1. Birdsong in tube stations (heard in Ikebukuro on the Yurakucho line).
When I first heard it I thought there was actually a bird somewhere up above the platform but of course it’s underground. No birdies down there. So they have a recording of birds singing. Why? A Japanese friend told me the singing is supposed to make stressed-out commuters feel relaxed and peaceful, as though they were waiting in a quiet country lane. Nice idea, but weird.
Firstly, even if you close your eyes and try to imagine you are anywhere other than a Tokyo subway station swarming with human life, the thundering of trains entering and leaving the station coupled with the constant loudspeaker announcements to let you know the train is arriving, to stay away from the tracks and that the train doors are closing bring you right back to your present location.
Secondly, the recording is only of one bird singing but the same little chirrup is looped over and over. So unless you find repetitive sounds relaxing, it only serves to annoy.
2. Sleeping on trains
Everyone does it. Seriously. I’ve never seen so many people unanimously sleeping on a train -and I’ve travelled on an overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. The second a Tokyo-ite sits on the tube, the rocking of the train lulls them, their eyes close, head starts nodding and moments later they’re asleep, leaning on the passenger next to them.
The crazy thing is, they don’t even need to get a seat to fall asleep. I saw one salaryman standing up and holding onto a bar beside the doors. His eyes were closed and he was so tired that even in that position he was falling asleep. But whenever his sleep became too deep, his knees would give out and he’d crumple to the floor, get about a foot from actually hitting the floor then wake up and pull himself upright again with a surprised look on his face, despite the same thing having happened several times already.
Either people in Tokyo work too hard, or there’s something funny in the air of the Tokyo subway…
3. The number of teeny tiny old women
Japanese people, women especially, are generally short in stature. Certainly most women are shorter than me (I’m probably the same size as your average Japanese man). But I have seen a lot of women who are so tiny they must surely be officially classed as midgets.
I’m pretty tall even at home, but I’m not used to seeing so many people who are so much shorter than me, and so I find it weird. I also can’t help wondering, were these women always so tiny or has the burden of years weighed down on their shoulders, effectively squashing them into little old women?
And then I start to think, will I get shorter as I get older or will I always be tall? I can’t imagine I could ever shrink so much that I could be referred to as a little old woman.
4. That even today there are still very few gaijin in Tokyo.
It’s a huge metropolitan place, bigger and with more people than London, but while the Big Smoke is one massive , diverse cultural melting pot (the percentage of foreign-born Londoners has been estimated at around 30), I can still count on my hands the number of other gaijin I encounter on a daily basis in Tokyo (of course when I say gaijin I actually mean people who don’t look Asian, so there could well be thousands of Chinese, Koreans etc. in Tokyo).
I read somewhere that registered foreigners in Tokyo make up about 3% of the 13 million population. So that’s around 390,000 non-Japanese.
I’ll pass by a person with a Western face and we’ll make eye contact and there’s some spark of recognition there, a sort of complicity. ‘Hey fellow foreigner, how’s it going?’ At least, that’s how it feels.
I find it weird that Japan still manages to be so… well, Japanese!
4. Toilets
It has to be said: Japanese toilets are weird. If you’re not used to squatting, the hole-in-the-floor toilets can take a bit of getting used to. A Japanese friend said to me the other day that it encourages strong thighs so I guess that’s got to be a good thing.
Then at the opposite end of the loo-spectrum is the hyper-modern all-singing-all-dancing-all-wash-your-butt-for-you toilets. They make flushing sounds or play music to cover your embarrassing bathroom noises. They spray water so you can wash your bits after you’ve relieved yourself. But the bit I really dislike is the heated seat.
I find having an electronically heated toilet seat – plugged into the mains no less – is not only worryingly dangerous (if you’re not supposed to have mains plugs in your bathroom, why is it ok in the toilet?) but also deeply unpleasant. It’s like going to use a toilet that someone else has already been sitting on for ages.
I don’t want to feel like I’m using a loo that has just been the seat of another person taking an epic dump.Icky.
Well, that’s all for now. But I’m sure I’ll find some more Japanese things I find weird soon.
Update:
There’s just so many things I don’t understand here. I reckon I could probably write a book on this topic, but I’m sure it’s been done before. Anyway, here are some more things I think are strange.
1. Policemen at traffic lights
Ok, so we have a busy junction, there’s traffic coming from all different directions. There’s a policeman in his smart uniform, whistle in mouth, red glow-in-the-dark baton in hand. He blows his whistle, he waves his baton, he would not be out of place at a rave. He directs the traffic so everyone knows where and when to go.
But there’s a set of perfectly good traffic lights overhead. They work fine! What is the purpose of this policeman? Maybe I’m missing something…
2. Japanese TV
It’s true, I don’t understand a great deal of what they’re saying on TV but I can get the gyst of it usually. What I don’t get is how popular the guest panel format for TV shows is.
On practically every channel there’s some kind of show where for example they’ll be telling the story of a girl who got really fat as a child and got bullied and then one day had an epiphany and decided to lose lots of weight and then they show the before and after pics – nothing terribly unusual there.
But all the while the girl’s story is unravelling on the screen, in a corner there is a shot of the panel member’s faces, the camera passing from one to the next registering their reactions to the girl’s story. Then afterwards the programme will cut back to the studio and film the panel discussing what we just saw.
I’ve seen this same format so many times now and I find it odd. Can’t the watcher form their own opinions of the girl’s story without having a panel of (presumably) famous guest speakers to measure their opinions against?
Ok that’s enough of that, now I’ll get onto things I like about Japan!
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