After riding past Mount Fuji on the shinkansen (bullet train) from Kyoto to Tokyo, it seemed funny to me that our guidebook had said the shinkansen and Mount Fuji together were the two most important symbols of Japan. First, a little criticism, the shinkansen is a marvel in its speed just as the Eurostar Chunnel Train, France's TGV, and Germany's ICE, but it is a commuter train ill-suited for travelers lacking the space and other luxuries found best on the ICE train. As we sped towards Tokyo with the ice-capped Mount Fuji in the background looking splendid indeed, I thought the smoke stacks that littered the foreground with "clean" white smoke pumping from them were a more accurate if not wholely pleasant second symbol of Japan. The shinkansen is suppose to be a symbol of Japan's economic "miracle", but I think the image of the smokestacks we saw, as dense as stars in a clear night's sky, are more accurate symbol's of Japan's industrial growth. Although smokestacks are not considered particularly pretty, they are typical accessories of development which never is wholely good otherwise there would never be any debate about the efficacy of "progress", but to improve our image of what we are striving for from day to day we dress up postcards of places like Mount Fuji by showing them with more idealistic symbols of progress, the shinkansen for example.
Having just said that Japan is not dull and that it is expensive, I will do a bit to contradict the first statement while expanding on the second. Japan is one of the few places in the world where manufactured goods may cost more in their country of origin than in overseas markets. Surprisingly for such an wealthy nation, by appearances wealthier than any we've seen, there is still an amazing lack of variety in consumer goods which undoubtedly helps keep consumer spending artificially low. To name two example: in a chain convenience store in Kyoto, we saw two brands of cheese and butter and a fraction of the drinks that would be available in the American counterpart. This should be qualified though. Coke is available everywhere (this does not hold true for Japan alone of course), and tea, cold in the afternoon and hot in the evening, along with beer seem to be the beverages of choice throughout the country. Dairy products in Japan came primarily from the northern island of Hokkaido, though we did see a Kraft cheese product in the convenience store and imported cheese at phenomenal prices were available in the basement culinary shops of department stores. The fact is that when people talk about Japan as being a closed society this is most observable at the consumption level. Whether or not this is a feature of Japanese society entirely directed by government action is debatable, but I believe the lack of dairy products both in Japan and throughout East Asia helped me achieve the results of a miracle diet without ever trying.
It is more difficult for a foreign traveler to obtain cash in Japan than it is in most countries. Because of this, we used credit cards as much as possible. When we did so at department stores, we realized that Japanese consumers rarely used credit cards themselves. The clerks seemed relatively unfamiliar with credit cards, compared to the ease derived from the commonality of their usage in America. We had to wait much longer than the Japanese customers, cash carrying customers as the clerk made an old fashioned telephone call to verify the card was acceptable much the same way it was done in America years ago. In America, I rarely see customers paying for anything, anywhere, with $100 bills, but in Japan it was common to see a person pull out the equivalent ¥10,000 bill or multiple ¥10,000 bills for larger purchases at a department store. We marvelled at this, realizing the implications of the lack of use of consumer credit as well as the apparent lack of concern with carrying large amounts of cash in one of the biggest cities in the world. I still wonder how a ¥6,800,000, five foot high wood home Buddhist shrine, a ¥3,500,000 tansu (traditional Japanese dresser) and perhaps one of the ¥200,000 five inch high carved wood Buddhas which are perfect for such a shrine, or ¥200,000 or more kimono is purchased. Cash or credit!?
We've seen vending machines in Japan that sell cold soda; hot and cold teas and coffees; beer in sizes ranging from 250ml to 2 liters; sake and whiskey; cigarettes; chewing gum; panties for men and women; phone cards; batteries; popcorn; audio CDs; newspapers; and pornographic videos, magazines, and books. While similar machines could probably be found in the West, what is unique about Japan is the sheer number and availability of these machines.
Japan is the first place I have ever been where I saw a magazine in a convenience store with the words "Boys How-To Magazine" under the title. It wasn't a serious Joy of Sex type of book either. It was something in between a comic book and a one of the two popular American adult men's magazines. In the United States the only two magazines that commonly show pictures of naked people are Playboy and Penthouse. To be sure there are other magazines, but none seem to be as widely distributed as the roughly equivalent magazines in Japan. In fact, although Japan's typical sex-related magazines are almost exclusively those that show naked women (the censorship rules have been relaxed in the seven months which interrupted our two visits to Japan; now (December, 1995) women's pubic hair can be shown but vaginal pictures are still not allowed to be as explicit as in foreign magazines; and men's genitalia is still censored). Japan is an unusual case in these regards to someone visiting from an America where social guidelines are relatively puritanical compared with Europe. While you may not see magazines or videos depicting bestiality such as you will in Germany or Amsterdam, you will see an unusually high volume of sexual oriented magazines with sadomasochism. While sadomasochism rules as Japan's number one fetish, the number two fetish seems to be for middle school girls (even one or two magazines for male heterosexual pedophiles were typically available at adult men video/book/magazine stores). These fetishistic magazines are generally available in the adult section of bookstores or sex shops only. More typical magazine photos generally show naked and partially naked photos of women and teenage girls, but comic books are much more graphic.
The availability of magazines with nude young women and teenage girls in them is astounding. So plentiful in fact that you can't help but wonder where all these girls come from. The more typical variety of girlie magazines oriented to men and teenage boys were available in convenience stores, perhaps ten to twenty different titles in a store, that are prevalent in Japanese cities. I remember being in an American town where a recent Playboy Playmate had lived and hearing all kinds of rumors merely because a woman posing nude for a magazine that people had access to was so unusual. In Osaka we saw several different school girls in uniform as well as older, generally attractive women being solicited by a couple of young men in a popular outdoor shopping arcade, and the women that I noticed walking away typically looked a little more nervous after talking to the men. We could only speculate because we don't speak Japanese and were never sure what these conversations were about. On another occasion we were at a Buddhist temple in Kyoto where busloads of middle school students were also sightseeing. These busloads of students were led through the temple grounds by a uniformed woman guide. We saw a small group of such girls being solicited by a couple of men. The girls seemed to end the conversation politely and walk away ill at ease though it was apparent that the men had not been intent on transferring such a feeling. Several minutes later we saw them again and the typical smiles and laughter of their schoolmates was still absent from their faces. (After discussing this issue with a Japanese woman, I learned that our suspicions were correct.)
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