Clean and Polite
Japan is supernaturally clean and polite. In our plane trip from mainland Asia we were magically transformed from being some of the tidiest, most respectful people around for miles into obviously the most slovenly and rude.
I’ve met clean and polite individual Japanese before, but a whole society of this behavior almost defies believability. Even the machinery is very polite. Little animated people bow at you every time you use a public phone, ATM, or kiosk.
A girl accidentally stepped in front of me in a queue one day, realized what she had done and jumped back a mile: “Gomen! Gomen! Gomen-nasai! Gomen!” with repeated bows. Another girl briefly touched my hand in a train station and did the same thing.
The Japanese were extraordinarily helpful. We had to be careful how long we spent looking at maps in public. People would go far out of their way to help us out. Once a woman biked all the way down a hill, gave us unnecessary directions, and then biked all the way back up. Concerned that you won’t be able to navigate the subway, people will offer to go hours out of their way to guide you and “make sure you arrive safely.” For Buddha’s sake, its Japan! What could happen?
I don’t think you can properly appreciate how cleanly the Japanese are without being surrounded by it. There’s a national obsessive compulsive…habit, lets say, regarding tidiness, dirt and germs. Everything is always being polished, swept and arranged. Its very rare to see anything larger than a cigarette butt on the ground. We saw someone spill a soda in a public park in a poorer part of Tokyo. They immediately got down on hands and knees to clean up their mess with napkins while their companions ran for more cleaning supplies.
There’s no vandalism. Public machines go unmolested so they don’t need to be fortified. Graffiti is pointless what with how often everything is cleaned. When a train reaches the end of the line, white gloved and masked sweeper teams rush in. Blue collar workers wear white gloves. Truck drivers too, that steering wheel could get filthy. Doilies cover the seats in taxis. Rubbish collectors jump off the truck wearing white jumpsuits with white gloves. Its like a 50’s science fiction movie.
Just before supper the Japanese shower, soap and rinse. Then they climb into a short, deep tub to soak. Climb out, rinse again and your done. I must get myself a Japanese washroom.
I personally hope that Japanese politeness and cleanliness spread like a virus over the globe. Okay, that doesn’t seem likely. The Japanese had to be instructed with the nasty side of a 3 foot razorblade over many generations to train these habits into them.
We never got in contact with the people we know in Osaka and Kobe, so our first stop in this country was the old capital, Kyoto.