Final Japanese musings

Just a few little things I wanted to download before leaving this wonderful and odd country.

Cuteness is aspired to here. I've seen business women in very sharply tailored suits with short skirts and knee socks, the same look sported by girls in school uniform (too many of whom seem to have playboy bunny logos on those socks!). The ideal form is one of perpetual girlhood, sometimes in a sweet, childlike innocent way, sometimes less so. Yesterday in Akihabara i passed a number of 'maid cafes' where girls in Anne Summers style maid uniforms will fawn over you while you have a beer or coffee. Such is the profusion of girls in short dresses there have to posters on the walls by the escalators reminding ladies to be careful of 'up-skirting' by men with phone-cameras. For a country so built on respect and politeness, it seems a shame to see that as an issue in big city Tokyo.

Tokyo is HUGE! 35 million people in greater too; that's 5 Londons!!

There may well be nine million bicycles in Beijing, but I bet there's a few here too, and they're everywhere! They cycle on the pavement, on the road and transition between the two at whim. Jumping out of their way can be perilous, as in smaller towns there is generally no pavement, so one sidestep puts you in traffic! For such a modern, sophisticated country in technological terms, it's odd to see them on 1960s style sit-up-and-beg jam-jar gears bikes, although I have seen a significant number of trendy modern fixies here in Tokyo. You couldn't have one of those out on the sticks, its too steep too often!

I went to the museum at the National Shrine to the war dead yesterday. What an eerie place. Such monuments in Britain are dedicated to those who gave their lives in the cause of freedom, here they honour those who happily climbed into Kamikaze planes, boats and submarines, and revere those who participated in aggressive wars in the pacific before then with China, Russia and Korea. It's a conflicted place in national hearts; they sacrificed themselves for the good of Japan, but there still seems to be a good deal of some shame to go alongside that pride. Politicians win and lose votes in the controversy of a visit here and it's a brave MP who will get off that fence so publicly  I wonder how such things function in Germany?

It's so hilly it's flat! The mountains are so steep and start so suddenly that you can only really build on the flat bits in between.

I've come round to the face-mask thing, that's just really polite. "I've got germs, i don't want to share them with you." Nice!

I wonder what they think our weirdnesses are? OMG, look at gai-jin, walking around the inside of his house with his shoes on getting it all dirty! Don't they rinse their dishes after washing up? They're always touching each other, ew! Why do their women wear such short socks? How am I supposed to get clean on these non-bum washing toilets, and why is the seat not heated, aren't they smart enough to have worked out how to make toileting a thing of joy? (That's DEFINITELY an area we can learn in!). And why aren't they making the peace sign in their photos? Why do they all have nuclear bombs, can't they see how poorly that turned out?

That's about it for Japan, except to put up a post about my Tsunami evacuation experience last Friday. Watch this space...