Seven True Tales from Japan, Our Strongest Ally

In about seven weeks, our voters will deliver a verdict on our 248-year-old experiment in democracy. Many of us will be working like crazy, and donating all we can, to influence it. But whatever the verdict, there’s something else we all can do in the meantime: examine our own American culture with fresh eyes.

One way of doing that is comparing other cultures. In my 79 years, I’ve visited some forty foreign countries and lived in two: England (Cambridge) and Russia (Moscow). But as I look back on my travels, one country stands out as unique: Japan.

I’ll can’t describe Japan’s uniqueness. Words alone fail. But these seven stories may convey an impression of what makes Japan worth visiting and knowing:

1. The Shinkansen. Most Americans have heard of Japan’s unique train system. Its long-distance trains race between cities at a “slow” speed of 120 kilometers per hour (72 MPH, the “hikari”) and a faster 180 kilometers per hour (108 MPH, the “nozomi”).

The trains are superbly maintained and spotlessly clean. You buy reserved seats, by number. If you dislike smoke, you can buy a non-smoking seat in a car that never carries smokers, so all its surfaces and air conditioning equipment are smoke-free.

The tracks are so smooth and level that you hardly feel any sense of motion, except an air-pressure increase when another high-speed train passes in the opposite direction. You can work or sleep easily, but if you want to see the scenery, you have to pay attention. If you blink or nod, you might miss a gorgeous hidden bay on the coast, as your train rushes by it in an instant.

The trains in Japan run on time. They run so precisely that the clock in the station clicks into the precise minute slot just as the train opens its doors.

And therein lies my tale. Once, on a shinkansen trip from Kyoto to Tokyo, I exited my car rolling two suitcases. Just after I had left, I sensed that I had dropped my wallet inside. My heart sank, as I thought the doors would soon close and I would lose it forever.

But a Japanese “salaryman”—a complete stranger—rushed out of the car, holding my wallet before him. “Sumimasen!” (“Excuse me!”) he exclaimed, as if he had done something wrong, and handed me my wallet. I bowed and thanked him, and he rushed back into the car just as the automatic doors started to close.

2. Those multicolored, fringed envelopes. Some time before, on one of my early visits, I had found myself in one of the many proprietor-owned small shops in Tokyo. (Still today, small shops predominate over the “big-box” stores that, by and large, have made small retail businesses a thing of the past among us, except maybe online.)

The shop sold stationery, and the proprietor spoke fairly good English. He spent some five minutes helping me find exactly what I wanted.

Since he had been so kind, and since the shop was far from full, I ventured to ask him a question that had troubled me for several visits. All the stationery stores I had seen in Japan sold narrow, multicolored envelopes. Not only did they have pastel stripes; they also had long, multicolored pastel fringes, like the fringes on a cowboy’s leather jacket.

“What are these envelopes used for?” I asked. He replied that Japanese use them to send cash, in stacks of brand-new, ten-thousand-yen banknotes (about a hundred dollars each) for gifts, salaries and donations. Their garish colors and shape, he said, warn postal employees and others to take special care of cash mail.

3. The Errant Cabbie. On my early trips to Japan, I stayed in so-called “business hotels,” which are affordable. Their rooms have complete, private bathrooms, with good showers—all modular—and controls for all the lights, TV and A/C within easy reach on the night table. But the rooms are small: I had to take care doing my arm swings for exercise, so as not to scrape my knuckles on opposite walls.

Once, in Osaka, I stayed in a small business hotel called the “East” Hotel. It seemed to be on a big boulevard, and I was proud to be able to read the three letters of its name in neon katakana (more on this later).

On returning one evening, I gave the cabbie the hotel’s card and said the name. But he had trouble finding it in Osaka’s notoriously confusing labyrinth of streets. Finally, the neon sign “East” hove into view and he pulled up to the curb.

When I asked him how much the was the fare, he said “nothing.” He would not accept any money at all because, he said, he had provided poor service by not taking me right there.

4. The “Golden Week” Debauch. In Japan, the week between our Christmas and New Year (“Golden Week”) is the time when small-firm proprietors take their employees out for dinner and drinks. Drinking, including both sake and stronger stuff, is often to excess.

I had stumbled on this holiday ritual after contacting a Japanese lawyer whom I had helped years before, in law school, by lending him my antitrust notes. He had invited me out to this yearly ritual with employees of his small firm.

What amazed me then—it may be different now—was that all this treating of employees was done entirely in cash. Firm proprietors walked around the busy streets of Tokyo carrying rolls of ten-thousand-yen notes as big as their fists.

They stuffed these wads of cash loosely inside coats or overcoats. Many of them were old and frail. Most, if not all, were drunk and inattentive. And it was late at night.

Yet no one touched them, and none seems to have given any thought to possibly being robbed. It was on this night that the thought of Japan’s big cities being some of the world’s safest began to penetrate my American brain.

5. My Allergy Serums. During the time I was visiting Japan most frequently, I was taking “allergy shots” to desensitize me to various natural pollens and molds. The injections had been prescribed by an American doctor, but they had to be taken regularly to work. So I took them, in small vials cooled with ice, in a thermos jar, on my travels to Japan.

Once, in a bigger hotel, I was trying to reload the ice in the thermos jar from an ice chest in the lobby. A uniformed attendant approached me and offered to help. He (or I) pressed a little too hard on an ice cube, and the glass vacuum enclosure shattered inside the jar with a loud bang.

Just as I began wondering how to fix this problem, and how to retrieve the vials of serum from the mess of shattered glass, the attendant declared “Chotto matte, kudasai!” (“Wait a bit, please!”). He took the broken thermos and set off literally running. I could see him run out the main door of the hotel, across the street, and into a major department store.

In short order, he returned. He had my serum vials, all cleaned of glass shards, safely stored inside a brand new thermos bottle, all stainless steel. The jar he had bought as a replacement was much sturdier and better (and probably far more expensive!) than my broken glass-inside one.

He would not let me pay for anything and sent me on my way with an apology for his clumsiness. In fact, it had been hard for me to know whose clumsiness had caused the breakage, as both of us had been working on the jar at the same time.

6. Tokyo’s Crowded Streets. In one of my most recent trips to Tokyo, I began to notice something unusual. I was in Meguro, a youngish, hip district of Tokyo, in the evening when the wide sidewalks were full of people going to and coming from bars and restaurants. Some of them seemed inebriated, but others seemed to be walking fast and purposefully from late work to home.

But something struck me: in all this fast-moving crowd, no one seemed to come close to bumping into anyone else. So my long-ago scientific background urged me to try an experiment.

Feigning drunkenness, I stumbled around on the broad sidewalk, making eye contact with no one. Several times, I crossed perpendicular to the motion of foot traffic. Not once did anyone bump into me; nor did anyone shout a warning or a reprimand. Instead, the rapid flow of foot traffic parted for me like the Red Sea for Moses.

From this and other like events I reached a tentative conclusion about Japanese people: they look out for each other. They seem to feel an innate responsibility toward other people, even complete strangers and foreigners (“gaijin”) like me.

7. The Red Marking Pen. By now, I hope these stories have convinced you that Japan has a very different culture from ours. But I must tell one more story, about its different history.

The University of Hiroshima Faculty of Law became a “sister school” to the law school where I first taught law: the University of Hawaii’s William S. Richardson School of Law. That relationship supported most of my early visits to Japan.

At one time, I was lecturing on intellectual property before a small audience of law professors and students at the Hiroshima University. I would speak English in paragraphs, then pause for subsequent, sequential translation into Japanese. I highlighted points on a whiteboard in English outline, since most, if not all, of my audience could read English well.

The whiteboard had a collection of various colored pens in a shelf protruding below. I picked up a red marking pen at random and began my outline, but I soon noticed some awkward looks among the audience. The professor who had invited me to speak approached, gently took the red pen from my hand, and explained that, in Japan, red writing is reserved for the Emperor.

* * * I hope these stories have convinced you that Japan has a very different society from ours, but different in a good and enticing way. I’m a big Japanophile. I love traveling there and enjoy it more each time.

There’s no need to be intimidated by Japan’s Asian writing. In addition to the ubiquitous Chinese characters, many of which are simplified, Japan has two alphabets: hiragana (used for Japanese words) and katakana (used for English and other foreign words). You can learn these alphabets with a few hours’ effort and read many of the neon signs around Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, among other big cities.

As for transit, Japan has, IMHO, the best public transit systems in the world. In the old days, you had to know hiragana in order to get around Tokyo, because every third or fifth subway pillar would have the name in hiragana, in addition to the inscrutable kanji, or Japanese-adapted Chinese characters.

Today, it’s all infinitely easier. Every subway and train car has an electronic display that announces and displays the name of every station, in advance and on arrival, in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean.

And don’t even get me started on the food. There are so many different kinds and flavors, and so many price ranges. You can easily afford to eat well, as long as you don’t hang out at the major hotels or restaurants for foreigners. In subway stations, for example, I’ve had excellent bowls of donburi for two, with shrimp or meat, for less than $7.

But what makes Japan most worth visiting today is its unique geopolitical position. It literally stands between us and the behemoth China, which its people understand better than we because they all can read its writing. And of all our close allies, Japan has the largest population (in 2022: Japan 125M, Germany 83.8M, France 68M, Britain 67M; compare Russia: 144.2M), the biggest GDP, the strongest economy and (perhaps tied with Germany) the best reputation for excellence in engineering. Most of all, as I hope these stories illustrate, this vital ally has a unique culture with aspects that we could do well to emulate.



For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post