura and the quiet streets chancing on temples, graveyards and singular shops selling reams of origami paper or yet more cartoon icons. Or chancing on a live band in Osaka playing on a flyover after we had searched for a veggie restaurant for an hour that turned out to be closed - on this occasion an Indian restaurant nourished us. Or the kind man who stepped out of the shadows in Kyoto when we had just about given up trying to find a cycle hire shop, who went out of his way to help us as he stammered out a little English. Or the electric toilets that played music when you sat down and offered vari-speed hosing. Or on the Nozomi train and dozing off both ways as we passed Mt Fuji. Oops



Didn't want to leave. Got to come back. Still much to digest. A good sign.

and temples...

Sakura

It's not surprising that the Japanese love Sakura or the cherry blossom that explodes in April. Of course it's a sign of spring and that is welcome after cold, hard winters but it's also because it's pretty and pink; like the lap dogs with tartan bows and pink ruffles in an Osaka park; like the kittens and cats adored and fattened in quiet Tokyo streets. While it was great to take photos of major blossom displays in Kyoto, it was much more interesting to watch Japanese men and women apparently shy with each other go giggly and giddy over petals falling or branches being pulled around their heads to form the perfect frame.

The Silent Thrall of Privacy

The metro provided a funneled, concentrated view of the inhabitants of the world's largest city. There were many facts to digest, one, took a while to chew as well as to get through; a downtown station called Shinjuko handles around 34 million people a day.Women are given their own carriage to avoid the attention of gropers who, we are warned, take advantage of the crush to touch what isn't theirs.



I guess traveling by underground can often lead to sights not being seen or a sense of geogrpahy and layout muddled by the diminishing of distance but I never grew tired of the journeys even when it seemed like we had been hanging like meat from hooks for too long.It was too new to be tiring. We were part of the everyday, an immersion which was absorbing; the soaking up of other lives. Despite the omnipresecence of routine and efficiency there were flares of self-expression:the uber-ubiquitous salary man still has a furious or fuzzy or cuddly manga character dangling from their mobile phone ; the black suited worker still can go on safari with wild hair.

Hello Tokyo!