The ABCs of Japan according to Google

Apologies for the one-and-a-half-month delay – I decided to get my own website and editing every single pic in my imported blog took a whole lot longer than I expected…

So, to celebrate my quarter of a century, here is my new website! 

But now let’s forget time and let’s get back to last year…

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Next stop: Japan. As an introduction, let’s ask Google Search to define Japan a little bit…

The ABCs of Japan according to Google

(Basically, I googled ‘Japan is’ and a letter of the alphabet. Followed with comments by me.)

Japan is awesome

This seems to be the opinion of the vast majority of this world’s people. For a long time, I didn’t share this thought. Anime annoyed me, manga annoyed me, Pokemon annoyed me, my Japan-obsessed school friends’ fanatism annoyed me. I had no particular interest in Japan or Japanese culture until I moved to Vietnam, where I learnt to consider Japan as more than ‘that tedious country with exasperating cartoon characters with massive eyes and squeaky voices’ that inspired zillions of school girls to shriek “Kawaii!” to everything, pose with that silly peace sign and overcutify everything possible to the level of ultimate sickliness. Travel makes you more open-minded, and as many of you I’m sure have noticed, I have acquired many of those Asian habits I previously deemed extremely irritable, for example those silly peace signs and overcutified big eyed cartoon characters. But also, Japan is a whole lot more than badly proportioned superkawaii mangas.

Japan is better than America 

I’m not in a position to compare Japan betterness with the US, where I’ve unfortunately not had the chance to visit yet. However, I can say Japanese was better than my prejudices.

Japan is calling and I must go shirt                              

Well, I haven’t heard of that shirt before, but it has a valid point. Also, Japan boasts a very wide array of quirky clothes and especially T-shirts with questionable images. Here is one I’ll always remember…

I’m pretty sure that sign says something on the lines of ‘no photos’, but alas I don’t speak Japanese.

Japan is doomed

…”unless is learns to love inflation”. I’m sorry but I’ll leave economics to someone else…

Japan is eating lamb stew

(or ‘Japan is European country’ which slightly worries me)

This one is interesting. I never ate lamb stew or even knew it was a thing. Ah, it’s a Hotel Transylvania quote. So Japan don’t eat lamb stew. ‘My kids’ in Vietnam watched Hotel Transylvania. It looked pretty funny.

Japan is famous for

Let’s see.

To name a few.

Japan is great

Great food, great temples, great sights, great autumnal leaves, great cleanliness, great politeness, great toilets. Yes. Especially the toilets. They are heated, they flush automatically and some of them actually do have that, well you can’t say button coz you don’t actually press it, just wave your finger over it (you wouldn’t be expected to press things in Japan, lol, it’s not like we’re in the stone age, lol), which provides you with a flush sound in case you need to make some less pleasant sounds. I think it’s more a hindrance though, in all honesty, especially when you can’t get the sound to stop… Sorry fellow toilet users, no I am not constipated, I’m just an uncultured tourist.

Anyways, after leaving Japan, one had to get used to unheated toilet seats where you actually had to press (or usually just finger-wave – it was indeed Korea where I went to after Japan, which is pretty advanced too…) to flush the toilet… Sigh, the effort.

Saying all that, I did come across a few good old squat toilets in Japan too. Without an artificial flush sound or even heated, er, air around your bottom…

Ok, moving on.

Japan is homogeneous

98,4 % as cited by a few web pages. This was one of the things that surprised me. Japan seems like such a popular tourist destination, and TEFL-destination on that hand, that I expected it to be inundated with foreigners. Well, I guess there were a fair number, but obviously hugely outnumbered by local Japanese.

Japan is in what country

(a worrying one)

Japan is Japanese

(heureka!)

And my favourite Japanese things have come to be: sushi, the above mentioned multi-usage toilets, the music group World Vision (which my beloved bro introduced me to), Japanese vending machines and Harajuku shops. Harajuku shops I will talk about later, but let’s spare a moment now for something VERY Japanese, ie. the said vending machines.

I’ve never believed in vending machines, because they either

a. Eat your money and do not provide anything in return

b. Eat your money, try and provide something in return but it gets stuck halfway

c. Have some complex mobile phone paying systems I neither understand nor trust

This is not the case in Japan. I was stood waiting for a metro, vaguely eyeing the funky looking matcha milkshakey thing in a carton in a nearby machine. It had the sign of my metro pass on it, so I vaguely decided to wave my metro pass over the approximate bit shown, and press the button for the matcha latte. Before my brain had completely even registered that this was not a mere thought process, but also an action, a matcha latte had dropped down into the slot below, happifying my metro trip by 320%. Before you even consciously decide to buy something, Japanese vending machines know what you want and have provided you with it.

(Inspired by my positive Japanese experiences, I decided to open-mindedly try an English one a few weeks later. It was out of order. I hereby officially am willing to use only vending machines in Japan for the rest of my life.)

Japan is known for technology

One of the most well-known technological displays was the Robot Restaurant in Tokyo, featured in many top lists of what to do in Japan. We walked past it, bopped about to the funky Robot music, but it cost … and all of us figured it was too much for just a robot show. Ok, take away ‘just’. I’m sure it would’ve been amazing and completely worth it, but you never know what you’ve missed when you miss it, right? (Not a motto I like to live life by, but sometimes it comes in handy. :P)

My new friend K mentioned how, although she loved Japan, it was less “futuristic and technologically bizarre” (I don’t remember if that’s a direct quote or my paraphrasing… probably the latter) than she expected. I don’t know what I expected of Japan, but in a way it was reassuring how, even though it was awesome and advanced and everything, it was still… human. Even Japan has its flaws. Covered in tatamis. (Hee hee hee geddit?)

Japan is located to the East of China

Some geography for you there.

Japan is misogynistic

Misogyny is ‘the hatred or dislike of women and girls’. Quite a drastic thing to say, and I’m not gonna go into that, but we can analyse the gender divide a bit. It’s been a topic of discussion with quite a few of my new friends found in Japan. As in Vietnam and other Asian countries, there is a big gender divide between men and women – in Japan, for example, the metros are packed stereotypically with all them businessmen, but not a businesswoman in sight! Women are urged to quit their jobs after getting married and focus on their families. It’s true that women could be valued a lot more in Japan, but they seem to be going in the right direction.

Japan is not interesting miyoshi

Bless you Google, anyone care to enlighten me?

Japan is overrated

What do you think?

I disagree. Japan is sufficiently rated.  You have technology, you have history, you have architechture, you have every kind of nature and scenery you could dream of, you have efficiency, you have entertainment, culture, food…

Japan is perfect

No. Don’t obsess, manga peoples. But Japan is stunning.

Japan quantitative easing

(it took out the ‘is’ by itself)

It’s a financial thing.

Japan is right hand drive

Interesting fact – this is wrong.

Unless it means that since you drive on the left in Japan, your left hand would be on the gear stick while your right hand, er, drives.

Japan is sinking

As a stratovolcanic archipelago of 6,852 islands, Japan has one of the most dodgy geographical locations ever, hence the big number of volcanoes and earthquakes. However, it seems only a myth that it would be sinking, since some places are actually getting higher as the litospheric plates collide.

Sorry mate.

Japan is the land of the rising sun

Apparently this nickname came from the Chinese, since the sun rose from the same direction as Japan was situated. One of those obvious facts you just never think about.

Japan is unique

Yup, defs.

Japan is very clean

Apparently it’s inappropriate to blow your nose in public (woops…). It’s relatively inappropriate to eat or drink in public, unless you’re a cliché of a tourist, in which case you will be judged inwardly, but never outwardly. But this is all to do with cleanliness – if you don’t eat a sushi roll on the street, it’s less likely you’d feel the desire to throw away your sushi roll wrappers on the street. And, well, even for us barbaric foreigners who were not aware of this unspoken rule during the first days, obviously would never throw our sushi roll wrappers on the street because there is NO litter.

What is especially amazing is also the lack of bins in this country, which does not result in huge piles of rubbish in various unhandy bits of well-used streets (*krhm*Vietnam*krhm*), but with people actually physically taking their rubbish home to dispose of it. It says it also in various tourist etiquette handbooks, all which I conveniently read just after leaving Japan. And, what an excellent method. You have a bag, you have a home, you have a bin at home, what stops you from taking your rubbish home? It’s just not the done thing in, well, Vietnam, because of, er, HABITS, but not in Europe either, because of, well, BINS. (Except at train stations in the UK. Infuriating.)

Japan is xenophobic

Do the Japanese not like foreigners? This one is hard to say, too. They are lucky enough to live in a country that is deemed one of the most liveable in the world, so they don’t have much, er, need to go abroad looking for better opportunities. I guess it’s easy to be slightly xenophobic when you’re sat on your own little island(s). Japan is not the only island nation to feel like this.

Japan yen

The joy of travelling abroad is that even if you are travelling in one of the most expensive countries in the world, it still feels like you’re in a glorified game of Monopoly – I’ll buy a Euston Road there and a Vine Street there, and even if I go bankrupt on Mayfair, well, it’s only a game…

‘Ginza’ is Mayfair. And it’s Dong Khoi on my Saigonopoly. WHICH MUST BE PLAYED SOON.

10,000 yen is about 80 euros. 80 euros is quite a bit. But when you count in thousands, you automatically think in Vietnamese dong. 10,000 Vietnamese dong is about 0,4 euros.

Japan zip code

“Postal codes in Japan are 7 digit numeric. Format is NNN-NNNN, where N is a number.” – from our visiting star, Wikipedia.

And with that informative bit of factual knowledge, that is the Google ABCs of Japan. Hopefully your appetite has been whetted for my beloved JAPAN ENTRIES… Because, going back to A, Japan indeed was awesome.

Until next time (which shall be sooooooon, worry not my dears),

Emzy

xxxx