We then caught the 5 PM bullet train back to Tokyo, and then another train to the airport, where we got our late night flight back to Vancouver. When I was going through security, I removed my shoes (which is not required in Japan) because they have metal in them. A pair of slippers instantly appeared for me to wear as I walked through the metal detector. (Never mind that the Japanese slippers are always too small for my very large feet.)
This somehow symbolic of how Japan works; people are incredibly polite, thoughtful, and friendly, and every potential event is anticipated. In our hotel we were provided with slippers to wear in the room (one is never meant to wear your street shoes indoors), and a separate pair of slippers to wear in the bathroom. Everything is incredibly efficient and well run, and the aesthetic value of many things is paramount. All of this makes for an excellent visitor's experience, but I have no idea how this all feels to someone who lives there. Does it become oppressive? Do people get tired of constantly shifting from one pair of slippers to another? If I were there for a long time would I start to miss the anarchy and rudeness which is part of the essential character of places like New York? I really don't know.
What does strike me though is that by visiting Japan, you encounter many different ways of thinking about things, from urban spaces to interpersonal relations. These ideas often challenge our own Western notions, and make you think again about how we conceptualize our world. Consider, for example, that in general streets in Tokyo don't have names. (The larger streets have been given names, mostly as a result of Western influences.) There are neighborhoods, sub-neighborhoods, and gradually smaller chunks of the city that are identified by numbers, and numbered not necessarily according to any logic of adjacency. While this makes sense to those who live there, I suppose, it represents a whole different way of conceptualizing city spaces than what we in the west are used to. For me, this is just one somewhat trivial example of how some of the things we take for granted in the West can be thought of differently. And while Japan has certainly absorbed and in many cases improved on ideas that come from the West, there is a sense in which they still somehow maintain a very distinctive and unique way of doing things which is very Japanese. And, sometimes, you think they really do have a better way of doing things that we in the West could learn from.
I can't wait to go back to Japan and see more.
