A Natural Disaster

It’s common to experience culture shock visiting a new country or community. To some extent I’ve experienced it several times over the last couple months of traveling, even when revisiting prior haunts such as Colombia. But having never visited Japan before, a nation with a strong reputation for doing things a bit differently, I was subject to a number of revelations challenging my assumptions of how I live my life and how a culture and society can operate. But mostly this listicle was inspired by convenience stores and vending machines.

Vending machine drinks

Hot Lemonade, Pocari Sweat, and endless Tea

While it is well known one can buy some interesting things from Japanese vending machines, primarily they serve drinks, and almost all of them serve an assortment of both hot and cold drinks: for example, from the same box one might find a cold soda and a hot cocoa. Both delivered in a can. Still on the eve of a strong cold I discovered something I’d never considered: Hot Lemonade. There are a few brands and varieties, and perhaps it’s a hot yuzu drink instead of lemon, or the limited winter special lemon tea, but despite always considering citrus in sugar water to be primarily an iced, summer time drink, I was blown away by this. Not merely the drink itself but the wide availability. Convenience stores also have a hot beverages section, dressed no differently than the cold beverage shelves, so one variant can be found nearly everywhere.

On a late walk back from an onsen, I felt quite dehydrated. It’s the odd thing about a hot bath, particularly a long one, that it completely parches the body. I’d seen the name Pocari Sweat before, having noted it for its decidedly unappealing name, even though it is apparently marketed in English speaking countries under the same moniker, but had yet to try it. Seeking something with electrolytes I decided to give it a try. I’d never liked Grapefruit before in my life but this lightly flavored drink was delicious and has been a staple for me when recuperating from hangovers and rehydrating after a visit to the sentou.

Less specifically, Japan has pretty much endless tea. Most restaurants will put a pitcher of hot or cold tea at your table instead of water. Vending machines generally serve a dozen or so bottled varieties, and the convenience stores more still. Hostels and hotels will have free tea up for grabs. At a DJ set water had to be purchased but tea was on endless refill. I am a tea drinker, having never acquired a taste for coffee but somehow appreciating the bitter taste of water strained through dried, crusty Camellia sinensis leaves, but I wouldn’t have expected to enjoy drinking tea all the time. For me it had always been a morning drink, or perhaps some chamomile in the evening. Here in Japan my cup is rarely empty.

The wonders of 7/11, Family Mart and other conbinis

Fried chicken, Tuna/Mayo onigiri, and anything else you could want

The convenience stores in Japan are lit. Many of them are open 24/7. We have such options in the US, at KwikTrip and Love’s and so on, but these are mega stores on the empty corner lots of highways, not corner shops in dense metropolitan areas. The local corner shop in any given US city will not have the sheer stock or cleanliness of a Japanese one. In fact, the name 7-11 repulsed me in the US, it was one of my least favorite shops to visit in any region. But in Japan it’s the GOAT.

One thing I’ve found myself loving about conbini is the food. It’s remarkably high quality for either fast food or convenience food, and still quite inexpensive. It will still be better to go to a restaurant in terms of quality to price ratio, but I would much rather have Japanese 7/11 fried chicken than some of the best Dines, Drive-Ins and Dash featured fried chicken I’ve had. I just can’t understand how the quality is kept so high, all night long at these places. They also have decent full meals they will warm up for you, offering you eating utensils and wet napkins with each purchase. Goes well with all the other things you’ll do there: mailing parcels, buying socks, getting cash out of the free ATM (with a good exchange rate), perusing magazines that really should probably be shrinkwrapped given their contents, and so on.

Shout out to the onigiri too. Especially the tuna with mayo. Whenever my friends bring packets of tuna camping I struggle to hide my revulsion. It smells and tastes so terrible. But I guess if you stuff it into an onigiri and serve it up at 7/11, I can actually enjoy, no, crave it.

So quiet, so clean

Tokyo is a strange place. For many reasons well covered elsewhere, but what shocked me so much was how densely populated it is, how busy, how much commerce and eating and thus waste generation is going on, how many conversations and transportations are happening, and yet it is so quiet, and so clean.

Where does all the trash go? Why is it so quiet? I can have a conversation in whisper on the train, in fact I ought to, or I may disturb everyone else. I can’t find the litter anywhere, but there are no public trash cans anywhere — something visitors are often warned about — so where does it go? How does this megacity operate so smoothly?

Not all the cities are as quiet and clean as Tokyo, but they still don’t compare to what growing up in the US has accustomed me. Nonetheless, crime is so unusual here that walking through one of these busy cities, you’ll find hundreds of bikes leaned up against windows and residential buildings completely unlocked. Nobody is concerned about theft. I wouldn’t be surprised if, were I to try some of these doors, they would be unlocked, perhaps with nobody home.

Bidets for days

It’s a cold goddamn day in the city and hella rainy to boot. You’re waiting in the subway and you think you’ve got to do more than toot. So you seek out the otearai and surely you’ll find, there’s a bidet with a heated seat to soothe your behind.

Bidets are everywhere. Maybe you don’t care but I like them and so coming to Japan has been like arriving in the land of magical poops. And the heated seats, like hottoremon were unbeknownst to me missing from my life. They do seem to take warmth quite seriously: in the US long underwear is employed as a comic device in film and hard to find in stores, often of low quality. In Japan anywhere you can buy clothes you can buy long underwear, including at the conbini, and it’s soft, so soft.

Coin is king

In some countries I’ve found different denominations to be more valuable than I find them in the US. For example the equivalent of a two dollar bill in some countries is more wide spread and more useful than it is in the US. I’ve been cussed out for paying with a Jefferson. Or a 50,000 COP note in Colombia, the default denomination distributed by most ATMs. But in Japan, coins are really important. You’ll use them. You’ll receive them. You’ll desperately try to get rid of the really tiny denominations. If your Pocari Sweat costs 162 and you put two hyaku-en coins, the cashier will wait quietly, patiently to see if you plan to put down two more yen, or perhaps a single ten piece, because complicated coin interactions are expected.

Not to mention coins are often easier to use than IC cards at vending machines, are the exclusive accepted tender of gachapon machines, and of course at the shrines. I always thought coin purses were really dumb because who’s really carrying around coins? Well guess who has a coin purse and a ton of chagrin now.

I just wanna be naked around a bunch of other wet men, I guess

Showers in Japan are really nice. It’s a simple invention but every shower I’ve used in Japan has been more user friendly than the ones I’ve used in the US, even those of high end US hotels or my friends' fancy remodeled bathrooms. They all have almost the same design too because when you have something good why change it. The only variation is where more equipment is added: a tub, perhaps, for example.

But actually what I really love are the onsen and sentou. You know, where you go and get naked with a bunch of other people and bathe. Yeah. For real. Actually when I consider whether I just tolerate the fact that others will be there but would really prefer to be there alone, I think something about a bunch of other people bathing makes me somewhat more comfortable. Maybe it’s just because I have a vague background terror of slipping and dying in the shower someday.

Regardless of the public nature, the bathhouses have obvious value beyond everyone getting to see your junk. Multiple different baths to alternate between is great. Even just a hot bath and cold bath swap is awesome, but I’ve been to places that have jet baths, mineral baths and even electric baths. Boy that was a wild time.

Save for the one time someone shouted at me about having a little ink, I really love the public baths in Japan, and I’m going to miss them.

Mycophilia

I come from a mycophobic culture. People hate mushrooms where I’m from. That’s changing, but still many friends and family members associate my fascination with psychadelica and toxins. I’m gonna get myself killed! Or I had better not run afoul of the police! It’s a very limited point of view. In Japan it’s different. In museums, the fungal kingdom isn’t a mysterious statement in the corner of an exhibit about the forest floor, it’s represented across the entire museum for its role in cities, cooking, prehistoric ecosystems and more. Mushrooms are dirt cheap in grocery stores and feature on menus at izakayas, udon/soba/ramen shops and everywhere else. In some of the aforementioned museum exhibits, the idea that mushrooms are associated with trees in mutually beneficial relationships is not piece of trivia, but assumed to be understood even by young children.

Japanophilia

Having been raised in the dungeons of the internet I’m no stranger to people obsessed with anime. Or the derogatory names associated with them, the occasionally absurd means of communication and of course the memes. Something I had kind of expected when I was in Japan was to run into a lot of people fixated on certain Japanese exports. In a sense I did. But it turned out to be positive, not negative.

Traveling throughout the world I’ve encountered many people quite excited to be in the countries they’re visiting. For many reasons. But only in Japan have I encountered so many people excited to be in Japan. I wrote in a previous post that I was tired of justifying Colombia to people who were already there, who had to have had some motivation to buy a ticket and get on a plane. In Japan I have met so many people who were just happy to have opportunities to practice Japanese. Beyond that so many westerners have been so excited to explore the distinctly foreign food traditions of Japan. Many have been studying martial arts for years and want to explore the schools here. Artists are here studying classical and modern Japanese styles. Buddhists are learning about some of the early roots of Zen. There are so many things drawing people from all over the world here.

It is a very different dynamic when people are traveling out of interest, motivation, or fascination, rather than hedonism or the accumulation of experiences. People are tougher nuts to crack: they’re not here to make friends, or assemble an entourage. They see an innate value to their time here and have a will to take it for everything its worth, whether that’s spending time chatting up locals or researching dojos. If only I could find such focus, maybe I’d feel less wasteful of my limited time here.

The man made disaster

Of course generalizations abound here. There’s no need to dispute me because everything I’ve said is wrong, to a degree, just as everything I’ve said is right, to a degree. Very little of what I’ve said seems deserving of the term culture shock, least of all given the fawning tone of most of these bullet points. It’s a strange but exciting thing to be in a country, two weeks at the time of starting this and five weeks at the time of writing this sentence, having found so little upsetting. So much of my time here has been spent wishing my home country could serve people as well as this one. I know I’m missing something oppressive, offensive, horrendous about this culture, I must be, I’ve been told stories that make me certain I am, but in between elderly people constantly giving me money on the bus/at bus stops, and people picking us up hitchhiking, buying us food, calling friends to help translate, and just driving us an hour out of their way because we asked, there’s enough to envy regardless of the things I’m missing.

It leaves one important question. Part of the purpose of this journey for me has been to try to figure out what I’m doing next in life. It’s been a selfish question. What kind of job would I hate less? Or how can I hate my current field less? Maybe the question needs to be less individual. Maybe I need to consider how I can work to better the society I settle in. My home nation or another, as yet undecided. But maybe the question about how I want to spend my time is less a matter of career, and more a matter of community.