Surprising Japan

Luggage is ready for the return journey. Clothes for various weather versions (Tokyo, Beijing, Warsaw) are also waiting on the chair. The alarm clock for the last morning walk is set. Time for a few words about what can surprise you in Japan.

I will immediately point out that I am not mentioning the typical differences between Poland and Japan, such as a heated toilet or the lack of sandwiches on the café menu (although you can sometimes buy them). However, I will allow myself to list a few other, less typical, but surprising phenomena in Japan:

People run in the street when they are late. We are familiar with images of crowds of people walking evenly down the streets - to the office, from the office, for a lunch break. And they really do look like that. But during my stay in Japan, I saw people running in the street relatively often: to work, to the subway, for some very important purpose. Punctuality does not mean that you always leave early enough 😉

Toilets everywhere and always with toilet paper. And I will miss that. Toilets are available almost everywhere here. In subway stations, train stations, shopping malls, but also simply on the street. When leading a group of people, I never worried that they would not be able to use the toilet somewhere. There are also electronically controlled toilet bowls and toilet paper practically everywhere.

No cloakroom in the theater. When I ran into the kabuki theater in Tokyo, about five minutes late, I was led to my seat just as I was - in my jacket, hat and backpack. The lady told me that I could put my things under the seat. Did you think that it was because I was in a hurry? In Japan, there is no such option as doing something quickly, so it is against the procedure. I discovered during the intermission that other people also had their jackets under their seats. Then, in other places, I found confirmation of the suspicion that I had at that time - in Japan there are no cloakrooms in our understanding, in public places. And if you think about it, it probably never developed such a function, because it's hard to return a haori or other type of kimono cover to the cloakroom. And then it stayed that way 🤷

Everything talks to me, even the escalator. A pleasant voice informs me that the stairs lead to platform number X, that trains leave here on the right, and there on the left. Yesterday, in the subway passage, I heard another female voice saying that there is a toilet on the right. In a multi-story department store, different songs are played on the escalators, and different ones in individual departments. At first, you can go crazy from the cacophony, then you either stop noticing it or start to understand what they're saying. And in fact, we can probably envy the blind in Japan, because they can really move around on their own here (I saw several calmly walking through the subway station, coping despite the crowds).

Melodies and sounds everywhere, which is probably partly related to communicating with blind people, and partly helps to operate on autopilot. If every subway station in Tokyo has its own melody, you can sleep peacefully until you hear the right one. On buses in Hiroshima, on the other hand, where you can hear the signal to pay immediately when you enter the bus, probably fewer people forget to put their ticket or card on the reader. I haven't discovered what the cuckoo's sound means at subway stations - maybe it heralds an approaching train?

All these sounds are planned and I am sure that the world in Poland will seem quiet and peaceful to me after this month 😉

No bins on the street - everything is carried home (to the hotel). It's probably because toilets are everywhere 😅 It got to the point that the group I was traveling with discovered two types of places every day - those with cherry blossoms and those with bins. Both of them brought about liveliness and positive emotions 😁

I have recorded some sounds for this post and I will add them here in some time. In the meantime, a photo from the topic "toilet".

Znak informujący o rodzaju toalety / Sign indicating the type of toilet