Don’t mix up the flush and emergency

The journey today was 850km by bullet train from Hakomate to Tokyo. Journey time 4 hours and 40 minutes, so not as fast as Chinese trains, but still easily beats anything in Europe.

Japanese trains are so clean that they are scary, especially if you have 4 children who randomly spread food and bits of paper everywhere. Although the Japanese are invariably polite, I can sense they are not totally at ease with our mess and our inability to be very quiet as they are.

The highlight for most Europeans has to be the extensive bathrooms and wash areas. The toilets come with all the luxuries you would expect, such as heated seats and bum wash (didn’t try that, but in some countries, Hallo India, that would have been nice).  

The downside of fancy toilets is that they have so many buttons that its easy to make a mistake, for example, bum wash instead of flush. Japanese railways seem to have experience of this problem, and so whilst you sit, you are educated on how to press the flush and how not to press the emergency stop. After reading this carefully I turned to the right and observed that the blue flush button has been made enormous (about 10cm) and the emergency button is pretty small (about 1cm) and as a result I had no difficulty in choosing the right one.

The journey felt like it went pretty fast, and we arrived in the worlds busiest train station, still fit and ready to navigate to the local train that takes us to our hotel in the Akihabara part of town. Found it with only one problem (we were on the platform for the other way). In fact, the main problem today  for us travellers was that the heat is back, at about 33C. Though I hear it's way cooler here than at home.Read more