We took a quick getaway between Christmas and New Years to Tokyo. I’d not been to Japan yet. I think my hesitation was mostly because of my unfamiliarity with Japanese food and the limited times I tried it I wasn’t overly fond of what I tried. Nevertheless, it was long overdue for me to get over it. There are many aspects of the Japanese culture that are very appealing to me, like they are very orderly, respectful, polite, helpful, and they follow the rules. Japan is a very safe country and it’s very clean, even with it being very difficult to find trash bins around the city. It appears it’s less of an eat “on the run” society and take away is taken home to eat.
First impressions of Tokyo, a city of 14 million people, are it’s busy but not necessarily always overwhelmingly busy. There are orderly queues for everything. The transportation system is impressively vast and very efficient. Pleasant music plays when trains arrive and depart, everyone waits for others to get off before embarking. People aren’t talking on their phones on the trains and there are signs everywhere telling people to have their phones on silent. The signage is in both Japanese and English as are the announcements which made it very easy to get around. There does seem to be a heads in the phone culture though; I guess it’s a way to pass the time while commuting. For most of our stay we commuted on the JR line and at most of the stations you’ll find shops or a shopping mall attached to it. It was quite amazing to see all the variety of things you could actually buy at a train station.
With five days here, it feels like we only have time to barely scratch the surface of what Tokyo has to offer.
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