{"id":2191,"date":"2015-04-30T03:35:21","date_gmt":"2015-04-30T11:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2191"},"modified":"2015-04-30T03:35:21","modified_gmt":"2015-04-30T11:35:21","slug":"japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2191","title":{"rendered":"Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

First off: set aside the details of the travel qua<\/em> 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. \u00a0Your 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).<\/p>\n

Now. \u00a0Japan.<\/p>\n

I suppose the most surprising thing to me was that it didn\u2019t seem all that expensive. \u00a0Sure, 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\u2019s downright reasonable. \u00a0I\u2019m sure real estate and rent is appalling, but hell, there\u2019s no way our house is worth a million dollars, and yet.<\/p>\n

The next most surprising thing, I suppose, is that for all the talk of ubiquitous all-everything Japanese vending machines, I didn\u2019t see anything on offer but cigarettes and non-alcoholic beverages. That said, there were a LOT of drink machines. \u00a0I mean, a lot a lot. \u00a0As in, you\u2019re walking down a back-alley sort of street and there\u2019s a Suntory vending machine just in the middle of the alley apropos of nothing. \u00a0I don\u2019t 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. \u00a0That\u2019s right, they\u2019ll sell you a can of hot coffee out of the same machine that sells you a bottle of cold Coke.<\/p>\n

And the temptation is there pretty much all the time. The smallest bill is 1000 yen, or ~$8.40 today. \u00a0The largest coin is 500 yen, or ~$4.20. Because one yen is less than one cent, you look at \u00a5130 for a short bottle of Fanta and think \u201cthat\u2019s less than a buck thirty\u201d and pour the money right in, and next thing you know you\u2019re spending ten dollars a day just getting drinks at random. \u00a0Which is not a problem for me, but it\u2019s 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. \u00a0It 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.<\/p>\n

There was a certain frozen-in-time aspect, too. Salarymen are still all off to work in two piece dark suits. \u00a0Women 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\u2019s awkward to discuss, especially in\/around Hiroshima, of which more later). There are still line items like \u201cdrinks for women\u201d in the cocktail menu. It\u2019s as if the Occupation departed and everything more or less froze in place about the time the economy started to skyrocket – and thought \u201cwe have a good thing going here, why change?\u201d \u00a0And then stuck after the deflation hit and the bubble burst. \u00a0You get the sense that daytime TV might have more than a couple ads invoking \u201cring around the collar\u201d and \u201coccasional irregularity\u201d if you could understand them.<\/p>\n

Japan is another train country, like the UK, and it was pretty delightful. \u00a0After years and years of public transit, all I really need to know is \u201cdo you tag at both ends or just pay on entry and is it a flat rate or not.\u201d 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 \u201cpay as you get off the train if you don\u2019t have a payment card.\u201d \u00a0(As an aside, you could easily wind up in a Charlie On The MTA situation if you don\u2019t watch yourself. Through the open window she gives Charlie the finger as the train comes rumblin\u2019 through\u2026) \u00a0And the existence of viable bullet trains\u2026honestly, it\u2019s a disgrace we let the rest of the world steal a march on us there. \u00a0I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Japan is also a very lawful country, in the D&D sense. \u00a0You expect that, obviously, but it\u2019s 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. \u00a0Nobody was talking on the phone except tourists. Nobody was crossing against the light. Too many people around NorCal act as if it\u2019s a straight jump from enforcing \u201cno skateboarding on the platform\u201d to concentration camps. \u00a0Japanese commuters know damn well there are other people, and it shows.<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0It 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\u2019t be surprised if a lot of Japanese people were similarly freaking these days. \u00a0I saw an awful lot of \u201cMade In Japan\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In any event, I\u2019m sure I will have much more to say later as I process the whole trip. \u00a0I would go again in a heartbeat. \u00a0Probably not on a tour, though. \u00a0We broke the seal, we know where to go and what to see, and I think we\u2019d be just fine, especially if I learned more than three phrases in Japanese…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0Your own culture should be a springboard, not a fortress, … <\/p>\n

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