Bidets, Barefoot Museum Visits, and Public Bathing
Ah, Japan. A country where one can buy hot tea and cold soda from the same vending machine — with their metro card.
Where circling a parking garage in search for an open spot is a thing of the past — because there are mechanical car-elevators for that.
Where I can’t find a single public trash can on the street — yet somehow, I see barely any litter, either.
And the only country where I’ve seen someone lose their phone on the subway and manage to get it back a day later, unscathed.
Dear Japan,
Thanks for a fascinating couple of weeks. This one’s for you.
As I draft this letter, I’m lying across a couch at my hostel in Osaka, waiting for my beloved okonomiyaki restaurant to open at 6:00pm. Behind my laptop, a very odd TV show plays silently on the flatscreen. It seems to be some kind of children’s game show… with mostly live actors, but some cartoon/video-game characters edited in…? The theme is cooking. That’s all I’m picking up.
I’ve got to say, you’re quite a place.
Before I get into this letter any further, I want to acknowledge that my understandings of your culture and history are still very limited, and I have no doubt that my ignorance will show through in this letter. Apologies in advance. Nevertheless, my time here in Japan has been very special, and I write to you to capture the memories of my own personal experience as well as I can. Get ready, it’s gonna be a long one :’)
This is my first time in Asia, ever. How exciting is that?! When I booked my flight from London to Tokyo, I had no idea how long I’d be here; I just knew that I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fly for really cheap (shoutout to my friend Marques for making this possible!) and that I wanted to take the chance to go somewhere completely different from anywhere I’d ever been.
I don’t know if other people can relate to this, but often when I’ve visited a new country or city for the first time, I’ve had to keep reminding myself that I was in that place. I expect to be able to “feel” it when I’m in a foreign country that I’ve heard so much about—you know, just from the energy—but no matter how different the food or language or architecture are, I often don’t “feel” it.
“Not even in Central America?” a friend asked me when I told him I’d had this experience. I had to think about this for a minute. He was right, there was a lot about Guatemala and Nicaragua that was different from the cities I’d previously lived and traveled in… and yet, I didn’t quite get that culture shock. Not like with you.
Here in Japan, I felt it.
For the first time, I’m surrounded not only by a language I don’t know, but by characters I wouldn’t even be able to sound out if I tried. (Shoutout to the Google Translate camera feature!) As I mentioned in my letter to Scotland, this was my first time in over a year visiting a country where I didn’t speak the local language, and as predicted, it made a difference. I learned how to say the basic “Hai” and “Arigatō” and “Sumimasen,” and tried my best to learn some other basic Japanese phrases, but it just didn’t come as naturally to me as Spanish always has. (This was actually really discouraging, and remains one of the reasons I’m quite ready to leave tomorrow.)
The first time it really hit me that I was in such a different place was on my first day, when I was in a Tokyo 7-Eleven. I picked up the one pre-made dish I could find that contained tofu instead of chicken or fish, and then I realized I couldn’t eat it when I noticed, upon closer inspection, that the squiggly silver lines peppering the dish had tiny little eyeballs. Anchovies! (We do have anchovies in the States, but apparently I’d never seen them topping tofu before? I always thought they were way bigger.)
Speaking of food, I knew that your cuisine was fish-heavy, but man, I didn’t realize being vegan would be such a struggle here. To be honest, only half of the meals I’ve gotten from restaurants were actually Japanese, and of those, the only one I really truly enjoyed was this vegan okonomiyaki that I’m about to go order for the third time in six days. I’ve also tried vegan ramen, udon soup, and tempura, but I honestly prefer the versions I’ve had in the States much better. (Cue the gasps.)
But back to the topic of Japan being unlike any place I’ve ever been. On the walk to my hostel from the train station early that first morning in Tokyo, I passed by the ancient Sensō-ji temple, just chillin’. Amazing. Without even looking, I’d stumbled upon a major historic Buddhist temple.
Within the next few days, I’d wander into a loud and vibrant, two-story video game center that reminded me of Vegas casinos, an arcade room whose entire first floor was devoted to claw machines with popcorn and soda cans and stuffed animals, an “entertainment” store that turned into an ~adult~ store on the second and third floors, and a hedgehog “cafe” where visitors pay not for food or a drink, but for 30–45 minutes to sit and play with a hedgehog. (Personally, I’m not a huge fan of these animal cafes. I know they’re cute in theory, but please leave the poor hedgehogs and pigs alone!)
On my last day in Tokyo, I went to the TeamLab Planets museum, and I loved it! It was such an unnatural experience to walk around in a museum barefoot — especially without any socks. Of course, when I posted photos from this museum on Instagram, several of my friends (all from various Western countries) teased me about being barefoot because they aren’t used to it.
After a few nights in Tokyo, I took an overnight bus to Kyoto. Thrilled at the sight of snow for the first time in almost a year, I made my way through the icy sidewalks to my hostel-style guesthouse. It was too early for reception to be open, so I let out a sigh of relief when the front door actually gave way to my push, allowing me to enter the dimly-lit, homey-looking foyer. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was the array of shoes neatly laid out in the entranceway. As I untied my own boots, I heard shuffling in a kitchen around the corner, and I spotted the spread of fruit, pastries, sandwiches, a rice cooker, and a slow-cooker laid out on the table to my right. Check-in was hours away, but as soon as the owner saw me, he encouraged me to set my bags down, showed me how to work the coffee maker, and told me I could help myself to breakfast. What a guy.
Here in Kyoto, I had a lot of “firsts.” For instance, while I’d already become familiar with bidets at the Tokyo Haneda Airport (I think I’ve had one or two opportunities to use a bidet in the past, too, but they always weirded me out), this guesthouse was my first time experiencing a heated toilet seat and seeing a toilet with a built-in sink. (This last concept is actually really cool, by the way, but I would’ve appreciated if the water were a little warmer.)
On my third day in Kyoto, my new hostel friends and I went to see the bamboo forest in Arashiyama, which is honestly one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen. There was something magical to me about the lime-green bamboo stalks shooting through a perfect carpet of white snow, towering meters above our heads, with their delicate leaves sparkling in the breeze.
After this attraction, my friends led me to try my first Japanese street food. On our stroll out of the forest, a couple of us bought baked sweet potatoes wrapped in newspaper, which were pretty good. Then, we went to one of the food stands on the main street, where the guys ordered me a fried block of tofu and a cup of warm soy milk. I don’t usually drink soy milk on its own, but it was sweet of these guys to buy foods that they knew were vegan for me, and it was also so wholesome how excited they were about fresh soy milk in general.
Next, we hiked up to the nearby monkey park and lookout point, where we watched (wild?) Japanese macaques swing between trees and pick bugs out of one another’s fur.
After we explored this area, the guys took me to Nishiki Market for more street food. Once they’d filled up on various meat skewers, sushi, and dairy ice cream, Still-Hungry Me led them to a nearby vegan restaurant I’d saved on my Google Maps, where we had some vegan karaage and fluffy pancakes with more (non-dairy) ice cream. (We couldn’t figure out what flavor the ice cream was… sake?! It lowkey tasted like alcohol.) Once we’d all had enough to eat, we browsed a local record store and Daiso before finally wandering the streets in search for a bar with live music.
Turns out, Sunday isn’t a great day for jazz in Kyoto, and after peeking into several bars and finding no music, we ended up at Bar Orange. We opted to sit on the terrace, escaping the January evening chill by slipping off our shoes, crouching down onto the zabuton cushions, tucking our legs under the “chabudai” table, and wrapping ourselves in fuzzy blankets. I was confused when Jesse mentioned that the table was “heated,” but after several minutes of us fidgeting with dials and a nearby power cord, the center area underneath the table was radiating heat, and we all reveled in it. Snuggled up like this, we spent the next several hours sipping our various orders of tea, cocktails, and whiskey; snacking on wasabi edamame, smoked nuts, and smoked potato chips (tasted exactly how I imagined they would—strange, but fun. 10/10 would order again); and talking. As I would later tell Alex, I was amazed that I could spend an entire day with a group of guys who’d gone to college together and feel so included the entire time — but that’s how they were. This was one of my favorite days of the trip.
After a few nights at this “guesthouse,” I moved to the apartment of Hanako, a woman I’d found on Couchsurfing. Back in Tokyo, when I’d realized how much the language barrier would hinder my ability to get to know you, I figured that staying with a local who spoke Japanese and had grown up with you would be a great opportunity. So, I surfed with Hanako for three nights. Unfortunately, she was working almost the entire time I stayed with her, so she didn’t get to explore Kyoto with me, but I still enjoyed my stay. Here, I also met a few other couch-surfers from Europe and Chile, and we ate dinner together two of the three nights. Cute.
Still here in Kyoto, I did one of the most adventurous things I’ve ever done: going to a sentō. At this gender-separated bathhouse, I had to fight my inhibitions and strip off all clothing to enter the hot tubs and sauna. (While I am used to seeing the occasional naked woman in a locker room at Maryland swimming pools, we don’t usually go into the hot tub and sauna without a bathing suit.) This was a really fascinating experience for me, in the sense that it led me to reflect a lot on cultural norms, human perception and thinking, and the ways I’ve personally grown up to think about things like nudity and privacy and gender and comfort and shame and judgment. Honestly, I’ll probably write a whole separate blog post about this.
Anyway, let’s move on to Osaka. Osaka was also pretty interesting. Here, I bought my first hot green tea from a vending machine. In the States and Europe, our vending machines usually only serve room-temperature or cold drinks and dry snacks. And while I, too, grew up only a few blocks from a 7–Eleven, I wouldn’t exactly be able to find a snack with tentacles at mine.
In all seriousness, though, I did stop at 7–Eleven or Family Mart at least a dozen times in my 16 days here with you, and one of my most iconic memories of this trip will forever be pulling down my mask to gobble down one of those pre-wrapped kelp onigiri on my walks between hostels, bus stops, and train stations. (Fun fact, my friend Suze introduced me to these in Paris a year ago, and I’d totally forgotten they existed until Tokyo!)
Okay, it’s been a couple hours since I started writing this, and I’m finally seated in Oko, waiting for my vegan okonomiyaki. Very quickly, I will note down a few miscellaneous details that I want to remember about my time with you, before I sign off:
- So formal — I find it fascinating that I don’t have to ask people standing on an escalator to stay to one side so that I can pass. Every time I entered or exited a train station with an escalator, I’d notice a line of people patiently standing to one side of it, while another line would wordlessly pass, no “excuse me” needed.
- Diagonal crosswalks — Not sure why I’ve never seen these anywhere else in the world, but they’re so useful. Love.
- No freaking benches — What’s with the lack of benches on sidewalks?
- Underdressed — I intentionally packed my least-favorite winter clothes for this trip, including a puffy coat that I got as a hand-me-down from a friend (thanks, Anna!) and a pair of boots that had lived for three years, untouched, under my bed. This served me well, as my plan is to ditch these clothes here in Japan before flying to my next, much warmer destination tomorrow, and I don’t want to deal with the heartbreak of parting with nicer clothes. That said… I constantly felt under-dressed when I was with you, as you showed me the absolute coolest outfits I’ve ever seen. My favorite was that of a girl in black knee-high platform boots, a manga-style pleated skirt, and a fuzzy pink sweater with bunny ears on the hood and ribbons criss-crossing the sleeves. I should’ve asked to take a photo.
- Organized CHAOS — Japanese train stations are the most crowded and complicated ones I’ve ever seen, with a million people striding in a million different directions, and yet somehow everyone seemed to know where they were going and managed to avoid bumping into each other and doing that ridiculous side-step dance the rest of us can’t seem to escape on a sidewalk.
- Nice hostels (+ bathrooms)—I think my current hostel is the nicest one I’ve ever been in—especially the bathroom! Before you, never had I ever even considered showering in a hostel without sandals (seriously, even when my flip flops were broken in Budapest and Nicaragua… I would drag my right foot around so that I didn’t have to walk barefoot). I know I’ll miss some of these luxuries in Southeast Asia.
As we can see, you really are quite a special place. I could go on about so many more things that I saw and did and noticed about you, but I think this is a good place to wrap up. I hope to see you again someday. Thank you again for showing and teaching me so much.
Sincerely,
OKO’s #1-fan
