More Cleanliness & Customer Service

[November, 1995] Despite the limits on individuality that are so often criticized by the West, Japan lacks the dullness of the former Socialists states and still allows for enough individual expression in a personal appearance of its people that is generally comparable with any society, even France, in respect to the attention spent on everyday attire.

...cleanliness and hygiene

In general, I would say that Japan is also the most hygienic place I have visited which is surprising given it's close geographic proximity to China which would rank on the bottom of my list. While we were observing this close attention to hygiene, we were surprised by the seeming contradictory social rules that applied to the nose. It seemed strange to us that the Japanese don't approve of blowing your nose in public. We suffered from runny noses and sniffled until we could find a restroom or could bare the wait no longer and turned into an alleyway, if we could find one with no one close by which was surprisingly difficult. We couldn't figure out when people might ever use the free tissue packages that were used to disburse advertisements and were handed out throughout Japan, especially at subway stations, until I saw partially used packets in restroom stalls. I can only recall having heard someone blow their nose in a bathroom once which is quite surprising given the fact that we were constantly sightseeing or shopping and the sniffles due to the cold weather were on the rise. Despite this, it seems quite appropriate to pick your nose or stuff a wad of tissue paper up a nostril in public judging from the numerous times we witnessed people doing such things.

Dining in Japan for a Westerner can be a little surprising if only to hear the room filled with sounds of slurping. Whether it be soba or udon noodles, Japanese invariably slurp their noodles down. I was raised to think that you should make as little noise at the table while eating as possible and that something so rude as slurping during a meal is a sign of bad manners. I can only wonder what the Japanese around us thought when they saw us quietly eating our noodles as they cooled down, biting them when we got enough and to avoid that slurping sound. We had seen businessmen hurriedly slurping away steaming hot noodles in Osaka during lunchtime and couldn't realize how they avoided burning their mouths. My wife, Karen, had decided that it was better to learn how to slurp like the locals so we could better fit in, but never pressured me to do so. While adopting the slurping technique she learned that the people were slurping to cool down the noodles as they ate them hot, something like the way you might eat a bowl of hot soup a spoonful at a time only faster, much faster.

Politeness

As I mentioned, Japan is an exceedingly polite place to visit. Albeit as genuine as the politeness may be it does not, nor could it, require the same amount of energy as politeness does in less polite societies. The politeness offered in Japan is often so routine that it has taken on mechanical form from mere words to a bow and smile. It doesn't really seem to matter though how mechanical it is because it's there, expected, and more important in Japan than anywhere else. We were eating in a small laundry facility and had to move out of the way of a college student who needed to fold his just-dried clothes. He said "sumimasen" when he needed us to move and when he left after finishing all his folding (literally "excuse me", but used in a variety of ways to express thanks for inconveniencing someone).

We entered a Japanese fast-food restaurant, called Yoshinoya, and all the crew that was visible to us greeted us with "irasshimase" ("welcome"). When one of the employees accidentally dropped a cutting board down on the counter two feet away from me, he said "sumimasen." In nearly every business we entered we were greeted and this was usually followed with more than one "arigato gozaimasu" (a polite form of "thank you").

I was in front of a police box, looking at a map when a police officer approached me and apologized, stating that his English was not very good, because he did not help me sooner. I had been looking at the police box sign and at some wanted posters a few minutes earlier, but otherwise had made no attempt to solicit help. He said that I looked lost and when I admitted I was, he told me where to take a bus to get where I needed to go. He apologized again when he was leaving because the bus announcement would be in Japanese!

Customer Service

Having worked in American businesses, I was familiar with the term "service" which, however, was typically talked about more than it was ever practiced (from either side of a business transaction). In Japan, a country that has a keen sense of aesthetic sensibility, service is practiced as an art. The Japanese art of service is undoubtedly related to the uncommon practice of politeness practiced in that country where there must exist a pressure for service to exceed the already high Japanese level of common courtesy.

a bank

We went to a Sumitomo Bank office in Kyoto after being told that this was the only bank in the area that could help us with a cash advance from our credit card. In Japanese banks you usually go to a window to have your transaction initiated, but then sit and wait until they call your name to complete the transaction. In the waiting area there was a uniformed attendant who acted as a custodian, greeter, and security guard. This man was later relieved by a woman who was also in uniform. They would welcome all customers and thank all customers who left. There was also a young male, probably a junior hire who worked behind the partition with the other bank branch workers, whose tasks included yelling out a greeting to customers entering the office.

a gas station

Besides seeing the most modern gas stations in Japan, we were also impressed once again with the service offered there. One rainy day in Kyoto, I saw a couple of cars crossing an intersection before entering a gas station and then three young attendants came running out of the station office and yelled a greeting to the drivers. I was amazed, the attendants weren't competing with each other or making a joke, they were merely performing their jobs in a professional manner with all seriousness. When cars have been fuelled and the fuel paid for at a typical gas station, an attendant typically goes out into the street to make sure his customer can pull out into traffic safely as he waves him or her on. The attendant's job is only done when he bows and says "arigato gozaimasu" to the departing customer.

meoto-jawan

There was a comment in our guidebook that politeness in Japanese society becomes a device by which Japanese maintain there distance from gaijin (foreigners). While this negative by-product cannot be felt during a short-term visit to Japan, there was one occasion when the politeness of a merchant. On our first trip to Tokyo, we went into a small tea shop and liked a particular teacup but there wasn't a matching pair for sale. The only pairs that were for sale at this shop were of two different sizes. We naively thought it was pretty stupid that they would sell pairs of cups with odd sizes. When we told the merchant we wanted the cup she began to take both of them, but we told her that we only wanted the bigger one because the cups weren't matching sizes. On our second visit, we learned that traditional Japanese teacups were usually sold in such pairs because one was meant for a man and the other, smaller one, was meant for a woman. These teacups are called meoto-jawan. Either the merchant at the first tea shop we had visited did not want to offend us by explaining that it was not a mismatch at all or she wasn't confident in her English skills to convey the cultural lesson. Having learned about meoto-jawan in written form we instantly lost our dislike for differing size teacups, whatever the implications for gender egalitarianism, and became happy consumers once again.

Tourist Behavior

When traveling internationally, Karen and I have tried to present ourselves in the best possible light realizing that we often stood out and were sometimes objects of curiosity. Sometimes we slipped. On one occasion, we were at a train station in Kyoto and were trying to figure out how to purchase the correct ticket from a machine. The information was all in Japanese except for city names which were also in English. We were perplexed by what looked like prices for one-way and round-trip that seemed extremely low priced for Japan. I hit one button without putting money in the machine and Karen chastised me saying that it was the wrong button. Then, acting out my childlike anger, I hit several buttons all at once in retaliation to show her that I couldn't do any harm by punching a button. Just then, to my eternal embarrassment, an older Japanese gentleman made his presence known from behind us and offered his assistance.

English in Japan

Japanese have a love-hate relationship with English. English is taught for several years in school, but rarely can you find anybody who feels comfortable conversing in it. Growing up, I remember seeing many restaurants and retail stores with incomprehensible French names. It was as if a French name gave the establishment a refined, cultural characteristic. In Japan this borrowing of a foreign language to increase the apparent value of something is taken to extreme. It was common for us to see magazines(one was named McSister), books, menus, and stores with English titles or subheadings, but like the "DHL Price Guide" we opened you invariable could not find a word more of English. It was frustrating at times, as a non-Japanese speaking tourist to see these things and be lured into thinking that we would understand more than we could. Comprehension, we did learn, goes both ways. It was not uncommon for us to see English used in new and unfamiliar ways even though I grew up in an English speaking country. A sales slogan for one drink company whose products are sold through some of the numerous vending machines throughout Japan goes: "There's a gallon of deliciousness in every drop. Reach for the taste of good taste, reach for DyDo"; one particular vending machine drink was called "Yogut"(even with my severely restricted knowledge of Japanese I knew this was not a Japanized word for "yogurt" because it's impossible to end a Japanese word with a "t" in this way); in one department store menu we saw "cleam soup", "prain pizza", "a grass of wine", and "tometo sauce"; and finally we saw a leather jacket with lettering on the back that read: "Tipes of Gold Clubs."

The Geisha Walk

geta

One of the unresolved observations we had was that some Japanese women and girls seemed to walk with the front of their feet pointing inward. It can't be genetic because men and boys don't walk in the same way. Nor is it something that seemed to be limited to geisha, maiko, or other traditionally dressed women and girls.

Japanese Toilets

There are often two types of toilets at locations in Japan where tourists can be found, the East Asian squat type and the Western chair type. This is nice for Western tourists to Japan because their style toilets are obviously less used than the East Asian variety. We also noticed that it was common for the toilets to have a flush option of "large" and "small" (written in kanji, the characters borrowed from China).

Racial Purity

Having read something about Shintoism and Japanese concepts of purity and non-purity, I couldn't help but speculate if the high rate of encounters with people having Down's Syndrome in Kyoto had anything to do with misguided attempts at achieving purity in procreation. (Okay, so I don't have a strong science background!)

A Japanese View of Japanese Americans

After the noisy contingent of American college students had left our small, hundred year old, paper-thin* walled Japanese house turned inn, we went into the communal kitchen to have a peaceful breakfast (*well it wasn't exactly paper-thin because it was constructed from earth and straw, but noised passed through the wood-framed paper doors pretty easily). After a few minutes, the door slid open and one of the owners came in to share the heated room with us. He asked us which state in America we were from. When we told him that we were from the San Francisco area of California and asked him if he had ever been there, he responded "yes." When I asked him what he thought of the town, he replied "no comment." Then he started to relate his dislike of Japanese Americans who he had had some contact with in Los Angeles by saying that he thought they were dirty, lacked good posture and manners, and were generally too laid back, and dishonest. I was surprised by his comments and told him so. The first characterization struck me the hardest though because Japan is an exceptionally clean country, but his inn was extremely dusty as well as being dirty. The dust in our room was causing me to sneeze so much that I decided to pick up some of the dust with a tissue which I ran along strategic areas of the walls and windows. The room looked as if it had not been dusted in its hundred year's of existence. Leaving aside the contradiction between his characterizations and the way he ran his establishment, it seemed to me that our host's comments were influenced by the recent American college students and I interpreted the words as a veiled critique of these particular patron's homeland. This is why it was interesting to me that when I stretched his characterizations to include all Americans, he didn't comment and when I said American society was much looser than Japanese society, making it more difficult for the imposition of social rules he agreed.

Space Control in Japan

There was a note on a board at this same guesthouse that advised people who rented bicycles not to park them "around or in front of other's house. If you leave your bicycle [it] will be removed. [If you put it] in front of other's house, you should get his permission. As land is narrow [sic] in Japan, there's no space to put your bicycle." It was very rare indeed to see a bicycle parked individually and not with a group of bicycles. We saw an official of some sort giving tickets to bicycles parked in the center of an outdoor shopping mall in Osaka that did not appear to be interfering whatsoever with anybody and I saw a man ask for permission of a small shop's owner before he parked his car briefly in front of the shop. While we have been in densely crowded areas of Tokyo on a weekend, Japan does not seem to be suffering from a shortage of land and most people even in large cities appear to live in houses or relatively small buildings. People sometimes seem to have a peculiar sense of land space not just in Japan. I remember visiting Manhattan Island where the land costs have often been compared with Tokyo, but I couldn't figure out why everyone needs to live in such a small area when public transportation to and from the area is so good.

Japanese Innovations

Having a keen interest in debates about the differences of the East and the West and whether or not the East will ever surpass the West economically, it was interesting for me to observe Japanese innovations that we hadn't observed elsewhere (though they may not be confined to Japan). One of these innovations was outdoor parking lots with elevator like stacking facilities that made it possible to stack two layers of parked cars into a small space without building a walled facility. Another, albeit less profound innovation, was lighted license plates. Instead of a light illuminating the plates from the car, the license plate numbers and letters themselves were green lights. These were either new, extremely expensive, or both because we saw very few of them in the cities we visited in Japan.

Traveling by rail both between cities, and by bus and rail within cities is probably more efficient in Japan than anywhere else in the world. It's easier to purchase tickets from their vending machines, which often provide bilingual information, from their attendants, or upgrade a ticket on the train or at the end of a journey than anywhere else. We took busses in Kyoto that had electronic signs displaying the next stop, a sign board displaying several bus routes; audio announcements of stops and connections, often bilingually; a change machine in addition to the fair box, and you could purchase multiple tickets from the driver; and illuminated buttons within reach of every passenger, whether sitting or standing, to request stops. Many of the curbside bus stops in Kyoto have automated black boards with color markers that pop into fill in one of three successive round slots as the approaching bus comes near. In case you take your eye off the board for a few minutes, a chime rings when the last slot is filled in.

There is competition between train services provided by companies such as Japan Rail, Hankyu line, Kintetsu line, Toei line, Tokyu Toyoko line, Odakyu line, Tobu Nikko line, Seibu Shinjuku line, and others. We traveled within Osaka and to a small castle town the same distance again past Kobe and we could have purchased one ticket at the vending machine from our initial journey point in Osaka, or have upgraded a ticket purchased for intra-city travel either on the train or at our destination. You can travel between Kyoto and Osaka in less than forty minutes and for less than ¥400 ($4.00). Between Kyoto and Tokyo you can ride a bullet train, the shinkansen, which will take you the distance, from city center to city center, in about 2.5 hours for about the price of a plane flight which would require you to take additional transportation to the city centers that would probably exceed the flight time itself. On the other hand, you still have an option of drastically reducing the cost of the travel by taking a regular train, American style, on an 8 hour trip.

Taxi drivers open and close passenger doors without leaving their seats or turning around. They have a hand lever next to the steering wheel. They take credit cards which seems a bit strange in a country where cash transactions are so dominant. In ultra expensive Japan, the cost of a taxi ride is one of the more expensive, in Kyoto you have to pay ¥580 just to have the door open and in Tokyo it was ¥70 higher.

The Shinkansen

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.

A Consumer's Nightmare

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.

Cash Society

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!?

Vending Machines

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.

Boys' and Men's Magazines

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.)

Japanese Primetime TV: a Look at One Show

In a society where everyone seems so uncomfortable in public trying to maintain face that I would liken to a young boy visiting some adults that he wants to make a good impression on, television is a welcome exception. Japanese commercials are more entertaining than any commercials in the world, and many of the programs at night are highly entertaining.

Here is a glimpse at one variety show we saw: about eight couples, aged 18-23 years old give a brief description of their relationship. The hosts then cross match the men and women from different couples. Each "swap" couple is given a chance to have a drink and talk together for a brief time while a camera looks on recording all except what is whispered into an ear here and there. Followed by this, the "swap" couples are made to become a little bit more intimate in front of the audience. In one scenario, the man stuck a long chocolate in his mouth and the woman took the other end into hers. They were suppose to eat the chocolate between them, but she broke off her side before his lips met hers. The other scenario had the man biting off a piece of ice that was molded for the purpose. Then he passed the ice onto the woman's mouth with his own. After all this is done, the audience views tape of a hidden interview with the women involved in the "swap". Women say whether or not they would like to swap their mate for the man in the "swap" or stay with their boyfriend instead. If they say they want to swap, they have to walk down some stairs many of which include a television screen facing the foot of her shoes with his face appearing on it.

One Woman's Alternative View of the Japanese and Their Respect for Knowledge

A woman sat next to me on a crowded bus and began reading a copy of the English language Financial Times. After she had put it away, I asked her where I might be able to purchase a copy. She said that she subscribed to her paper and didn't know where in Kyoto there might be a kiosk to purchase one. Then she added "They don't read English language newspapers. In Tokyo you can only find an English language newspaper in large hotels." [She was partially correct, you can only find USA Today and Japanese English language newspapers at newsstands in Tokyo]. Finally, she added: "They don't even read much Japanese." When I mentioned that I had seen numerous bookstores, but was unsure of the content of the material sold in these stores because I couldn't read Japanese, she said "You didn't miss much."

I wasn't sure where she was from and didn't have a chance to speak with her for long enough to find out why she was so critical of the Japanese people. This was a refreshingly contradictory viewpoint to that carried by Western media reports about Japanese literacy. I have read that more works are translated into Japanese than any language. This alone would suggest that a voracious appetite for reading exists in Japan, but after considering what this woman had said, I took a closer look at what the average, observable Japanese was reading. Businessmen could be seen reading business newspapers, but some could be seen reading Manga (comic books). It was rare to see others reading anything but Manga at all. I doubt that I saw as many people reading books as I am used to seeing do so in similar situations in the U.S. It's dangerous to make a conclusion based on mere observation and discussing the issue with only two people, but I would suggest that the above-average Japanese college student whom I spoke with was more reliable than Western media sources. She agreed with the woman I had met on the bus and generally seemed to have an understanding of the world that supported this despite being a recipient of the Japanese educational system American educators seem to envy so much.

A Shinto Priestess

A Miko

We happened across a Shinto shrine, and I saw a couple of miko (or Shinto Priestesses) so I took some pictures of them. As I walked away to look at some other part of the shrine, one of the mikos approached me. In English, She asked me where I was from so I took the opportunity to ask her a few questions. I spoke to her briefly before she had to officiate at some ceremony, I think it was a wedding, but she later came back and sat with us after changing out of her ceremonial clothes. She said that miko were virginal women who typically served at a Shinto shrine part-time for four years during college, and that they performed wedding ceremonies.

...on world war ii

Taking advantage of the fact that I had the opportunity to speak with a Japanese person that could speak English quite well I asked her a few questions about her own opinions and how she viewed the sentiments of other Japanese in a few areas. I told her that I had read that foreigners who were longterm residents of Japan often felt there always existed a wall between themselves and the Japanese that they interacted with from day to day. The way I put it was that it seemed as if Japanese people had difficulty trusting foreigners, even those that had learned enough Japanese to effectively communicate with them. Her response surprised me. She said that Japanese people still feel like they are the victims of World War II because of the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Her grandfather was killed somewhere in Southeast Asia during the War and her grandmother lived through the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. She added that younger people like herself want to go past the issues of World War II. When I asked her about the Pacific War and whether or not she felt Japan had some responsibility for it she acknowledged they did. She said that school lessons concerning the issues of responsibility for the Pacific War were not clear. When I asked her how she learned more than was offered in school she didn't have a clear answer, but while we were in Japan we read newspaper articles in Japanese published, English language newspapers that spoke about the continuing debate over Japanese responsibilities for the War and at least one of these articles dealt with the issue of Comfort Women.

...on english

When I tried to expand the issue of relations, she told me that she felt younger Japanese were afraid to speak English to foreigners they met, especially in Kyoto where there were a lot of foreign visitors, because they have difficulty in conversational English even though they spend years in school learning it. However, she felt that younger Japanese people were much more interested in other cultures than earlier generations had ever been.

[After having traveled throughout Europe in late Spring where we saw Japanese tourists often outnumber non-European tourists, including a man and woman who were traveling by bicycle, and in Thailand and Malaysia where we saw a young couple, two young women, and a single woman all traveling by themselves it became apparent that Japanese people are beginning to feel more comfortable traveling, even without the ubiquitous Japanese travel group.]

Japanese Politics

The following news item appeared in the English language Mainichi Daily News on November 25, which was about the time that international headlines were telling of the arrests of former South Korean Presidents Roh Tae Woo and Chun Doo Hwan apparently at the direction of current president, Kim Young Sam, to divert attention from his possible involvement in high level financial scandals:

Shizuoka-- The Shizuoka District Court on Friday upheld the prefecture's argument that it cannot make public the governments' entertainment spending because doing so would harm the confidence of guests entertained at the local governments' expense.