Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

From the moment we arrived at Tokyo's Narita Airport it was pretty confusing. We had been warned about the lack of English in Japan but we had hoped for at least a little at an airport. Before this trip I would have thought it absurd to suggest that any country should be using any language other than their own, after all we are the visitors so shouldn't we be speaking their language, and they clearly can't be expected to support every foreign language can they? However I've since discovered the extent to which English has become the de facto international language. People of all nationalities talk to each other in English. So now I've come around to the opinion that any country which cares about its tourist industry should cater for English speakers. This doesn't make me feel very good, to be travelling around the world, expecting everyone to speak my home tongue; I would much rather that French or Spanish, or just any one single non-English language would be an international passport to communication, but it just isn't the case. English is the language that everyone speaks everywhere. Except 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

Kinkaku-ji

We arrived in Kyoto and I was expecting to be blown off my feet by the beauty of the place, but it was just another over-developed consumerist hell. Japan is just about shopping. Kyoto seemed more like London where Tokyo had been New York. I had been expecting much more (again my expectations of Japan were too high) as Kyoto was spared bombing during the war. Oh well the beauty must all be in Gion, the old part famous for geishas.

Gion at night

We had some difficulty getting to our hostel. We were starting to suspect that Japanese people cannot give directions. Every time we'd had to follow directions they had been awful; there always seemed to be so much unsaid. It's all very well having a culture that is so precious people don't like to be explicit about things, but it's rather irritating when it comes to things like directions and closing times! We made it there, nonetheless, and the place was huge. Floor upon floor of young people. It was a bit intimidating: how on earth were we going to get on with this plague of 18 and 19 year-olds? That first night we stayed up until 5am drinking and talking to an Israeli guy and a Quebecois, who gave us this great tip about Strong Zero, a fruit cooler that comes in a half-litre can, costing about the same as a can of beer, but it's 8% alcohol by volume. Great tip. Bad hangover.

The next day we got up too late to do anything really, and I didn't feel much up to it anyway. This time our hostel had an excellent internet connection and free wifi, so I spent the whole day online, most of it blogging, while Joanne got excited about the well-equipped kitchen and the prospect of cooking again, and went shopping for provisions to cook with. I only left to get more Strong Zero. That night we stayed up quite late again, but managed to rein it in a bit that night and got to bed about 2am.

We had only been able to book that hostel for two nights, apparently because the hostels all fill up with Japanese people at the weekends, so the next day we had to change hostels. It was in a different part of town and walking distance to Gion, which was just as well because we had so far seen nothing of interest in Kyoto; just Strong Zero and a city that could be British. In fact in Kyoto I decided that Japan is more similar to Britain than the rest of Europe is. Must be that influx of Anglo-Saxonism brought by the Americans at the end of the war.

This is Japan: a shopping mall in Gion

Near the hostel we discovered a cheap Japanese fast-food place, where the food was quite good. It seems to be mostly noodles, but many dishes come with a raw egg and a device for separating the yolk from the white. I watched someone then copied them by leaving the white aside and plopping the yolk on top. I wasn't sure why you wouldn't want the white when all of the cholesterol-, fat-, and guilt-free protein is there, but I didn't want to look like I didn't know what I was doing, so I just left my egg white as well. Delicious and cheap – we now had an extra eating option after supermarkets, which was a relief. The triangles are nice, but they aren't very interesting.

Cheap fast food

A geisha running from the paparazzi

After lunch, we took a walk around Gion. Again it was a massive disappointment. Yes, there were some old wooden buildings, yes we saw a couple of Geishas, but it just wasn't very beautiful. I had expected Japan in general to be an extremely pretty place and it was ugly in general; I had expected Kyoto to be particularly pretty and it looked like London; but I had expected Gion to be the absolute centre of all beauty in the world and it was just about OK. So far Japan was without doubt the ugliest country we had visited.

Gion

We went to look at a couple of sites with a special mention in the Lonely Planet but remained totally unmoved. At that point we noticed the introduction to Kyoto says that many people are under-whelmed when they come to come to Kyoto, but there are little corners of beauty remaining if you hunt them out. I didn't come here to play hide-and-seek with beauty, I came here to be bowled over by it! After hunting out a couple of motes of slight non-ugliness, we decided not to bother any more.

The LP says this is the most beautiful street in Asia!

A very obediently posing Japanese crane

The "lovely" river in Gion

Heading back towards the hostel we passed through quite a lively area. I have to say that although so far I was not much impressed by Japan as a tourist destination, I think it would be great to live there. There seemed to be a really lively nightlife everywhere we had been and there is plenty of shopping, if you're into that sort of thing, and I'm sure the wages are great.

Fnarr fnarr

Also, I think most of the interesting stuff about Japan takes a bit more time to see, and all the difficult stuff would become much easier in time and a grasp of the language. One reason I had wanted to go to Japan in the first place was to see a radically different culture. In fact it was without doubt culturally the closest to Britain we had seen on our trip. We can see reserved and polite people in a modern environment any day of the week at home. I believe though, there is a much deeper complexity to the culture that you can really only become properly aware of if you spend more time than two weeks there. We weren't going to understand it in that time. And at those prices we weren't going to see much of the nightlife either.

Beef birth certificate, complete with pedigree and nose print!

Very expensive beef

We found a place called Sam and Dave's that everyone in the hostel had been raving about and disappearing to every night, so we went in. There was a cover charge of ¥1000 after which we got the privilege of paying extortionate prices for the drinks. We simply couldn't afford it. Instead we went downstairs where there was a bar with no cover charge and quite reasonably priced drinks. It was a Jamaican / Reggae bar and it was completely empty apart from us. How depressing that our first drink out in Japan was in a Jamaican bar!

I thought this was cool

Our new hostel was nothing like as large and did not have as lively a social area as the last one. However we soon discovered that the people staying there were quite happy to ignore the signs saying “No talking in the sleeping area after 11pm”. I couldn't read the Japanese on the same sign, but I'm sure it didn't say “No talking unless it's only foreigners trying to sleep”. The social area downstairs was empty, but the dorm next to ours, separated only by a tatami partition was full of people talking and laughing. We were exhausted by our two consecutive nights of Strong Zero, so Joanne got up and asked them to be quiet. I was too scared they wouldn't speak English and it would all be very embarrassing, but at least one of them understood and they went away with no problems. Shortly afterwards our dorm filled up with young Japanese people, who made loads of noise, before disappearing only to return later with lots of food, which they ate in their beds as if at a slumber-party while chatting and giggling. Clearly the Japanese under “No food in the sleeping areas” must have said “Japanese people can slurp their noodles loudly and keep foreigners awake”. So much for Japanese people being polite! I had heard that there was a big generational divide in Japan and that one of the dividing lines was manners; in fact the Japanese film Battle Royale is all about that subject, and that night I really feel I got the point of the film: sending the younger generation of Japanese off to an island to kill each other seems like the perfect way to cure them of their insolence!

At this point I feel I have to admit that some of our problem in Japan at this stage was self-inflicted: we had effectively wasted two days on staying up late and hangovers, and without that we probably wouldn't have been as tired in this dorm. But dorms are horrible and we couldn't afford anything else. After keeping us up so late, the little buggers got up at 7am and made even more noise than the night before. How do those young things do it?

The river promenade in Gion

We were determined to get something out of Kyoto, so we hired bicycles from the hostel and set off to see some more LP recommended sites. I had forgotten swearing never ever under any circumstances to hire one of the stupid awful Chinese bikes that infest Asia. Why a supposedly technologically advanced country such as Japan imports cheap Chinese rubbish instead of making their own high-quality bicycles I cannot understand. They are tiny. They make a really uncomfortable angle at the knee, even in people small enough to ride them; I watched some Japanese people on them. They have no gears and the one gear they have is for uphill. I reasoned this time we weren't trying to get anywhere far so it would be OK, but I'd forgotten about the knee pain caused by trying to exert a force at 120 degrees from a straight leg. We took the bikes back and tried to get a refund, explaining that it was like a child's bike to me, but instead, after one more failed swap, he said I could take his own bike. It was only slightly better, but I didn't feel I could refuse his bike when he's made such a big thing of it, and he clearly didn't want to give us a refund. I wonder if this is another Japanese cultural thing: the onsen preferred to give us something worth several times what we had paid rather than a refund; here the owner gives me his own bicycle rather than a refund. Would giving a refund mean failure? Or do they just love money so much they hate to give it back?

This was the best bicycle on offer

For luck. Probably.

We cycled to Kinkaku-ji, the “famed Golden Temple”. It makes it into the inside cover of the Lonely Planet as one of the top sights, and Joanne had read on Wikitravel that it is located in lovely gardens. I longed to see beautiful Japanese gardens so we chose to go there first. The cycle was an unpleasant uphill in the humidity and my knees were aching when we arrived. It would nice to sit down in the beauty of the garden. We paid the rather high entrance fee and went in. The temple was quite nice, but to have it as a top sight really spoke volumes about Japan to me.

Not much of an aim are they?

To put it in the same category as the Grand Palace in Bangkok is ludicrous, in fact I wouldn't rate it next to just about any temple you can see in any town in Thailand or Laos and as for the Taj Mahal, the Varanasi Ghats, or the temples of Angkor, forget it! Maybe we had already been a bit too spoiled on this trip. To make matters worse, the gardens were only for looking at, not for enjoying, and you had to stay behind ropes, shunting through a one way system until you got to the end. Near the exit I realised I hadn't taken any photos, so tried to return, but it was not allowed. Luckily we were able to get in again using the same tickets and I took some snaps then had to go all the way around the one way system again to get out.

Kinkaku-ji. OK, it's quite pretty.

At this point I more-or-less have up on Japan. This was the best Kyoto had to offer and Gion had been rubbish too. I had expected Kyoto to be the highlight of Japan, which I had expected to be one of the highlights of our trip. There was still Fujisan to look forward to at least.

Infuriating Japanese umbrella use!

The cycle back was a bit better because it was downhill, but rather annoying that we had to constantly bump up and down on the pavements. For some reason the Japanese cycle on the pavement; maybe it's because you can only go just above walking speed on the terrible bicycles everyone rides. As a pedestrian it had been annoying us since we got there; nobody had hit us yet, but there had been plenty or near misses and big frights, so it seemed only a matter of time.

Following a recommendation at the hostel, we went to a sushi restaurant for dinner. It was very confusing. You needed to get a ticket from a machine and wait in quite a long queue as it was a very busy place. Of course the machine was all in Japanese and after a couple of failed attempts at pushing random buttons I gave up and we just hovered wondering what to do. Luckily a nice Japanese girl came up to us and offered to help. She handed us our ticket and said we needed to listen out for the number. No high-tech solution: no video screen with the number; no pager for each customer; just a woman calling out your number, but at least she had a microphone! It wasn't easy to pick the number out, but we practiced listening for numbers in the stream of – to us – completely redundant syllables, and I think we would have got it, but the nice girl who had helped us tipped off the staff when their number was up and the caller came to get us when it was our turn.

Fish nigiri

Tuna nigiri

The sushi was easy: it was on a conveyor belt and we knew we would be paying according to the collection of plates left at the end. Getting beer or anything else not on the conveyor belt was another matter: each table had a touch screen menu to order things, so that was pretty high-tech, but we had the same language problem as usual. We tried pressing a few buttons after the icon with the beer on it, but nothing happened.

Mini beef burger sushi!

Eventually a waitress appeared and we waved her over and managed to get our order in that way. Some time after our beers had been delivered she re-appeared and indicated that we had to do something with our screen, pointing up to a large screen on the wall which had our table number on it. Apparently we had managed to call her before, but had not cancelled it. Anyway, the food was excellent and really cheap: only ¥105 per plate. The beer wasn't so cheap and just three beers cost nearly the same as our 21 plates of sushi. We were happy again.

That night it was very noisy in the dorm again and we remained exhausted as we had been since arriving in Japan, save for the day we went to the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki. In the morning we sat downstairs, waiting for our train to Nara, and chatted to an 18 year-old girl who had been living in Japan for nearly a year. She had been WWOOFing (www.wwoof.org) and loved Japan. Many people we had met loved Japan, but they were all either there long-term, or it was the first time they had ever been out of their home country; parents seem quite happy to send their kids to Japan, feeling it is a safe option. This girl fell into both categories, and when I said I didn't think we were really getting the country because we really needed longer to see all the social stuff that makes Japan so interesting she said that she had found it interesting for a while, but now it was actually starting to really irritate her: there are just far too many unspoken rules, she explained.

At the train station ticket office I saw three geishas who were all obediently posing for tourists to take photos. I didn't have my camera, so I ran back to Joanne, who had been waiting with the bags, and told her if she wanted to get a better geisha picture than we got in Gion, then she should take her camera there now. She rushed off but came back saying she had been too embarrassed to take photos as everyone else had stopped by then. Later she was cursing herself; in Gion they had all rushed from doorway to car, but here they had been sitting ducks!

written by

The Happy Couple on July 12, 2009 from Kyoto, Japan

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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