Japan is serious, crazy & innovative

The Japanese culture is hard to understand. On the one hand, they are terribly serious. The culture is driven by fear or mistakes of being out of place. This explains, for example, the fact that they are still paranoid about Covid and that mask wearing indoors in public buildings are compulsory and that outside around 95% wear face masks. Now, I am not a Covid denier, not in the least. But after most people who want to be are triple or quadruple vaccinated and a large number have had Covid, this level of caution seems utterly mad. In hotel buffets, it goes further and requires that you wear gloves to handle serving spoons and tongs.
On a more day to day basis, it's striking just how conservatively people are dressed at work or even visiting tourist sites. Clothes, cars and lots more are perfectly clean and free from any blemish. This does, of course, have upsides for us at least, in that we can eat and drink without fear of getting sick, and we can relax a bit about our money or stuff being stolen. It also means that when I wash 4 pairs of shoes in a hotel washing machine, and it breaks down, the strongest rebuke I get is that they say the machine is not designed for that.
On the other hand, there are aspects of Japanese culture that are completely crazy from a Western standpoint. They have games stores where you can win all sorts of crap by grabbing them with a remote pick-up arm. The large store has as many as 50 different kinds of these games, all very brightly lit, with lots of vibrant colours, especially pinks. They have pachinko halls, where people sit and watch ball bearings fall through a metal maze. ( a bit like a vertical pin ball machine, without the flippers). The hall is noisy, and it's not clear what the point/pleasure/other of this game is. And of course there is karaoke, sumo wrestling and more.
I should give Japanese tech a mention because there are things for which the world should be thankful, like hybrid cars and heated toilet seats. The latter has not caught on in the west, but it should do. The sheer pleasure of sitting down to a warm seat. Joyful! That said, it seems some Japanese are tempted to use these as foot warmers (see photo), even if that is not allowed. But who knows what goes on when the door is closed?.Read more