Around The World In 80 Waves

The first thing you notice walking around Tokyo is number of vending machines that are all over the place. I suspect you may actually struggle to more more than a hundred metres without passing one or more of them.

Japan has more than 5 million coin and card-operated machines. That’s about one vending machine for every 23 people, and more vending machines in Japan than people living in New Zealand! You can buy almost anything from the machines lining the streets. Beer, cars, used ladies underwear, live crabs, bags of eggs, Pringles, fried chicken, porn, cigarettes, and lettuce that is grown inside using artificial light. (Yes you did read it correctly about the underwear!)

The next thing I am aware of is the number of people wearing surgical masks. It varies at different times of the day but at any time there will always be somebody wearing one.

It makes you wonder if they know something that you don’t! However the air here doesn’t seem to be anything worse than I remember it being in London, so it seems a little excessive, bordering on Howard Hughes style behaviour.

The Japanese must be the most polite people I have ever met. As a rule any conversation is laced with bowing and more thankyous than the day after Christmas. 

There is a dignity about the way people handle themselves and the way they dress, so much so that even the punks are wearing ironed shirts. As well as being polite they are always so quiet. There is barely a murmur on the metro trains.

However you contrast this outward demeanour with a clear interest in deviant behaviour. There are signs all over the underground warning ladies about the men trying to take pictures up their skirts on the stairs and escalators. I’m no psychologist but perhaps all that repressed emotion boils out from time to time.

Walking around the street you will see plates of plastic food outside almost every restaurant.

They are lined up in cabinets on the wall or on stands outside the front door of the establishment.

It is a means of displaying the options open to diners, as well as the respective prices.

However it is the least appetising thing I have ever seen. I have the least sophisticated palate of anybody I know, but I actually find it off putting to imagine enjoying any meal I might eat, when the first suggestion of it is caked in hardened resin.

Finally I will mention that almost everything here is a shade too small for me.

I am not in the realms of Godzilla going on the rampage through the city, but doorways, entrances, toilets, seats on public transport, etc usually entail some form of limbo practise or contorting my body to try and fit in.