Mystery, modernity and Mount Fuji

Two months ago, I was sat atop a volcano, gazing out across the barren red scree slopes that composed the ascent, over the forests that surrounded its base, and into the urban sprawl of a true metropolis, Tokyo. The volcano was of course Fuji, the highest point in Japan.
Sitting above the clouds, the sheer scale of Tokyo becomes apparent. Inside the city, you’re aware that it’s huge if only by how long it takes to get anywhere, but you can’t comprehend the size until you see it from above; the city sits in a basin, and almost all of it is covered in buildings.

There is no greenery until you reach the base of the mountains that surround the area, apart from a few parks scattered around the city. There’s a good reason for this though, in some parts of Tokyo, the population density is as high as 15,000 people per square kilometre. It’s certainly no wonder they can’t afford to have countryside.

You could argue that such a huge amount of people in such a small space would never work in the western world; there would be far too many problems, without evening thinking about crime. While the obvious issues of traffic and transport do exist, this is where the culture of politeness allows the Japanese to flourish in such an environment. Not only do they speak to each other politely as you’d expect, but they’re even reserved in showing emotions in public. For the month that I stayed there, I saw nobody arguing on the streets, heard nobody calling to each other across a road as you might do between friends in England, and very rarely saw someone exclaim their enthusiasm for something.

Despite this, the culture is by no means dull. This ‘private’ culture gives rise to things like ‘private dining’ restaurants, each of the booths is curtained off from the rest of the restaurant, down a corridor, and you are given a button to press which summons a waiter to take your order. Entering one of these places feels as if you’re in a film, being taken into some kind of mafia den to do business, though you soon get used to it.
Bars and clubs are also hidden away, usually ‘hole in the wall’ type places that go down into a basement or up to an upper floor, but the inside is usually raucous with the sounds of laughter and people chatting to each other. In the case of clubs, the usual music you’d expect to hear back in the west is played, but it’s interspersed with J-Pop and K-Pop remixes – they seemed to love ‘Gangnam Style’ just a little bit too much. Entering a club in Tokyo is an odd experience as well, like something out of an 80’s film, people have dance-offs against each other, and karaoke is ridiculously popular. Not once did I end up somewhere which wasn’t busy, a ‘quiet’ night in a bar in Tokyo is easily comparable to a busy one back home.

The islands are now very much in the modern age, the trains have an efficiency that puts Germany to shame, and everywhere you look there are ads for various electronic gadgets.
Of course, the old temples, castles, and other heritage sites are a big part of the culture in Japan too, especially so once you leave the city of Tokyo. Amazingly, almost all of them are incredibly well preserved; in Kyoto alone there are one thousand six hundred temples, each of them with its own unique architecture and layout, and the Gion festival makes good use of the biggest ones. Gion itself originated as a purification ritual to appease the gods of diseases and natural disasters, and nowadays is more of a memorial to that ritual. The night that I saw of it was the final night, with a huge parade of floats carrying traditional drummers, Geisha, golden portable shrines, and street vendors selling all kinds of traditional Japanese food.

The food in Japan is brilliant too, there are various spiced fried dishes which taste nothing like anything you can find in the west, Sushi which tastes better than anything you’ll find in a Wagamamas, and even strange bean-based sweet dishes almost like a cross between a rice ball and a cake in texture. My only complaint was that they used an awful lot of Soy sauce, though when I voiced this opinion to a Japanese family I spent a day with, they laughed, agreed, and then said that we English use far too much vinegar. It seems the stereotype of England is ‘bad bread and vinegar’ for a lot of people in Japan!

Overall, Japan is a massively different place to anywhere in the west; for anyone interested in Asia, it’s a place you have to visit at least once. I hugely enjoyed my time there experiencing the culture and seeing the sights, and urge anyone who can to do the same. Just don’t stay out past midnight in Tokyo, that’s when the Yakuza appear.