Arrival in Japan

The first thing I had intended to do anyway was buy a phrase book, so I left Joanne with the bags and went hunting for a book shop in the airport. I found one and bought it, grimacing slightly at the fact it was more than one tenth of our daily budget; a daily budget which was about four times the highest daily up to this point, and one which we had settled on after lots of financial, arguably self-delusional, trickery that even Gordon Brown would be shocked at. We had already shelled out £300 each for a two-week Japan Rail Pass in India, which was the same as we spent in total for three weeks in Nepal, during which we didn't watch our money at all and did lots of shopping.

The next airport mission before braving the outside world in this new country was to print out the instructions for getting to the hostel we booked before leaving India. We had booked it so last minute there had been no time to print them out then. We found some coin-op internet terminals in the airport and were shocked once again at the cost. Then using it we were shocked at how dreadfully slow it was. Is Japan supposed to be a super-high-tech country with lightning fast internet? There was no printer either, so we settled for taking a digital photo of the map and the directions.

Already we were noticing some very nice differences from India. Joanne's favourite: Japan is clean; the toilets don't smell; and there is almost no litter. Secondly, passers-by were actually returning our smiles, and when we dealt with someone in a commercial situation they were very polite and friendly.

We were ready to go now, so we followed the JR signs for Japan Railways and managed to swap our exchange vouchers for rail passes. The JRP is not available outside the country, however the exchange vouchers you need to get one cannot be obtained inside the country. Luckily we had been forewarned and had done everything right: exchange coupon stamped by customs, visitor stamps in passports. I thought the extra day we had been trapped in India meant our pass would now last us the whole of our stay in Japan but I had miscalculated; it would run out the day before we leave, so we would only have to pay for transport back to the airport. All the rest of our transport in Japan would be free. Surely our budget would suffice under the circumstances?

Everything seemed to be going well: rail passes and phrase book obtained. We were a bit surprised that our rail passes were just little cardboard books. Apparently we would have to show them when reserving seats. Then we saw the turnstiles everyone was going through by feeding tickets through them. What were we supposed to do? An employee waved us over to the end of the turnstiles, unlatched a gate, and waved us through. First the internet and now this! Japan was really falling short of the technologically advanced country I had expected. Both China and Hong Kong had RFID smart cards in place that you just wave over the turnstile to open it; these could have been charged up with unlimited credit for a certain period. Surely Japan could do better than this clumsy and bulky work-around.

Then we got on the train. No maps of the line; no video screens telling us where we were; at least there was an announcement telling us the name of the station, but again I was let down by how low tech it all was. Clearly my expectations of Japan had been just a little bit too high. I had really been looking forward to seeing this country of the future and in fact it had been one of my “red lines” when designing the trip in the first place. The fact that I had been so determined to see Japan had considerably added to the cost of the tickets and the hassle of finding a route which allowed it.

We managed to change lines without too much difficulty, despite the lack of information. I was starting to notice an additional problem to the lack of English. The signs in Japanese most of the time did not even have an accompanying Romanisation of the Japanese script. This meant that maps were of no use, we had no idea from the front of trains arriving where they were going, and so on. Japanese uses three character sets. First and the oldest is Chinese kanji character which are identical to those used in China and give no clue to their pronunciation; you just have to know. The Japanese use far fewer kanji than the Chinese: only a few thousand instead of the tens of thousand for Mandarin and about one hundred thousand for Cantonese; however I wasn't going to learn the one thousand considered basic for junior school children during a two week trip, so that was out. Next up is hiragana, which is a phonetic script containing forty-eight characters. I assume this was developed after distance grew between theirs and Chinese culture and is used to express newer concepts not contained in the original kanji set. Finally there is katakana which, absurdly I think, represents exactly all the same phonemes as hiragana, except it is used when the word has been borrowed from another language, for example “birru” or “kuredit carto”. It seems like pointless duplication to me, but nonetheless it would have been feasible to get a handle on hiragana and katakana within two weeks, if not actually learn them, at least so I could look things up easily. The problem is that all these three scripts are mixed together and the majority of the writing is in kanji. Learning the other two would only let me read one or two words in an average sentence. And this is why the Romanistation, romanji, is so important for foreigners: this is how you can look things up in phrase books or dictionaries and this is how you can at least make approximately the right noises without understanding what you are reading. Clearly Japan was going to be tougher than we had expected. Apart from the scripts Japanese seems pretty easy from what I read in the phrase book: it has a similar structurelessness to all the SE Asian languages i.e. no plurals or tenses, although has most of the same additional complications, like quantifiers and a very complicated system of polite and respectful terms.

When we arrived at the station disaster struck: the strap of Joanne's big rucksack broke off the bag. She was furious because she had bought it new before the trip only about six months previously and it was “a good brand”, Berghaus, but I was worried about what we were actually going to do. The (massive) differences between Japan and India were still sinking in and this really brought it home. In India you can just pay someone well under a pound for them to fix something like that, but in Japan what do you do? We were at a loss. Furthermore, in India, you can take auto-rickshaws everywhere until you find someone to fix your bag, but there was no way were could afford taxis in Japan. The rucksack does also have a handle on the side so you can carry it like a suitcase, so that was what Joanne had to do until we got to the hostel.

Outside I noticed something else a bit backward and surprising: like all SE Asian countries we had been to, and India, the overhead wires were a shocking tangle and looked like all sorts of disasters waiting to happen. Surely they at least have health and safety in Japan? More and more it was looking like my ultra-modern image of Japan was completely misplaced. But apart from the distinctly Asian wiring, it looked much more like Europe than I had expected. Another feature from my imagination which was missing in reality was the ubiquitous small Japanese car. It just doesn't exists! The cars were just as big as Europe, in fact I thought that there were far more Buicks and other infamous large American “gas guzzlers”. What happened to the country of the future?

The map and directions to the hostel could have been much better but we did manage to find our way there. This feat was not helped by the fact that none of the road signs had accompanying romanji, yet the instructions had only the Romanised street names and no Japanese representation, so we couldn't tell what street we were on. When we arrived reception was closed and a sign indicated that check-in is at 4.30pm. This was despite the fact check-out was stated to be 10am. The notices went on to inform us that early check-in was possible with payment of 50% of the room fee after 3pm, increasing in steps to 90% before midday. The room was already about ten times what we had been paying on average in India and four times more than the most we had paid anywhere, except Hong Kong, and it was still nearly double that. We had no choice but to wait, although we were exhausted after our overnight flight.

There was a helpful map outside showing where we could get cheap food. It wasn't cheap by the standards to which we had become accustomed but to be fair it was quite cheap by Scottish standards: the sign said ¥250 for a bento box, which in my experience had been nice little assortments of sushi. The Yen is almost one-to-one with the US cent, so it didn't seem too bad. I left Joanne attempting to sew up her bag with dental floss and headed out. The bento place was crazy: there was a long queue of people and one woman at the counter doing most of the serving, who was constantly jabbering away in Japanese. She sounded something like a auctioneer, or a commentator or pundit at the races. It was very entertaining but the selection was not quite what I had been imagining: I returned with one box containing a burger and rice with spicy tomato sauce, and another containing a piece of fried chicken and rice. Oh well, beggars can't be choosers!

After eating we felt a bit better and Joanne had noticed that the office door was open, so we dumped our bags inside, leaving a note explaining that we would be back in time to check in, and set off to check email and find whether any of our last-minute couch requests had been successful. It was clear that we were not going to be able to afford to stay in hostels, so it was vital that the Couchsurfing worked out. We had been assured that Couchsurfing is easy in Japan, so we still hoped for the best. We found an internet place which was very expensive and also had shockingly slow connection, probably the slowest we had encountered since Cambodia, which amazed me. The Couchsurfing news was not good. A few people had replied but they were all saying no, because it's a very busy time at the moment as it's the peak holiday season. To compound matters, the Tokyo message board we were thinking of posting a last-minute plea for help to already had a last-minute plea for help and the responses to it were incredibly unpleasant and unfriendly. We were shocked because in every other country we had visited we had kept an eye on the Couchsurfing bulletin boards and never seen anything like that. It is, strictly speaking, discouraged to post a couch request to the group, but many people do it out of desperation, either because they have had so many rejections or simply because they were too disorganised to get around to it in time. We were somewhere in between, but after having seen all of the self-important patronising responses this poor guy got we decided to forget Couchsurfing in Tokyo. Choice phrases were “Couchsurfing isn't a band-aid”, “Why don't you re-read the guidelines and think for a while about what Couchsurfing is all about”, and “There are plenty of hostels in town and even some stairwells”, "Nobody owes you anything". Lovely! In other countries people run around trying to help even hapless fools out when they post a message like this, but in Japan it seems you just get mauled. A very upsetting surprise, especially when everyone in person had so far seemed so friendly. To be fair most of the people posting these remarks were foreigners living in Japan, but they had clearly developed a very high opinion of themselves in this position. The Japanese people on the forum seemed more of the opinion that Japanese people are so nice and friendly that everyone just wants to take advantage of them.

Defeated, we returned to the hostel and I dozed on the bench outside for a while. Soon the owner came back and started to check us in even though it was only just after 3.30pm. He seemed like a very nice friendly guy, full of helpful information about trains and suchlike. He was telling us that we don't need to worry about security at the hostel much because they have never had any kind of theft or other trouble, when he stopped himself and said that they did have one kind of trouble, but that was when a customer didn't pay. He was from Ghana, the owner explained, then said that he knows he shouldn't be prejudiced, but now he is. He went on to explain that Japanese people are very trusting, very stupid. Caucasians though, he told me, are very clever. Apparently because of Caucasians cheating the public telephone boxes and some other public services they had all been withdrawn because they took advantage of the Japanese stupidity. Of course I said that I thought that was nonsense and Japanese are well-known for their ingenuity, but he was having none of it: they were very stupid. I hadn't noticed the connection to the Couchsurfers at this point, but this turned out to be a common preoccupation with Japanese people; they are paranoid about being so nice and polite that evil foreigners will just take advantage of them. In fact many of the Japanese Couchsurfing hosts say something similar on their profiles. Ironically this makes them not at all nice, and far less so than the average Couchsurfer elsewhere, but the natural tendency does seem to be towards niceness. Why some of them want to fight against it in this way I cannot understand. Maybe that's what happens to individuals who aren't nice born into a society built in politeness.

By the time the owner had finished it was about 4.30pm anyway, so we weren't checking in early after all. He showed us to our room, after we refused his offer of a more expensive bigger room which looked like a cell. This was the smallest room I have ever seen in my life. It was obvious that they had put up partitions just so that they could cram in more people than if it was a dorm. The partitions between rooms didn't even go to the ceiling and they were made of chipboard and plasterboard, and in some places something even thinner; could it be cardboard? In the space that had originally been a medium-sized room, smaller than many of the places we had stayed in India (and much smaller than some), there were now four rooms, each with a bunk bed, and a common area / kitchen and a shower room / toilet. Absolutely tiny, but we had no choice. All over there were posters excusing the tiny size of the rooms by the fact that it was so incredibly cheap. I couldn't believe it was so expensive and that was before I saw how little space we had. The common area had one computer for coin-op internet. Again it was horribly slow and expensive. I just couldn't understand it.

Our bijou room

We took the owner's advice and went out looking for a place where they sell cheap sushi after a certain time, but we couldn't find it. Of course all the shop and restaurant signs are in Japanese so we had no idea what anything was. Instead we settled for a supermarket we passed and bought some sushi there. It was more than we were used to paying for food, but from the supermarket we could just about afford it. Clearly this was how we were going to be eating in Japan. When we returned and said we hadn't been able to find the place, the owner's wife offered to take us the next evening. They really were very nice people.

Back in the common area our neighbours has appeared. They were all Canadians and they had been shopping. Of the two couples, one girl had apparently gone completely overboard and they had been shopping for several days non-stop. Clearly they had come to Japan with the correct amount of money, although goodness knows why they had chosen to stay in a sardine tin like that. When we went to bed I could hear the guy on one side sniffing and on the other side I could hear someone's personal stereo. What a place!

View from my bed