Day 87 - Rails

The four hours’ sleep I managed to get before being, once again, violently woken up by the cleaning staff of my capsule hotel were just about sufficient to keep me functioning on my last day in Japan, but no more than that. Most of it was spent hiding from the heavy rain by wandering around the shopping centres around the Nihonbashi area for a last round of gift shopping, mostly done on auto-pilot as my brain went into safety mode after visiting a handful of different shops looking for an elusive cosmetic product my mum had asked me to find - for future reference, obscure things are not as easy to find in Japan as you might think, you know with the Kanji and the fact that the only language I share with most of the population is hand-waving…

When I eventually made my way to the airport (on the slow train, since my shopping spree left me with a pretty light wallet) I slept through half of the 80-minute journey and spent the other half talking to a Brazilian guy who noticed someone’s name on my phone and asked if I was from South America. As it turns out, Jesus has lived in Japan for 12 years and has not made it back to Mato Grosso do Sul since - including his father’s funeral, last week. If I needed to be reminded that being able to go back home and see my family a few times a year is a privilege not available to many, that probably did it. We also exchanged thoughts about how different his native and adoptive countries are, with him admitting he missed the Brazilian warmth and easy-going atmosphere, of which Japan is pretty much the perfect antithesis.

Having enjoyed these three weeks immensely, I leave in two minds about Japan. On one hand, it is a staggeringly beautiful country with a culture that has so many points we can learn from (the importance of core values like honesty, loyalty and altruism for starters) and a history that has led them to actually have a debate on whether or not they should allow themselves to have armed forces despite having a communist dictator tossing ballistic missiles over their territory for fun. On the other hand, and as Jesus correctly pointed out, it feels like a fundamentally repressed society, where a vast majority spends an an entire life “on rails” and a small minority feels the need to turn to extreme eccentricity to escape from that. On one hand, people do their absolute utmost to help you despite the language barrier. On the other hand, in several occasions I wished people just said “no” when it became clear what I was after was not possible, rather than spending half an hour discussing it between themselves in Japanese trying to avoid disappointing me. On one hand, people who hosted us were incredibly kind and went above and beyond to make sure we had a good time wherever we were staying. On the other hand, the warmth I felt in countries like Sri Lanka, Myanmar or India was almost always absent - as Pete put it, our hosts were usually “good, but not necessarily nice”. Either way, I leave Japan with a desire to come back to explore the rest of the country and spend some more time in places we did not quite get to see properly - and to actually do the Kumano Kodo trail next time!

(This is the bit where you are probably expecting me to write “Sayonara Japan”, but that is both unbelievably cliché and against a strict no-goodbye policy I have to abide by. So without further ado, I shall just walk away…)

Cheers,
J-Wowww