Is Japanese better? Technology, culture, perfection…
✈️Travel,⭐️Featured
Recently I was on trip to Japan after 12 years. I’ve noticed many things that in Japan are different than here in Europe, and very often… better. Which reminds me of the lyrics of one of my favorite Placebo songs: “Pure Morning” where they sing that: My Japanese is better… (check out the song at the bottom of this post). So anyway, here are the things I noticed while being in Japan and what I think about them:
- 🌸 Cherry blossoms make everything look great
- 🛒 Convenience stores
- 🚗 Renting a car in Japan
- 🧭 Navigation with Apple Maps
- 📦 Space efficiency
- 🚓 Cars are small. Minivans are really mini.
- 🏎️ Sport cars can be also cool.
- 🚽 Hygiene and butt-cleaning toilets!
- 👞 Shoes in Japan
- 👟 Buying shoes in Japan is worth it now.
- 🛂 Tax-free shopping. Register or carry your passport.
- 🪪 You can set up a transit card in Apple wallet
- 🥋 Marie Kondo is ingrained in their DNA
- 💼 Japanese order in shops and restaurants
- 👕 Uniqlo clothes and other brands, also very zen…
- ✂️ Nail cutters and scissors
- 🇬🇧 Their English is really bad…
- ❤️ Japanese friends are forever!
- ✍️ Japanese like writing beautifully
- 🎸 Placebo - Pure Morning
🌸 Cherry blossoms make everything look great
Cherry blossoms are amazing in Japan. This is after all the country of blossoming cherry.
When you visit at the end of March you’ll see cherry blossom flowers everywhere. They make everything more vivid, every photo looks better with cherry blossoms in it. Yes, the accommodation and flights can be a little more expensive when you plan your trip at that time, but it’s worth it. So worth it. Especially when you visit the Ueno Park:
Even when you look at the green woods in Japan, they are not entirely green as there are blossoming cherry trees scattered everywhere…
🛒 Convenience stores
Family Mart, Seven Eleven and Lawson are the leading convenience stores in Japan. They have everything. Supermarket stuff, fresh food, great coffee, ATM, clean toilet, and they are usually open 24/7.
Japan didn’t just copy the convenience stores concept from the US — they reinvented the idea completely. So much so, that now the 7/11 brand is owned by a Japanese company, Ito-Yokado, which was initially only a franchisee of it. When you book accommodation in Japan, make sure you’re next to a convenience store and you’ll be fine.
🚗 Renting a car in Japan
Normally you’d travel in Japan using bullet trains called the Shinkansen but if for some reason you have to rent a car, make sure to get the ETC (Electronic Toll Collection) card so you can drive on all the highways and automatically pay for them.
To drive in Japan you need to get an “International Driver’s Permit” in your country which is valid only for a year. Remember that they drive on the wrong side of the road, meaning “Left hand traffic” like in the UK. My rental car which was the latest Toyota Prius, not only had the steering wheel on the wrong side, but also the indicators were moved to the right side, so in the first few days when I was switching lanes I was automatically cleaning my windshield…
The new Prius doesn’t use much gasoline. The latest model has a larger battery so on the highway as I was going 80-100 km/h I saw it just maintain this speed on cruise control with electricity. And it was aggressively charging the battery any time it could. Very efficient car.
🧭 Navigation with Apple Maps
Choosing a navigation app in Japan as a foreigner is not easy. My usual favorite Waze is shit in Japan. The app somehow doesn’t understand that just because I’m physically in Japan, doesn’t mean I know how to read Japanse characters, even though my iPhone is set up in English. Google Maps is less worse in that it shows directions sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English and sometimes in both… you never know what you get. And don’t get me started on its inability to save recent addresses correctly. What are these talented Google engineers working on???
Apple Maps was the best as it was always showing things in English for me. In Japan on the highways all directions are written in both Japanese and English, so it baffles me why Waze chose Japanese, Google Maps chose random and only Apple Maps understood my needs.
The trick when driving on the highways in Japan is that they are very packed and sometimes they have several levels, so even if you turn to a wrong level, GPS still can think you’re on the right track when you’re really not. Also, many times you have different lanes to turn to different highways and if you choose a wrong lane, there’s very little room to maneuver and correct yourself. Once I had an ETA to my hotel of only 30 minutes and then I ended up on a wrong lane, went on a wrong highway and then suddenly my ETA increased to 50 minutes. High price for a small mistake.
📦 Space efficiency
Japanese are very efficient with space. After all it’s a big population living on a small island with lots of mountains. For the first time in my life I was using a gas station which have designated spots where you stop your car and then the fuel pump comes from the distributor mounted on the roof.
It really looks weird but works!
🚓 Cars are small. Minivans are really mini.
Because Japan is so small they also drive small cars. Not wide. Not long. But tall. Very boxy. Even the sports cars can be very tiny and cute. Companies like Daihatsu, Isuzu, Toyota, Suzuki, Nissan, Mazda, or Honda are manufacturing these small cars mostly for the Japanese market.
All this while in Europe or USA the cars are just getting bigger and nobody buys vans, everyone wants SUVs.
🏎️ Sport cars can be also cool.
Japanese are famous for their “drifting scene”. They have these aggressively tuned cars that can drive sideways while smoking rubber of their wheels. They drive both Japanese-made tuned cars like Nissan GTR or Toyota Supra, but they also drive European sports cars…
Very often they import automobiles from the western world with the steering wheel on the left side. Apparently having an inconveniently-located steering wheel in your sports car is considered cool.
🚽 Hygiene and butt-cleaning toilets!
In Japan free public toilets can clean your butt! They have an electronic bidet built-in in their toilets that can spray to clean your rear end. And not only are these available in hotel rooms but also in most public toilets. I was amazed how clean and modern the free public toilets were and when they wipe your butt it feels like it’s Christmas morning.
Inspired by this I installed two such toilets in my home. I bought the first one after my last trip to Japan 12 years ago and a year ago I decided to splurge and upgrade the toilet in my home office… and it’s glorious.
In many toilets when you flush them, the water that is being used to fill up the water tank can be used for hand washing. This is a space- and water-saving measure. You just use the water that is anyway going to be used to flush the toilet to rinse your hands. Brilliant.
👞 Shoes in Japan
When you’re in Japan you’re gonna walk a lot and you will be asked to take your shoes on and off in many places. Again, it’s about hygiene and not brining dirt to your home, or museum, or a restaurant. That’s why it’s critical to wear comfortable shoes that feel great.
I’m a fan of Callaghan Adaptation Technology shoes which have served me well here. These particular shoes have been designed to be easily slipped on and off and have no laces.
👟 Buying shoes in Japan is worth it now.
I bought new running New Balance shoes and a pair of Air Jordans. Not only the currency exchange is in your favor, but you’re also getting them tax free (so around 10% less).
Even in their outlet store they had these fancy feet measuring devices so I could get the sizes of my shoes right.
🛂 Tax-free shopping. Register or carry your passport.
Speaking of tax free, before you go to Japan you need to sign up and register on their “visit Japan” web site so that you don’t have to fill out any additional forms when you land and you can also use a special QR code to validate your passport when buying tax free stuff.
There are QR codes for everything in Japan now. And you have to have active Internet connection in Japan to use them, because they don’t let you screenshot these, you need to load a live web site with live time to make sure your QR code is authentic. This happened to me when I bought an all-day ticket for a bus and I screenshotted the ticket and the bus driver was shouting at me “no screenshot”!.
As to the Internet, I got a 25GB package for a month for $25 bucks and I just disabled online access for some apps and it worked great. I used an eSIM from Airalo.
🪪 You can set up a transit card in Apple wallet
This surprised me. Instead of getting a physical transit card, I could just go to Apple Wallet, tap to add a new card and go to “transit cards” and choose the most popular - Suica.
Later I could top it up directly with Apple Pay.
🥋 Marie Kondo is ingrained in their DNA
When you visit a museum or castle in Japan, you see that their rooms are very… zen. There’s barely any furniture there and barely any things… it’s all clean. They put stuff away after they use it and they have dedicated spaces for each of the things.
That’s why their best-selling author of “Life Changing Magic of Tyding”, Marie Kondo didn’t really invent anything. She just codified the Japanese way of cleaning things in a book that’s approachable by the western civilization.
💼 Japanese order in shops and restaurants
They have trays in all the shops and cafes. So you could put your coins, cards, bills not on a table like a Neanderthal but on a nice tray.
They very often also offer you boxes for purses and backpacks. This way you don’t put them on the floor like an animal.
👕 Uniqlo clothes and other brands, also very zen…
The clothes they have are amazing. Great quality, no logos, very zen, very practical, very good and comfortable fabric and also the process of buying is very easy - you just put them in the basket and they automatically count your total.
And again, your total is not much. Uniqlo is priced very competitively and in Japan because of the exchange rate and the tax free shopping, buying clothes becomes addictive. Half of my wardrobe is now Uniqlo!
✂️ Nail cutters and scissors
In Japan the old Japanese factories that specialized in manufacturing samurai swords are now also producing excellent nail cutters, scissors or tweezers.
I got fingernail clippers from the company called “Green Bell” and they are amazing. They cut my nails like champs. I also got smaller ones from Kai.
🇬🇧 Their English is really bad…
They use signs with English that’s really weird. It’s not even Google-Translate-bad, it’s worse. It’s like they look up each word in a dictionary and try to translate things themselves. “Sorry for the inconveniences”, or “You must out the parking” are just a few examples…
And yes, they apologize for everything. Basically when you’re in Japan you need to know two words: “Sumimasen” (“I’m sorry”) or “Arigatou” (“Thank you”) and you either apologize or thank them. They do the same for you. They are very kind. ☺️
❤️ Japanese friends are forever!
Back in 2011 when I was in Japan during the biggest earthquake I became friends with Kurazono Keizo. He is the author of the first Nozbe book in Japanese. Also, we’ve been through a lot at that time. We met again in 2014 and now after 12 years we met again. It was very emotional and very cool. I’m so happy that both of our missions are still aligned. What we do with our app and what he does writing amazing books. He showed me the manuscript of the sequel to his book “Good Vibes. Good Work”.
Meeting Zono-san again was one of my main reasons to go back to Japan this time. Together we’d like to change the attitude to work of Japanese workers…
✍️ Japanese like writing beautifully
They are big on calligraphy. They are famous for it. It was a treat for me to visit the museum of the famous author of “The Great Wave”: Hokusai.
In his museum I could see how he developed drawing and writing to perfection.
🎸 Placebo - Pure Morning
Time to end this long post with the song “Pure Morning” by Placebo where they just state that:
“My Japanese is better…”
Well, their Japanese is definitely better 🤪