Notes on some differences between Japan and Australia

This three week trip to Japan was my second visit to the country. I love visiting Japan for a variety of reasons, but one of my favourite reasons for visiting any other country, is to experience all the small differences between how people live their mundane day-to-day lives.

Similarly to how Australia has loads of unique flora and fauna from its geographic isolation over millions of years, Japan has loads of unique cultural differences helped by its relative social isolation due to its period of... well... isolationism.

And yes, millions of people already know that:

• Japan has amazing trains.
• Convenience stores have so much delicious food.
• Vending machines are everywhere, amazing, and cheap.
• There are very few public bins.
• Public places are clean.
• People follow the rules.

So I'm going to try to stay away from the obvious observations, and write more about silly niche things I noticed instead.

I find bath dimensions in Japan to be more comfortable than in Australia.

Japan has excellent baths, both public and private. I'd say Japan even has 'bathing culture', while in Australia we just shower to get clean and don't think about it. Baths in regular Australian houses are always fairly long, but not long enough to lie down in (I'm 186cm tall (6'1 freedom units)) but way too shallow to sit in. Japanese baths in hotels are shorter, but wider and deeper. This should show what I mean:

In Japanese baths, I can actually get the water up to my neck comfortably. Way better than regular western baths.

Also while we're on this topic, the Japanese enjoy bathing together. After staying at the APA Hotel in Yokohama, and being super impressed by the insane public baths, it got me thinking: "Surely it's significantly more efficient for hotels to have two huge public baths, than to have showers in each room". But I suppose that doesn't really work because if there are ONLY public baths, then there wouldn't be anywhere to wash if you have open wounds, or tattoos, which are a no-no in public baths.

This is the floor plan of the public baths in the APA. I miss them every day. 😔

Heated toilet seats

I didn't realise that I always brace for impact when sitting down on a cold toilet seat. I've seen the light and I think that we should start using heated toilet seats in Australia. It's very comfortable.

I was also amazed at how comfortable heated car seats were when I first used them in Canada. Maybe I'm just a hot-place man being entertained by cold-place comforts.

Australia's cars should have seat, belt, and steering wheel cooling in summer to give foreigners the same feeling when visiting us.

Everything has a mascot

Japan just does "cute" better than us, and one facet of this is the use of cool mascots EVERYWHERE. I swear every city, prefecture, business, and city has it's own mascot. Naturally you can buy plushies of all the mascots, and they're adorable. Except for this one. Other people have done a far better job of documenting them all though, so take a look at some of their photos or just Google "Japanese Mascots" to find some of the funniest.

Name one thing in Brisbane that has a mascot. I'll wait.

Train advertisements

We all know the trains in Japan are amazing. But I'm also a big fan of the train advertisements. Yes, there are some pretty generic ads, and Japan also seems to have sillier ads than we do, but there are some genuinely interesting videos getting airtime on the trains too. My favourites were:

• Cooking recipes, where they show you how to cook a meal. I saw a fried rice dish and some sort of soup dish.
• TrainGLISH! These are small videos that teach the english words for different random items!

Brisbane public transport doesn't have any video advertisements, which you could argue is good in its own way because trains are calmer with no flashing lights competing for your attention, but we're also missing out on these potential small upsides. Just food for thought.

Advertisements for engineering equipment

On the topic of advertisements, Japan has advertisements for engineering and manufacturing, which blows my mind and makes me incredibly happy. I remember the last time I visited, I saw a huge billboard erected at the Tokyo Dome advertising linear actuators. On the trains, and in public generally, I saw ads for engineering companies and their products.

Australia has none of this. We don't make things. We mine dirt and sell it, we build houses, and we educate people. Those are our largest industries. I'd absolutely love some engineering representation in Australia.

Here is an advertisement for manufacturing in Toyama train station.

And here is the end credits of an advertisement on the train in Tokyo. The preceding video shows a number of robot arms and automatic conveyor belts moving items around automatically to end customers.

"Automation that Inspires". How I'd love to see that in Australia.

Taps without aerators on them

Back in the early 2000's in Brisbane, we had a big drought, and our largest dam supplying water to the city dropped to 15%. Lots of money was spent on pushing the message out to save water. Almost every indoor tap in Brisbane has an aerator on it, which adds air to your water to make it less water-y. When washing your hands you'll use up to 70% less water, but the sensation is probably similar to using 10 or 20% less water.

Unfortunately when you use a tap with an aerator to fill up a bucket or drink bottle, you're purely limited by the rate at which the water flows, so aerators suck for this. It was very nice in Japan to turn on a tap and have my drink bottle fill up in 0.5 seconds.

Apparently Tokyo had significant droughts in the 1960's and since then they built more dams that collect water flowing down from the mountains to solve the problem.

Interesting ice handling techniques.

Back in 2014 I lived in Toronto for ~9 months. Toronto's snow handling methods were along the lines of:

• Big truck with shovel attachment.
• Literal mountains of salt.

Toronto functions pretty amazingly despite the frigid hand it's been delt, so I figured this was state-of-the-art anti-snow weaponry, but Japan surprised me with some new tricks.

Nozawaonsen where I skied had heated roads, and Nozawa, Iiyama and even Toyama had water spraying on the roads. The secret is that Japan, being located in a tectonically active location, has bountiful access to geothermally heated water. You can run pipes through your roads to keep them "warm" (above freezing) when it's snowing, and snow will pile up on the sides of the road, but instantly melt on the road. Practically it only heats the road up a few degrees, but this is enough to keep the road clear on all but the heaviest snow days.

Some roads pipe water alongside the road, and every few meters have a number of small holes shooting this water out onto the road to warm it up and melt snow.

Additionally, I saw driveways and entrances to businesses kept clear of snow by simply bringing a big pipe outside with holes poked every ~30cm, so that a shallow layer of water is constantly rushing over a pathway. I suppose if hot water is literally bubbling out of the ground, it would be silly to not use it like this. Some of these paths must use regular heated water, but I also saw some that use "raw" water (I don't know the technical term for this) because it left residual sulphur stains on the ground, and smelt heavily of eggs.

In Nozawa, to handle all this extra water constantly rushing around, there are deep drains flowing heavily with melting snow and geothermally heated water. This vast network of drains ALSO helps locals, who can often be seen shoveling snow off the roof or from the driveway, directly into these drains! The running water melts this snow and takes it away so residents aren't left with giant piles of snow on their property.

I appreciate the uniquely engineered solutions to this common problem.

A parking lot covering in a thin layer of flowing water to prevent snow from building up.

No thanking the bus driver. But thanking the kitchen.

The Japanese don't thank the bus driver when you step off. I think it's wholesome to yell "Thanks mate" when you leave the bus.

The Japanese DO however do this when leaving a restaurant. It's one of my favourite things to do (when the kitchen is visible) to drop an appropriately timed "Arigatō gozaimasuuuu" when leaving a restaurant and every chef yelling back thanks as you leave.

More chocolate per packet please

Most things I love about Japan, but something I don't is the serving size of chocolates. This complaint makes me feel like a fat westerner, but when I buy chocolate in Australia, I can get bars of ~200g. The closest thing I found in Japan are Meiji chocolate bars, which are 55g. There are a myriad of other little sweeties, but the quantities of chocolate on them is absolutely dismal. Probably good for my waistline though.

No public chairs for sitting

As Winston Churchill is quoted as saying: "Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down". I'm confident that if he even visited Japan (he never did) he would have found the lack of public chairs disappointing. As a tourist in Japan, you spend a lot of time standing up.

Shopping malls rarely have public seats, retail shops don't place a curteous seat for impatient boyfriends to use, and you're lucky if you find a spare one on a packed subway.

As a spritely 29 year old with supple knees, I find this bothersome. But if I was my twice-knee-replaced father, I'd probably hate the place.

To give some credit, seats are aplenty in public parks, however when it's -2 degrees (as it was when I visited), outside isn't really the optimal place for relaxing.

Surely single use plastics per person are high in Japan?

Japan doesn't seem to have hopped on the "use wooden products more" wagon, and instead has all it's eggs in the same plastic bag. Covering everything in plastic feels a little icky, and Japan loves to do it. I don't need plastic covered wet wipes, a tissue would be fine. I don't need my Japanese Pringles to be plastic wrapped inside the already plastic tube.

In saying that, quickly Googling "plastic consumption per capita" brings up a bunch of webpages of dubious quality, which all seem to show that Australians use more plastic per capita than the Japanese... I don't know why this stat is so disconnected to my experience, but possibly because I was constantly consuming as a tourist I just experienced more plastic than a normal person living in Japan would. Or perhaps the more SEO optimised webpages incorrectly interpreted data from a number of studies. Interesting. 🤷

Japanese Sheet Topology

On an entirely different note, let's take a look at Western vs Japanese sheet topology for a second.

This is what I've experienced everywhere I've stayed in Japan. (I have labelled the big fluffy warm blanket a "duvet" because apparently that's what people mostly call them even though we would call it a "doona" in Queensland).

Let me propose a new alternate topology by combining the superior parts of both regions bedding techniques.

I think the main reason we use a top sheet is because:

• It stops the duvet getting gross.
• It gives you something to keep you safe from the monsters when it's hot.

I think that essentially a fitted sheet on the duvet could solve dot point 1, and maybe not growing up with fitted sheets solves dot point 2. Although, to play devils advocate here, fitted sheets do suck to fold, so maybe doubling the number of fitted sheets in a house isn't worth it.

Okinomiyaki

I love making Okinomiyaki. There seem to be two different okinomiyaki restaurants:

• Some restaurants make okinomiyaki in the kitchen, and then turn your grill on and present you with a pristine, picture purfect okinomiyaki to... ¿keep warm? ...on your own grill?
• Others give you a messy bowl of liquid and expect you to make it yourself.

I always want the second one, but don't know how to find them. If someone could genuinely help me here, I'd welcome it.

I have two ideas why the first option exists at all:

• Every time we try to make our own, we mess it up. (Similar to when I attempt to make eggs sunny-side-up they always end up scrambled, but the half cooked half liquid mistake is the fun part, no?)
• Customers top their okinomiyaki with such a tall mountain of sauce and bonito flakes that they run participating restaurants out of business.

And if you're just going to serve me a pre-made okinomiyaki, stop putting a damn cooktop on my table, because if the food's already cooked, then it no longer serves a purpose.

Are beanies not in style in Japan?

I swear I'm cool guys, but why isn't anyone wearing beanies in 2 degree weather. I'm wearing one, and my ears are still freezing - yet thousands of Japanese are walking around me without gloves and beenies at all, seemingly unaware of how damn cold it is?

If Shohei Ohtani is the brand ambassador for every brand, does that deminish the value of the sponsorship?

When I last visited 2 years ago, I had the same question. Shohei is everywhere, it's probably impossible to exist in Tokyo without seeing this mans face. Here are some examples:

Shohei hawking some green tea:

Shohei and his favourite mastercard:

Shohei's going hard on the sponsorships. I'm sure the Japanese marketing guru's are all over this, but is it possible that Shohei is actually representing too many brands?

Manhole Cover Art

Vitruvius is a roman architect who wrote the oldest surviving book on architecture titled: "De architectura" (I suppose if it's the first book, you can give it a fairly bland name), in which he details the design of various types of roman buildings. He wrote it in around ~20-30 BC. One of his enduring quotes from the book is:

He states that all buildings should have three attributes: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas ("strength", "utility", and "beauty")

Brisbane's manhole covers have utility and strength. Japanese manhole covers also have beauty.

Here are some examples of nice manhole covers:

Some cute leaves:

The Kotoji-tōrō of the Kenroku-en Gardens.

A boat in Yokohama.

Pretty flowers.

The Yokohama bay bridge.

Some more nice flowers.

Which begs the question, why don't we do this too? Did Brisbane's manhole cover designing department get laid off? Are Brisbanites a thoroughly un-artistic people? Or possibly do we just not have the ability to cast large steel plates nearby so we settle for the same simple design everywhere because it's easy? Who knows, but I'd love to solve this so our manhole covers can be beautiful too.