First off: set aside the details of the travel qua traveling. Because you should never leave the country with a group of 20 people who are all a decade or more older than you. Old white folks are the worst to see another country with. Your own culture should be a springboard, not a fortress, and the best part of the trip was when we were on our own (which in fairness did dovetail with the most luxurious accommodations as well).
Now. Japan.
I suppose the most surprising thing to me was that it didn’t seem all that expensive. Sure, it was pricey, but so is San Francisco. When you can get a half-liter Coke from a vending machine for the equivalent of $1.43 and a whiskey highball – at LUNCH – for $2.60, that’s downright reasonable. I’m sure real estate and rent is appalling, but hell, there’s no way our house is worth a million dollars, and yet.
The next most surprising thing, I suppose, is that for all the talk of ubiquitous all-everything Japanese vending machines, I didn’t see anything on offer but cigarettes and non-alcoholic beverages. That said, there were a LOT of drink machines. I mean, a lot a lot. As in, you’re walking down a back-alley sort of street and there’s a Suntory vending machine just in the middle of the alley apropos of nothing. I don’t want to know how much money I sank into vending machines buying Coke Zero, or Coke Life, or Bikkle, or CC Lemon, or any of half a dozen different bottled coffee options with varying sweeteners and temperatures. That’s right, they’ll sell you a can of hot coffee out of the same machine that sells you a bottle of cold Coke.
And the temptation is there pretty much all the time. The smallest bill is 1000 yen, or ~$8.40 today. The largest coin is 500 yen, or ~$4.20. Because one yen is less than one cent, you look at ¥130 for a short bottle of Fanta and think “that’s less than a buck thirty” and pour the money right in, and next thing you know you’re spending ten dollars a day just getting drinks at random. Which is not a problem for me, but it’s the same issue I had in Europe (and especially Britain) – when the base unit of currency is a coin, whether a Euro or a pound or 100 yen, your American brain instinctively devalues it. It makes me wonder whether you could stimulate the economy just by getting rid of the $1 bill and forcing everyone onto the golden dollar coin, thus getting the push that comes with buying a drink for just two coins. But I digress.
There was a certain frozen-in-time aspect, too. Salarymen are still all off to work in two piece dark suits. Women are still wearing pantyhose with jeans, never mind dresses. The architecture mostly seems to be Mad Men-era (for reasons that are probably obvious, as is the reason it’s awkward to discuss, especially in/around Hiroshima, of which more later). There are still line items like “drinks for women” in the cocktail menu. It’s as if the Occupation departed and everything more or less froze in place about the time the economy started to skyrocket – and thought “we have a good thing going here, why change?” And then stuck after the deflation hit and the bubble burst. You get the sense that daytime TV might have more than a couple ads invoking “ring around the collar” and “occasional irregularity” if you could understand them.
Japan is another train country, like the UK, and it was pretty delightful. After years and years of public transit, all I really need to know is “do you tag at both ends or just pay on entry and is it a flat rate or not.” Once that was clear, using JR Rail was easy as pie. Even the light rail system in Arashiyama, on the edge of Kyoto, was easy to deal with once you figured out it was “pay as you get off the train if you don’t have a payment card.” (As an aside, you could easily wind up in a Charlie On The MTA situation if you don’t watch yourself. Through the open window she gives Charlie the finger as the train comes rumblin’ through…) And the existence of viable bullet trains…honestly, it’s a disgrace we let the rest of the world steal a march on us there. I don’t know how we wound up bifurcating into cars and planes and ignoring rail transit outside the Northeast when a bullet train from SF to LA should have been done by 1990 at the latest.
Japan is also a very lawful country, in the D&D sense. You expect that, obviously, but it’s still impressive to see people getting off the train before anyone tries to get on, and people being ready to board quickly, and being able to run trains with one minute headway because you can swap out passengers in 20 seconds. Nobody was talking on the phone except tourists. Nobody was crossing against the light. Too many people around NorCal act as if it’s a straight jump from enforcing “no skateboarding on the platform” to concentration camps. Japanese commuters know damn well there are other people, and it shows.
But back to the frozen-in-time thing, which strikes me as important. Japan was still in the throes of a deflationary spiral at the turn of the century when China was granted MFN status. It seems like that was a critical jump, because most of the stuff that was made in Japan now gets made in one Special Economic Zone or another in China. Televisions, computer components, everything that Americans freaked out about in the 1980s; I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Japanese people were similarly freaking these days. I saw an awful lot of “Made In Japan” signs on goods for sale, and it says something about how much things have changed that they feel the need to make it a selling point.
In any event, I’m sure I will have much more to say later as I process the whole trip. I would go again in a heartbeat. Probably not on a tour, though. We broke the seal, we know where to go and what to see, and I think we’d be just fine, especially if I learned more than three phrases in Japanese…