Well I am back from the 'land of the rising sun' to 'the land of the floating shite'. The culture shock is real. Those who love me have been following my adventures through the medium of You Tube Shorts.
Those who hate me have been waiting for me to write this blog post. The voyeurs, the observers, those who watch me on social media but can't quite work out what my angle is. This one's for you.
I can actually now say that I've flown around the world. My carbon footprint conscience is relatively clear because I hadn't flown at all since 2005. Almost twenty years of not contributing to climate change but I had the chance and I thought, "I will be too old one day".
So we went via countries that are not in Russian airspace, across Europe first and then across some of the Tajikistan sounding countries. We flew across the Gobi Desert at night and there was ice on the outside of the window. Pyonyang appeared on the flying map and I thought to myself "Aye aye, are we going to get an audience with the 'one' before Putin does. The plane veered off across South Korea and landed in Tokyo.
Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 was literally 'Bedlam'. Haneda Airport was like a Japanese Garden of Tranquility. When I say we I mean British Airways and I. I had booked through Japan Airlines but BA were the carriers for this trip and they brought me back yesterday via Alaska, Greenland and Scotland. Tokyo in the morning and West Wales at midnight. Who knew that there was a town called Wales on the wrong side of the Bering Strait?
I will annoy all my precious readers, viewers and subscribers if I just compare and contrast Britain and Japan but the most obvious one is the public transportation system. Britain's couldn't become like Japan's in a thousand years even if they started now. Sunak ditched the HS2. Japan has got the bullet train or the Shinkansen to give it its correct name. If it's late, the managers have to issue a public apology. Being a British train avoidant I wasn't sure whether it was such a good idea booking a JR Pass as most recent You Tube videos were saying that it wasn't worth the money. Well I can tell you, in my case, it was. I covered a lot of the Japanese mainland, north and south due to this futuristic and incredible piece of engineering technology.
On the Piccadilly line away from Heathrow Airport yesterday I could not help notice the tired, aging upholstery, the noisy journey and the unintelligible travel announcements. The escalator to the Piccadilly Line is in a far corner of some foreign field that is forever Heathrow Terminal 5.
All foreign visitors and tourists are ushered towards the Elizabeth Line because it is more expensive to travel on it.
There is no litter in Japan, no graffiti, no busking and no begging. There is plenty in Britain.
Japan is a polite, respectful society. Britain is not. Japanese crowds are not scary. British crowds are scary.
One might make the observation that British society is more relaxed and
more real wheras Japanese society presents a face to the world but in terms of productivity it is a world that works. The gadgets, the cars, the convenience stores, the food, the gardens, the onsens, all this carried out in the shadow and history of two nuclear explosions, one on Nagasaki and one on Hiroshima. I had no intention to go to either and if I was Japanese I wouldn't be happy seeing so many of 'the gaijin' coming in to their country with a low yen against the dollar. If Japan wasn't in thrall to the United States because of the Second World War it would be a power as strong as Russia.
I would like to go back, again before I am too old, but my one piece of advice would be, leave Tokyo till last and do the rest of the country first. Tokyo is not Japan as London is not England. Learn the language. I only had the basics and it did limit interactions and it is just Imperial arrogance to expect people to speak English. For my liking, there was too much English in the announcements on the trains in Tokyo. Make the Gaijin sweat. Make them learn your language. Don't pander to theirs. This is a lesson we need to learn in Wales.
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