Japan: Initial impressions
Saturday, December 1st, 2007I’ve now spent two days in Sapporo, which is the biggest city in Hokkaidō (Japan’s biggest island apart from the mainland itself).
- It’s colder than I expected. Then again, Sapporo is less than 500km from the coast of Siberia, and shares its latitude with Владивосток (Vladivostok), the last stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
- It’s more Westernised that I expected—somewhere between a third and half of the storefronts in downtown Sapporo sport American or European brands.
- No tipping. Coming from the US and Canada, this is almost jarring (and, coupled with the undervalued Yen, makes eating out very cheap).
- Excellent food is everywhere. At the local mall, instead of finding random franchises interspersed between the shops, the top floor is dedicated to restaurants—around 20 or so—with the cuisine ranging from French (patisserie-style) to Mongolian and Singaporean.
- Everyone has 3G mobile phones, so internet access is hard to find. In Vancouver, it was rare to come across a café which didn’t have free wifi; here, I still haven’t found a café that has wifi, free or not.
- Manga and Anime are everywhere (the internet café where I’m writing this, like most internet cafés here, has about half of its floorspace devoted to manga bookshelves). Manga-style imagery is also pervasive in advertising (used by the local slot-machine arcade, the corner store, and on the pack of chewing gum in my pocket), and usually has some sort of erotic undertone (see Ecchi). Sex in advertising isn’t exactly new, but here the focus seems to be on idealised schoolgirls.
- Seán (with whom I’m staying) described Japan as “brightly coloured”, and now that I’m here, I see what he means. Most downtown intersections feel like a combination of Times Square-style flashing neon and oversized displays, along with vaguely demented midi-ish songs and high-pitched voiceovers. While shopping for a sleeping bag last night, the brilliantly pink sign pointing to the second-floor escalator was more a wildly over-the-top ad for the numeral “2″ that an informational fixture. The balanced and ascetic elements of Japanese culture seem to compete with the ostentatious and sybaritic parts, and I can’t really get my head around it. Can anyone explain?
- Although I was sceptical in the beginning, chopsticks truly are a superior tool for transporting food from plate to mouth.
- Japanese people and cars seem smaller than their Western counterparts in roughly equal proportions.
I’ll probably post more thoughts in a few days.
