Osaka, Kyoto and Some Early Observations - Japan

Getting Around

We really got the hang of the subway system in Osaka, which paid off getting us to Kyoto.  Japan is zig-zagged with train tracks all over - it's truly amazing.  On the upside, you can score a clean and convenient ride anywhere, anytime.  On the downside, the Japanese rail system is not immediately easy to navigate for those who can't read Japanese, but it's do-able!

 Kyoto station, midday - busy but not insane

We are by no means the first English speaking tourists in Japan... apparently, since the 1960's English signage has been steadily improving.  It is now at a point where most transit ticket machines have English menus and options making it very easy to get around.

English - a nice treat!

Nuances like which trains are "Rapid Transit" and which are the "slow boat to tuna town" are tough to decipher.  We only realized you could buy tickets for your entire ride (provided you don't switch rail providers - all subway or all JR routes) after a few days of riding the rails - maybe a metro-newbie mistake, but still not obvious.

Spotless JR platform - the rule, not the exception

Urban Japan is extremely orderly.  Sidewalks are divided into left and right sides and often also include a bike lane.  Folks also obey this idiom throughout the Subway system - on staircases and in hallways.

Trains are whisper quiet 90% of the time - even when a car is crammed with 100 people at rush hour.  The streets are very clean and tidy - there is an obviously high degree of care for propriety and detail.  Manners are apparently hugely valued.

shhh...

Walking is a great way to get around in Osaka and Kyoto... sidewalks are generous and plentiful - but you have to keep your eye on cyclists!  Most bicycles are modest, grandma-style touring bikes with super-wide handle bars.  This width, combined with riders who speed into walker bottlenecks at intersection crosswalks often totally exhausts sidewalk wiggle room to a point of being a safety hazard. Walking city streets is not a lackadaisical affair!

A point of note - many cars in Japan run on diesel fuel.  Emissions standards seem to be decent, but we all know diesel fumes are noxious... smaller streets are definitely healthier ones! 

Bike lanes on a side street

Bike lanes on sidewalks

Stay in your lane!  This subway had us on the right - very unusual!

Kyoto and Osaka have an extensive network of bus routes, but their English signage is poor or non-existent.  After taking a few rides, we decided to avoid them where possible, which is, with the trains, easy to do.

Taxis would have cost our family 10x what it cost to use public transit - even for short rides, we found them to be an unnecessary luxury.

Bicycles can be rented relatively cheaply and are a terrific option for toodling around town.  Bike racks are everywhere and as mentioned earlier, sidelwalks often include dedicated bike lanes.

Getting around Osaka and Kyoto is truly a breeze!

Urban Space

The population of Japan is 123M - 4x the population of Canada in an area smaller than the Canadian province of Newfoundland.  Necessity being the mother of invention, Japan has risen to the challenge of efficiently moving and feeding its people.

Narrow 1-lane streets characterize most inner city side streets

Urban space is at a premium - so much so that everything is adapted for tininess (curiously, with the exception of bicycles).  Cars are small and toy car-ish.  Drivers can (and do) regularly park within 3-5" of concrete walls on 2 sides of a vehicle - the accuracy is truly remarkable.  Vehicles are built very boxy and utilitarian to enable this - no unnecessary bumps or lumps.

box on wheels

Look carefully at how close this car is to the wall!

On-demand water heaters hang off the outsides of buildings (tankless) - 5-7" thick and 2'x1.5' in size... tiny.  AC units are low-profile and on balconies/hanging of exterior walls.  Buildings extend right to the street, literally.

Tiny AC units everywhere

Bathroom doors can be less than 2' wide at a restaurant.  At +6' tall, I often bump my head and have to duck a lot - not awesome for my posture :)

C'mon, seriously?

There are often sliding doors on restaurants and cloth hanging over doorways called Noren.  These are mean to provide shade and control dust and wind.  They also conveniently make for good marketing space - they're a riot for tall people to navigate!  I guess there are no lice in Japan, right?!

Low-hanging Noren

There are blue mesh nets hanging from many street lamp posts - these are used on garbage day to cover garbage bags to make sure no loose papers get blown and escape onto the streets - very clever and very cooperative.


Garbage collectors run, literally, from stop to stop, presumably for the greater good (avoid traffic bottlenecks).  Garbage trucks are smaller than their North American equivalents.  Recycling is a big deal here.

There are virtually no garbage cans on city streets - people pack-their-trash home or just don't eat-on-the-run.  It's clear that great priority, care and pride are vested in public spaces.

Food

Ramen

It doesn't take long to notice that in both Osaka and Kyoto, the per-capita restaurant rate is very, very high - even residential city blocks in the inner city have garage-come-restaurant setups.  You could literally eat at 20 places in the span of 10 city blocks at small, non-commercial street-level joints.

Major subway stations (2+ line transfers) often have labyrinthine underground shopping options and food courts - the dining options are truly mind-boggling.

All this food competition appears to have resulted in highly specialized niche restaurants - ones offering 10 dishes or just a sub-genre of cuisine. You'll see places that only do noodle soups (Ramen) or only curry and others that do only Kobe beef dinners or octopus balls (Takoyaki), etc.  Menus can be as short as ~10 items.

Other than fast food, you really can't go wrong - it's a foodie's delight!  Japanese cuisine is no longer a mystery to the world at large, but we've noted these few points while surfing menus and store fronts - from convenience stores to fancy restaurants.

• Pictures of raw animal meats are a common feature in food marketing - fish, beef and seafood
• Seafood is prized 
• Colour is king - eye-grabbing marketing includes lots of colour
• Many restos have realistic 3D food-art in window displays to illustrate the dishes being served
• Prepare to eat deep-fried food!

Look real?

Sign me up!

Other than sushi and soups (and in many cases including them), we've found much of the food to be fried or deep fried.  We're not big on grease - we like our meals clean and lean, so we had to be a bit picky about menu items.  Just cause you can batter anything in Panko and deep fry it, doesn't mean you should (or that we should eat it :).

Salads are not a common menu feature - English-speaking vegetarians will struggle to select "safe" menu items.

Much more to come on food - stay tuned!

English

We leveraged technology to ease our assimilation into Japanese life.  The Google Translate app gave us on-the-fly camera translation of Japanese text and the VoiceTra app is awesome for gaining a quick-and-dirty working knowledge of a language.

Nathan and Parker took a particular interest in learning Japanese... they got hooked on the DuoLingo app too.  After a single day of studying, they were able to read some name tags and menu items - not bad!

Learning Japanese

All major streets in the cities have sidewalks, so once you've mastered the walk-on-the-left-and-look-for-cyclists-speeding-up-behind-you, walking is a great way to get around town.

Culture

It'd be naive for me to even attempt to capture a culture in the few days we have here to experience it - instead I'll try to highlight a few fun facts.

Mind your manners and apparently, you'll be healthier!

Politesse is the name of the game in Japan - manners, manners, manners!  

It's interesting being a visible minority - rare in our travels thus far.  We try to read about and respect local customs and culture wherever we go, but we're naturally louder and more publicly rambunctious than locals here, so we're trying to meet folks half-way rather than continually scolding our kids.

Eating while walking down or standing along a street is a Japanese manners faux-pas.  We garnered a few looks of disapproval while doing these things, so we've learned to sit-to-eat instead.

We had forewarned our kids about propriety in Japan before arriving, and we were right to have done so.  We run a fairly tight ship by Canadian standards, but our standards were, not surprisingly, not quite up to snuff/different.

We found Japanese people, on the whole, to be very warm, welcoming, helpful and patient.  We tried hard to engage with folks we encountered - not just the ones being paid to interact with us :)  All told, we felt very safe, encouraged and excited about embracing the aspects of Japanese culture we found ways to discover.

We got a sense that the Japanese public knows its history well and reveres its historical leadership in a personal way.  Folks seem to appreciate the incremental impact their leaders have had on the Japan of today.

In my experience, Canadian history, in contrast, is rarely taught in the family home - it's the purview of schools, and school boards censor/spoon-feed kids a lot of watered-down information.  It's not exactly stirring or pride-inspiring stuff.

Keep your eyes peeled for a post on cooking and other hands-on ways we engaged at a cultural level, including the following section of this post!

Kyoto's Jidai Matsuri Festival

We were luckily in Kyoto for the Jidai Matsuri Festival, which proved to be a wonderful way to engage with ~1400 years of Japanese history!

For this celebration, 2,000 volunteers don ancient garb and parade for 2hrs from the Imperial Palace to the Heian Shrine - all in chronological order, of course!  The Japanese mastery of aesthetics is made immediately obvious from the costumes and the parade's logistics.

Serious foliage

Excellent makeup and costumes

Very cute!

2,000 volunteers

Impressive Samurai

5km procession in these sandals!!

Exceptional colours and historical relevance

Checkout those bows!

Music too!

Vending Machines and Corner Stores

It is said that you can get virtually anything from a vending machine in Japan... and... it's 100% true.

Vending machine pandemonium!

We learned that items with red labels come out hot and cold items get blue labels.  We saw hot soups, SIM cards, hot and cold drinks, personal hygiene items, ice cream, cigarettes, and more, more, more!

Japan is coffee-addicted too!

Ice cream!

Ciggies

Beer!!!!

There is a 7/11 or Lawson or Family Mart on every corner - they are unbelievably prominent.  These aren't the North American variety corner store though - they carry real goods - not just junk food (though they have that too).  You can get a $5 hot meal that's actually decent for your health and tastes great too... groceries - from cereal to fresh hot peppers.... some western goods like cereal, sandwich bread and jam and the usual stuff like smokes and milk.

These ubiquitous stores seem to carry some of the load that big box grocery stores in North America do.  There are still grocery stores, but urban ones are quite small - smaller than the small ones back home.  I'm guessing this situation arises from the pressure of urban space being at such a premium.

Again, lots more to come on Japan!