JETache May 2001

Travel Club Speech

Reminiscences of Japan. Part of a speech given to a travel club

I left from the middle of winter. I had just been skiing on Ruapehu, then went up to Auckland to meet with the others and have a final briefing. I got a kick in the pants leaving the country by being burgled at the Auckland airport Gateway hotel. Someone broke in the window and rifled my belongings. I'd been carrying all my important stuff because of needing it for the briefing and at the end of it headed back to my room to change. I went down to the bar for a quick beer, and foolishly left my passport pouch and everything behind in my room. About ½ an hour later I was paged in the bar to say that I'd had a call from PN so I went back to my room to call home. It was my birthday so I knew whom the call had been from. But when I got back to my room it was ransacked. So instead of talking to my mother I was caught up with the police and hotel management.

My first indication that things in Japan were going to be different was when I discovered on arrival and consultation with the Japanese officials ~ that the Travel Accident Insurance that they had told me had been taken out to cover our trip was just accidents, as in broken legs etc. I hadn't taken any insurance out myself because I believed I was covered. I always travel with insurance. If you don't have the habit of doing it I strongly suggest you do. Get no excess coverage and don't think about the cost of it because when you need it, you really need it.

Tokyo. Tokyo was hot. We were straight into the thick of summer. It was 35 and humid. Tokyo is huge. We started our experience in Shinjuku, which is an administrative hub. It has some immense buildings that tower above you. The skyline of Tokyo is dotted with clusters of tall buildings. The area was once swampland so the tall clusters all indicate the more stable substructures. Not that anything will stand a good earthquake as has been readily seen in various major earthquakes that have plagued Japan. Around these tall new skyscrapers are a myriad of tiny little two and three storey houses. They are usually discrete rather than terraced but only inches apart. If it weren't for their preference for sliding windows they wouldn't be able to open the window to the view of the neighbours blank wall (or window).

Summer causes brownish haze and smog problems. The lack of paint on houses adds to a drab back-street feeling. In Japan there is little home maintenance. A house is built, lived in till it is run down, then pulled down and a new one erected on the same site. While they are outrageously expensive to build they don't last long. There is not much of a property market with houses. Families stay put in family homes and properties. If, as often happens, the husband is transferred to a distant branch for a few years he will go and live in a company hostel rather than uproot the family. Since fathers are not seen that much around the house anyway it turns out that, that is not such a big deal as it would perhaps be here. Why aren't they seen much? Well, the daily life of a 'salariman' is quite long, from early morning to late in the evening. Apart from the hour to two hours commute each way, 6 day working week, there are also the obligatory after work social events. We are familiar with "team building" as an occasional management intervention, but in Japan it is an institutionalised ritual. Then there is the Sunday golf or pachinko. Pachinko parlours are the closest thing to a casino that you get in Japan and they are everywhere. They are loosely based on pinball machine and are a form of gambling. They certainly have people hooked and every year 2 or 3 children die after their parents have left them in the carpark in an overheating car while they played all day. Holidays are in short supply so you won't see fathers around much then, and when trips are made they are rarely family affairs. You holiday with your work colleagues not spouses! You see marriage is a different sort of thing in Japan too. Marriage is a vehicle for children, and a kind of obligation. Although this is no longer universal, it is not about friendship, love or fellowship. Indeed while western style love marriages are increasing, arranged marriages are still very common. Especially as men enter their 30's and women their mid 20's the pressure starts to come on.

My hotel in Shinjuku was the five star Keio Plaza skyscraper. It was huge. It easily accommodated the 1500 new jet participants from throughout the western world. These days they have to use multiple hotels because they are up to 6000 JETs per year. From these plush surroundings I was bussed with my other 20 or so Nagano JETs out into the countryside. Driving along the elevated expressway it took ages to get out of Tokyo. As far as the eye could see was a sea of buildings. Huge clusters of enormous slab apartment buildings replaced the high rise clusters. These blocks were 10 or so stories high and 20 to 30 apartments wide. Every one of the balconies would always have a futon mattress airing over it and a tangle of washing would be swinging precariously above.

The expressways are toll roads and the 150km journey from Central Tokyo to my local exit cost around $120 for the average car one way. They are four-laned with totally separate twin lanes going each way. No U turns are possible. Most are 100kph but up to Nagano it was usually signed down to 80. The speed limits are in posted high tech boxes that can be changed progressively due to conditions or accidents. The fact that you are on an expressway doesn't mean that you are going to be able to get where you are going fast. They often crawl to a halt and on the weekends especially, the 2 hour trip to my town would take a Tokyoite an average 4hours. The crush getting back into town on Sunday night would usually make it a little longer! Off the expressway in the rural area that I lived, there were no open roads, the maximum speed was 50 and the majority of places were 40. (Which goes a way to explaining why Japanese tourists are so terrified when they get on the bus to Milford.) Buses are a good way of seeing the country and Japanese luxury touring coaches are exceedingly well equipped with toilets, lounge areas, karaoke systems and video. Needless to say drinking alcohol on a Japanese bus is not prohibited. The can be real party machines. The other main way to travel in Japan is by train. These are exceptional. They are more punctual than your average analogue watch. They range from the high speed shinkansen or bullet trains down through a variety of medium speed expresses to the local clunkers. Then of course there is the infamous crush on the suburban underground. If you are thinking of travelling around Japan a rail pass is a definite, but must be booked from outside the country. It can be a lot cheaper to forgo the shinkansen extra price and just go for expresses. They are all pretty good. I once went on one special party train. They had this train that had no seats, just low traditional Japanese tables on a tatami floor which were all set up with food and drink. We got on drank and ate for 1 hour in one direction. The train stopped then headed back up the way we had come and let people off at their original stations. Only getting off amidst a drunken sea of people can prove rather difficult. I ended up climbing out a window to get onto the platform. I believe some of my colleagues got carried off to the next station. Drunken louts? No, I was with the Board of Education and Town office (council).

My town was in the mountains so a car was my best bet. But to have a car in Japan you have to have a police registered car park. And carparks in big cities are expensive. Land is so tight that often houses don't have room for a carpark so they have to be rented. My wife's tiny apartment in Tokyo was cheaper than the space of one carpark a few doors away. Reason - a carpark for one car foregoes all the space above it whereas an apartment can more easily be multilevel (but they do sell private car hoists so that you can have two cars in your one car space at your house, you know like the garages use for servicing cars).

Cars are relatively cheap in Japan. And since Japanese can't seem to do so much with their housing they often use cars as surrogates. They lavish them and upgrade frequently. This is partly due to the taxation system levied on aging cars which sees cars which are 3 years old being hit with high registration and service costs. As cars get older these costs get quite significant. Then finally at the other end of the scale you have to pay someone to get rid of your old car. Therefore there are a lot of car graveyards out in the country, which are considerable eyesores. I picked up two of the cars that I used in Japan for $250 each and use them both for 2 years each before disposing of them when their next registration was coming up. To reregister them would have cost about $3000 each as they were getting on.

Another thing you see everywhere is bikes. Mary Poppins bikes by the million. Huge bike parking buildings near train stations especially. Walking is not particularly recommended. There are rarely footpaths when you get out of the big city centres and if there are they are prerogative of bicycles. Huge unseen drains await unwary feet on poorly lit streets as my shins can readily vouch. Those same drains also occasionally catch unwary drivers who pull over to the side of the road and bottom their cars as their wheels spin freely in the deep culverts. This was especially common in winter when they would get covered in snow and no-one could see them.

Roads are not well sign posted, and usually don't have names. Tunnels and bridges all have names as do many intersections but the roads themselves usually don't. Increasingly many regional roads have been assigned route numbers which may occasionally be seen but the local Japanese never seem to know or notice them. Giving directions in Japanese is always an interesting affair and usually is based around landmarks. Even house numbers are not commonly displayed. They wouldn't help much because they don't progress in geographical order but are instead a reflection of which plots were established first. If there are road sign they will often have an English translation on them which is nice, but they can give you a false sense of security because they are not always there. A nice big sign might send you up a road to the next T intersection, which will have nothing at all at it. Even maps are not much help because they are notoriously out of date or just plain inaccurate. These days hightech car navigation systems using GPS have become very fashionable but I can assure you that I have driven around for ½ an hour in circles following my brother-in-law who was using one to get us to a major tourist spot. Just to finish up on driving I should mention to you the other hidden hazard of driving in Japan. Apart from getting lost, the narrow streets and the drains, there is the concept of joint responsibility for accidents. This is completely alien to us where we consider one person to be at fault (except in unusual circumstance). If an accident occurs at an intersection, say a car drives through a red light and smashes into the one crossing on green. Both parties are 50% responsible. So beware.

Places to stay. There are a variety of types of places to stay in Japan. Big tourist hotel of course. Pricey. Around Tokyo Disneyland ------- Business hotels. Ryokan and Minshuku. YHA. Capsule. There are no motels as such in Japan. And Japanese get confused when we talk about them. What they have is particularly Japanese. The Love Hotels. And that is just what they are. They are fabulously elaborate hotel rooms rented by the 2 hour period - long enough for a quick naughty with the mistress. And they are everywhere. They have a carpark underneath the room and little screens to put behind the car so no other patrons can see the license plate number. From around 10pm at night they come off their 2 hour fixed rate and are available quite reasonably until 10 or so in the morning if you don't mind waiting that late to check in! I'm surprised no enterprising person has started one up in New Zealand yet.