assorted japan notes

here are a few things we noticed in Japan that never made it into a blog post:

 - very baggy pants, almost bell-bottoms, seem to be in fashion, especially for young women in the big cities.

- everyone on trains and in train stations is extremely quiet. we were on entire train cars where nobody was saying a single word. if they absolutely had to talk on their phones, they'd cover their mouth while rushing to the space between cars.

- there was a standard mom-bike, with child seats on the back and/or front and an electric motor. it seemed like every third cyclist was a mom with a cute kid or two, especially during rush hours.

- because of the narrow streets and often a lack of sidewalks, traffic on non-major streets is a crazy kind of polite and cautious anarchy. everyone drives/walks/bikes all over the place but is ready to stop on a dime if anyone gets in their way, without honking or getting angry. and there are nice big convex mirrors to help you see around corners.

- every food experience we had felt like a whole new set of things to figure out: how and where to sit, how to order, what the food was going to be, how to eat it... we ordered sushi on an ipad at one place (which set off a loud ringing noise each time we ordered something), one place had a buzzer to call the waiter over, and at ramen shops in Tokyo you order by buying tickets from a vending machine near the door before sitting down.

- everything had a jingle: trains stopping at stations, train doors opening or closing, people entering convenience stores, water heaters being turned on, toilets being sat on... they were often surprisingly long and jaunty little tunes.

- bad or even nonsensical english was even more common than we'd expected, including bizarre grammar and nonexistant words. after a while, bad english started to seem perfectly sensical.

seriously, do not step into a veranda.

- there were canals and little waterways everywhere, in every city.

- most food didn't have mayo in it, but when something did have mayo, it had a lot. i found myself scraping gobs of the stuff off multiple food items, including a burger and an egg sandwich.

- instructional signs, cops, and security guards all seemed both sincere and apologetic. whereas in other parts of the world there'd be angry signs put in place to prevent lawsuits or you'd get barked at by someone in a uniform, in Japan the goal always seemed to be to help people and prevent confusion or inconvenience. we saw one police officer meekly take a cigarette from a foreigner (you can't smoke & walk), apologizing the whole time, and then stamp it out before smiling at the guy and apologizing again.

- when you're a customer, you get treated like royalty. cashiers would flamboyantly count out our change for us, folding and flipping through bank notes. they'd also hand back credit cards and receipts with two hands while bowing. then they'd wrap everything up individually, tape them up, and place them all carefully into another larger bag, carefully rolling the handles together before presenting it to you.

- Japanese people are big into lining up for things correctly. there were always markers for where to stand and announcements for how many lines to form. when we were waiting to get into a museum in Tokyo, we went through the first gate with a bunch of other tourists and then were asked to form four lines in an open area of the sidewalk while they got the front doors open. the guard seemed extremely disconcerted when everyone just kind of milled around. he kept making various parallel hand motions and moving to different parts of the pack before eventually giving up.