japan extra

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we left japan a few days ago, but there's so much to say about the place that it needs another entry.

Our trip after Tokyo saw us take an overnight ferry south to one of Japans 4 main islands, Shikoku. Here we visited the oldest and supposedly best public baths in the country, paying a little extra for a private dressing room. This was a nice bit of luxury and a useful place to recover after witnessing close up how thoroughly Japanese people scrub. It was while in this area that I added to my list of things-that-hostels-offer-that-5*-hotels-don't. Our hostel, previously voted number 1 in the entire country, offered one of those fully automatic, electronic total body massage chairs.

From Shikoku we took another, shorter, ferry trip to Hiroshima. This place needs no real introduction, but suffice to say, the peace park memorial, and atomic bomb museum are very well done, giving nieve 30-somethings like me a proper idea of what went on at the end of the war. Hiroshima has a subsidised youth and foreigner visitors accomadation center, designed to encourage visits from these groups, which enabled us to stay in flash hotel type accomadation, on the 9th floor with city views, for around 15GBP. Surely the accommadation bargain of the trip so far? The rest of hiroshima is a slick and modern city, perhaps because they had to start again in such a dramtic way.

Japan has a real lust for 'top-3's' and at any tourist spot or in any local guide book, things will be labelled one of the top 3 this, that or the other. In hiroshima we saw one of japan's top 3 most scenic views which seemed fair enough. Later we saw one of Japan's top 3 set of shelves which was all together a bit more strange.

After Hiroshima, came Kyoto. is just a coincidence that the old capital city is a anagram of the current capital city?

Kyoto has 1600 temples, all of which are beautiful, but tend to look the same as each other after the first few hundred. Kyoto also has the most marvelous train station. A huge cathedral-like building which a curved roof that looks a bit like acreas of scaffolding. 14 floors of escalators leave the centre of the ground floor and emerge diagionally out of the open side of the roof. I thought the escalator was a bit like a very slow version of Disneys Space Mountain. on 3 evenings out of 4 in Kyoto Tanuja and I bought tasty take away sushi and sat on a little platform about 10 escalator high looking down into the bustling station.

We returned to Tokyo and took a day trip from there back to Mount Fuji, which was....well...a mountain. The bus took us half way up the foggy mountain. We had 20 minutes for foggy pictures, then had to move on to make way for more tour groups. We then drove to a other places to fill our 'day-trip'. A ferry, a cable car, an amusement park for lunch. I'm not a big fan of coach trips, but we'd actually taken this one to have a go on a bullet train. 90km back to Tokyo in 40 minutes. Super clean, super efficient, and can you imagine in England a train where the trolley girl and ticket inspector both bow when entering and leaving the traincar?!

So Japan is finished and what's the conclusion? Well for me it's this. I'd never thought about what a country with a higher standard of living than the UK would be like. Japan is that country. We have nice clean loos in department stores, The Japanes have electro loos, with flush control, a variety of heating and spraying functions , and sometimes a big red 'powerful deoderiser' button. We have food halls in department stores, Japan has immense rooms with almost every vendor giving the most tasty free samples, we have Wi-Fi in city coffee shops and airports. Japan has it without fail everywhere. London has an extensive, expensive tube system. Japan's is twice the size and half the price. The list of subtle differences goes on and on...

Initially Japan didn't surprise me. I had expected hi-tech with glimpses of the traditional past. As a big picture, first impression this is definatlay what you get. However, later on, after experiencing so many subtle differences I started to apprectiate the place more and more...

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