[Yikes – the formatting just went crazy. Haven’t been able to fix it, so this looks pretty darned weird. Humble apologies in advance….]

I’ve been in Japan for five days now, with three more to come, and it is unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. So calm, so quiet, so efficient, so sleek, so serene, so sophisticated, so smooth, so expensive, so – Japanese….. It’s really quite an amazing place and culture in a myriad of ways.

A word about the Japanese people. Being everywhere I’ve been has been like being in a library. Everything and everyone is super quiet and silent. I haven’t heard a horn honked anywhere. No one makes a peep on the trains (you’re asked to go between cars and talk in small compartments purposely built if you need to use your mobile). The only time I’ve seen people laughing and talking out loud was in the Nagano train station well after 10 pm, clearly following a night of imbibing and carousing with work colleagues. Watching those folks hug each other and laugh while saying goodnight seemed surreal, as though their strict cultural inhibitions, loosened with alcohol (where haven’t we seen that?), temporarily fled everyone. Onlookers seemed completely aware and bemused, perhaps even a little envious that fun was being had.

Timid is likely too strong a word to describe the zeitgeist here, but it feels as though people remember (or have been taught to understand) the horrors their ancestors brought on the country in two World Wars, and the idea of acting aggro again just never crosses their minds. Japan has serious demographic and economic problems, and it seems that folk here are cognizant of them. Their historic xenophobia has meant that others havenever been welcomed, even to do the menial tasks performed by refugees and  those from poor countries elsewhere in the world. While arguably good for the purity of Japan’s gene pool, the total absence of diversity is a bit shocking. In addition, the extremely low birth rate here means that the population is not reproducing itself. As a result, the population skews quite old, and their social security system is very much out of balance between those drawing out and those paying in. The economic lines have already started to cross between revenue and expenditures, and no one has yet come up with a solution to keep the country’s retirement system solvent, likely because a tenable one doesn’t really exist.