Impressions of Japan

Some observations after a years-long absence

I recently came back from Japan, and this post will be a list of short observations—none of this is systematic or rigorous, so add a handful of salt. There’s probably a couple more posts from the trip.

To get everyone on the same page before I start:

I grew up in Tokyo until my family moved to the US when I was 13. I’ve lived in the US since then, and I’ve gone back to see my relatives once every 2-3 years on average. After I got married to a Japanese woman with a somewhat similar background, we’ve gone back more often as her parents are in Osaka. The last time we went was for New Year’s in 2019.

This time felt pretty different, not just because of the pandemic, but because we have a baby. Here are some things that I noticed as we spent almost 2 weeks in Japan.

1. Japan currently allows you to pre-register your passport and COVID vaccination information online so that you can go through immigration faster. That’s fine and all, but it turns out that (as of late November) you can’t just show them the screenshot of the QR code with your information. They want to see that you can access the webpage that contains the QR code…presumably the QR code contains personal information about you so this seems bizarre.

   
   Hopefully this particular thing gets fixed, but this kind of glitchy government tech isn’t uncommon in Japan¹.

2. Where they were checking the QR code mentioned above, most of the staff seemed to be Southeast Asian immigrants. There’s been a big increase in immigration to Japan in recent years, and I definitely noticed that a lot of the convenience store clerks were immigrants in the past couple of visits. But it does leave more of an impression when it’s the first faces I see after I enter the country.

3. Please don’t read this as an endorsement of how the United States does this, but the border control felt lax, at least for people like us who look and act Japanese. The immigration officer we talked to when we entered Japan didn’t have the brisk seriousness and focus that immigration officers seemed to have most of the times I’ve crossed borders. This is especially interesting because the Japanese can be very particular about looking serious when that’s what they care about.
   
   On a similar note, on the way out of the country at Narita Airport, I saw an airport security person complimenting a traveler’s suit. Not sure I’ve seen that from the TSA (again, not saying this as an endorsement of the American way)².

4. I felt tall immediately after crossing the border control. I guess I got very used to being average height for a man over the past few years³.

5. When we left Chicago, it was pretty close to freezing, and then it was well above 60 °F (~15 °C) for the first few days in Japan. And yet, I felt like people were wearing almost the same amount of clothing in the 2 places. At one point, I was rolling up my long sleeves as others were in their sweaters or even down jackets. I couldn’t tell how much of this was “It’s November so we should wear warm clothes” vs. “I genuinely feel cold and want to wear this”.

6. From Osaka, we went to Okayama where my grandmother and uncle live. I’ve almost always gone to Okayama by Shinkansen (“the bullet train”), and it’s a very smooth, flat ride. But this time we went by car on the Sanyo Expressway, and this reminded me of how mountainous Japan was.

7. Here come the inevitable COVID observations: People were masking at a level that I (maybe) saw in Chicago in the middle of 2020 but probably no other time. The official guidelines in Japan actually say that masking outdoors is totally optional, but a lot of people still do mask outdoors⁴.
   
   Basically all businesses and public buildings had hand sanitizers at entrances, and hotel buffets provided loose-fitting plastic gloves that they asked us to use.
   
   Depending on where you are and what you’re doing now, you may laugh at this, but some of this probably contributed to Japan having one of the lowest COVID fatality rates in the developed world.

8. Speaking of the hotel buffet, we noticed that a lot of people arrived right on the hour (7 am, 8 am, 9 am), resulting in lines at the buffet. It got a lot less busy at other times.

9. It used to be that when I got to Japan from the US, I would notice a lot more places would have tobacco smell. This seems to no longer be the case. I’m sure this was a gradual change over the past decade or so, but I really noticed the change this time.

10. Japan is notorious for having a low fertility rate, BUT it seemed a lot more kid-friendly than the US. The condo complex in Osaka where we were staying had a courtyard where we often saw kids playing unsupervised, as well as a play room for infants and toddlers. Basically every restaurant we went to, even somewhat fancy ones, had a seat for the baby⁵. And of course middle school and even elementary school kids routinely ride the train by themselves (this I knew from my own experience).
    
    Obviously, living there with a kid is not the same as visiting for a couple of weeks, but this is my surface-level observation.

11. This is the kind of thing I rarely see people talk about explicitly, but people walk on the right side by default in the US, on sidewalks, in hallways, etc. In Japan, the default is walking on the left. Narita Airport can be an unsettling place to walk around because there’s a bunch of people who want to walk on the left and a bunch of people who want to walk on the right⁶.
    
    Another observation about walking: Americans seem to know what’s behind them when they’re walking, more than the Japanese⁷. And they would get out of the way if they notice that someone is trying to pass. I’m not sure if Americans are simply being nice or if they’re looking over their shoulders for safety reasons.

12. Non-alcoholic beer was everywhere. I did notice it getting more common during the last few visits, but this time it seemed like more people were drinking non-alcoholic than alcoholic. It’s possible this has something to do with us visiting a lot of older people who are conscious of their health.

13. In popular shopping areas in Osaka, I overheard a lot of Chinese. Shops generally didn’t seem to have Chinese speakers on staff, though. I guess international visitors are mostly fine with English, but it seemed like having Chinese speakers could be a selling point.

14. (I guess this is mostly for people who’s visiting Japan with a baby and staying with someone who lives there—a very limited audience) We rented baby gear (here) and it was pretty great. One of the things we rented was a Combi stroller (or ベビーカー = “baby car”, in Japanese), and it was extremely nimble, as you would expect for a stroller suited for all the cramped spaces in Japan.

15. Thin-sliced meat is a thing. I wrote a bit about Italian beef last time, and the thing that makes it hard to replicate at home is that your average grocery store doesn’t sell thin-sliced meats in the US, and not many people have a meat slicer at home. It’s easy to get thin-sliced meat in Japan, so that’s not a problem⁸.

16. You can make a good case that Osaka is bigger than Chicago, and if Tokyo were to suddenly disappear, you’d be talking about it as one of the biggest cities in the developed world. But most Americans don’t even know of Osaka unless they have some interest in Japan.

17. We went to a restaurant outside airport security before we left. I forgot that that was a thing. It helps that we weren’t really nervous about missing the plane because the security line moves quickly.

What I’m listening to now

Honestly, I didn’t listen to much music in Japan because I was with the baby and the in-laws for almost all of it. But Spotify’s 2022 Wrapped came out while I was there.

Uruguayan artist Jorge Drexler ended up being my top artist, and his 2017 song “Quimera” my top song. It’s really nice bossa nova en español.

I like the rest of the album too, especially "Estalactitas"—anyone who can name-drop a cave formation (stalactite) like that gets my vote⁹.

And I enjoyed his 2022 album too, so yeah, you should check him out.

1. It’s not that uncommon in the US either, to be fair.

2. Actually, I just remembered seeing a TSA guy updating a colleague on the Germany-Japan score at the beginning of the trip.

And by the way, it really is a rough job.

3. The difference in average height isn’t that big. But when you’re near the averages there’s a big difference in perception.

4. As many others have said, it’s been more socially acceptable to wear masks in public in Japan for decades. All else being equal, it’s a good thing for preventing diseases from spreading. But I’d note that all else is not equal because it’s partly a reflection of how many people felt they had to go to work even if they had a cold.

5. Some of the chairs didn’t have straps, so we didn’t always feel comfortable using with an infant, but they had it.

6. The physicist in me wants to bring up spontaneous symmetry breaking, where the stable state is asymmetric even though the problem is inherently symmetric. Narita is almost the unstable symmetric state.

Also, I’m not sure if people walk on the sides that they do because cars drive on the sides that they do.

7. I’ve found Europeans (huge generalization, I know!) to be even more oblivious.

8. Let me know if you open an Italian beef shop in Japan.

9. Juana Molina, from neighboring Argentina, has a song called “Estalacticas”, also from 2017. Anyone know what’s going on there?