The strangest thing about Japan is not the food. And believe me, to the average Brit, accustomed to well cooked, battered Cod as their staple fish, the food in Japan is strange. Even our Yo Sushi interpretation seems tame once you have experienced full-on Japanese cuisine. The sheer variety of colours, flavours, ingredients, styles of cooking (and lack there of) left me embarrassed about my average diet back home. It took a trip to Tokyo’s famous fish market to make me realise why food is such an integral part of Japanese culture. Here, workers tolerate, and largely ignore, the tourists who come to witness huge tuna and a plethora of other fish I couldn’t even attempt to name, being auctioned.
In other Asian countries that I have visited, notably India and China, where I was always conscious of being freakishly tall, white and foreign, in Japan I felt entirely at home. It’s the only country I’ve ever visited and thought ‘Yeah, I could actually live here’. Despite the obvious cultural divides between our two nations, I got the impression that the British and Japanese nuances and psyche have a lot in common. They share our island mentality. Japan certainly feels detached from Asia – the lack of anyone except ethnic Japanese walking around central Tokyo suggests their immigration policy reflects that too – much as we are isolated from Europe. Their respect for personal space and unwanted conversation might mean the Japanese come across stoic and perhaps cold but that seems very natural to a Brit who took four years before he spoke to his next door neighbour. They also share our disregard for other languages and persistence in speaking our own mother tongue progressively louder to anyone who can’t understand it, using decibels to compensate for vowels. The taxi drivers in Kyoto gave us entirely blank looks when we asked to be taken to the golden pavilion – probably the most notable tourist site in the city.
For all the similarities between our nations, Japan is of course very different and this is what made the country so strange to me. The place felt familiar yet eerily different, like seeing an old friend for the first time again after a term at university. Whether it was their unfathomable love for strange cartoon creatures that were either cute or creepy, such as the phallic mascot of Tokyo Tower called ‘Noppon’, I’m still undecided.
Even the ruthless efficiency of the trains or their refusal to break even minor rules felt odd; every man on the streets immaculately dressed in suits and crowds waiting patiently for the ‘green man’ whilst the road was obviously devoid of cars. As did the infusion of superstition into their daily life – we visited one temple in Kyoto with miles of orange arches each dedicated to the rice and sake God, rented by every major company in Japan. On the back of this visit and other similar ones I found it impossible to leave the country before I had become the proud owner of a fox shaped bell. This supposedly has the power to call good luck to whoever rings it. Even the countryside I saw from the window of the infamous bullet train looked different due to a farming culture in maintaining small, very regular fields, in contrast to loose and expansive ones back home.
Japan is a fantastic country. Going there is not going to be a life changing experience and you won’t ‘find yourself’ like people seem to do in Thailand. Just walking around Tokyo and soaking in the atmosphere is an experience in its own right, as is going into an average sized bar to find it has just four chairs and an £8 entry fee. But going there will, oddly enough, make you consider and hopefully appreciate what being British means.
