WEIRD JAPAN : BEYOND THE CLICHÉS

Yes, we all know the old tropes about robot restaurants, maid cafes and vending machines dispensing soiled high school girl’s underwear, but here are some things only a long-term resident would notice.

(Disclaimer : while all observations below are based on fact, my commentary may at times be somewhat tongue-in-cheek.)

NASAL NONSENSE ON THE TRAINS

You may have heard about the squeaky high-pitched female voices the Japanese think are cute, but ride the trains for a while and you might notice another kind of vocal weirdness.

Train drivers (predominantly males) adopt an absurd nasal voice while doing the station announcements. Sometimes this is barely noticable, but other workers take it to extremes and your ears are treated to a bizarre cartoon-like adenoidal assault. I’ve lived here for years, but certain drivers still make me giggle, while none of my fellow commuters bat an eyelid.

I asked a Japanese friend about this: does Japan Railways only advertise for people prone to congested noses? Apparently no, it is taught and learned as part of their training, the rationale being that this kind of silly voice will more readily cut through the noise than a normal voice, and is thus eminently practical.

OVERWHELMING OVERHEATING

You’d think the inhabitants of these islands would have got used to the fact that it gets cold in winter, but apparently not. While the Japanese have mastered living in the humid hell of high summer as poor Northern Europeans like me melt, the winter is still an ordeal for them.

Come October and, regardless of the actual temperature, the scarves and woolly hats come out and someone flicks the switch to the ‘sauna’ setting on the heaters. Trains, homes, offices and stores are all transformed into a gently roasting airless stuffy fug that induces drowsiness.

It can be twenty centrigrade outside and they’ll still do it. There’s no sense of a gradual ramp up to January and February when the mercury drops below zero, it’s full on heat the moment summer is officially declared over, which makes for some not inconsiderable discomfort for Westerners.

CURIOUS COAT CULTURE

I don’t know about you, but I thought that the definition of a coat was a garment designed to be worn outside to protect one against the elements.

Clearly the Japanese don’t think so. They wear them indoors too. No matter how bulky and restrictive, those puffer jackets and parkas ain’t coming off, even with the insane indoor winter warmth mentioned in the previous point.

They obviously didn’t get the old addage dispensed by generations of western mums : take your coat off indoors or you won’t feel the benefit of it when you go outside.

I often ask the university students I teach why they do this. Mostly I just get the non-sensical reply ‘because it’s cold’ (even though the temperature of the classroom might be twenty centigrade). However, I finally got to understand this behaviour a little better when one insightful individual told me that it’s to do with the Japanese liminal dichotomy between home and non-home, and little to do with temperature.

Any place where a Japanese person does not have to take off their shoes is regarded as outside, even if to us westerners it’s clearly inside, and therefore it’s not strange to keep on a coat.

HYGIENE HORRORS

You probably thought those Japanese were a squeaky-clean bunch, what with all those hot springs and entrenched bathing culture. Wrong! They stink. Well, some of them do, at certain times. Let me explain.

There are some aspects of Japanese culture that make total practical sense. Taking your shoes off when you enter the home, for example. That’s way cleaner than us Brits who just walk straight in off the streets and onto the living room carpet, bringing in all manner of unsavoury particles clinging to our soles.

When it comes to bathing, though, they’ve got it all wrong.

The Japanese take an evening bath, while us Europeans take a morning shower. I therefore go to work nice and clean, while the average Japanese heads off into the outside world after a night of mouldering in their overheated bedroom. Ewwwwww.

For me, I want to be clean when I go out and mix with people - it’s common courtesy. Who cares if I stink during the night? It’s only me who’s going to experience that.

The Japanese, however, are obsessive about going to bed clean and apparently don’t care if they’re dirty and reeking out in public the next day.

You may think I’m making too much of this, but anybody who’s spent time commuting or teaching young people in universities here will testify to the stink that emanates from a certain proportion of the population (young males, I’m looking at you - and holding my nose).

I’ve had to walk out of some classrooms just to get away from the nauseating stench. The general propensity for overheating contributes to this greatly, as does the predilection for the ubiquitous kotatsu, a kind of heated low table people sometimes wallow under all night.

PESKY PEDESTRIANS

The Japanese can’t walk in a straight line. Apparently.

You’ll be strolling along somewhere and an oncoming native will see you, then get into an indecisive dither about which way to turn to avoid bumping into you, resulting in them bumping into you.

This happens every single day. They usually manage to dodge me at the last moment, but it’s a rampant and infuriating quirk

It’s definitely not an Asian thing: the citizens of Taiwan stroll boldly and forcefully in a straight line, so no such problems there.

Then I thought it was a racist thing. Since discomfort with foreigners is endemic in Japan, I thought it was just a freaked out reaction at coming face to face with a gaijin, but I’ve since noticed this happening between Japanese folk too.

It seems to be a manifestation of the chronic lack of spatial awareness the Japanese have, leaving them in a bumbling oblivious daze of introspection.

In a hurry? Well, you’re out of luck because those high school girls blocking the escalator aren’t going to sense your wanting to get past them.

This summer I was pushing my aunt in a wheelchair around Stonehenge. I was blown away by the courtesy and respect shown to her and the way people made way for us. Only once did some clumsy oaf smash into her. Can you guess which country they were from?

PRIVACY PRIVATIONS

Going to the doctor or dentist is bad enough at the best of times. It’s much worse when you’re in a foreign country. And then you come to Japan….

It isn’t the language barrier or even the giggling assistants or staring fellow patients in the waiting area, it’s the total lack of privacy during the consultation and treatment.

Many dentists will have a number of treatment chairs lined up in the same room, sometimes even a single dentist multitasking between patients. Even in a totally modern clinic run by a young American-trained dentist, I was shocked to find I could see and hear other patients being treated through open doorways and hatches.

The same goes for doctors. I recently visited one and was disconcerted to find that during the entire consultation and examination a child and her mother were waiting in the same room, staring and listening to every word. Lucky I was there for an ear infection and not swollen testicles, right?

This is a particularly odd cultural quirk since it seems to fly in the face of actual privacy laws, but it is all-pervasive.

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As a final comment, when bringing up these perpelexing points with Japanese people I often mention as balance the case of the British and their bathrooms: why are they carpeted? Even our continental European cousins find this one odd. Unhygienic in the extreme, and also, why is the toilet in the same room as the bath?

I suppose each culture has its unique little customs that might seem strange to outsiders. Japan certainly appears to have more than most, though…