Japan🇯🇵Welcome to Japan: self-spraying toilets and 3 bows for a yoghurt

After Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, and North Korea, Japan was quite a culture shock: the third largest economy in the world and in many ways the opposite of my previous countries. Japan felt like one big amusement park.

Let‘s start with the toilets: after two months of squatting above piles of previous users‘ excrement and throwing toilet paper in a bin, here your behind is sprayed clean while resting on an electrically heated toilet seat. The toilet even has an option to play the sound of flushing (without actually flushing) and you can adjust the volume. WHY??? Even the amusement park doesn‘t have that.

No one honks their horn, every car stops for pedestrians, no one jaywalks, everyone says “Kon’nichiwa,” everyone smiles and asks if they can help if you look like you’re not from there for more than three seconds, and all accompanied by a constant Richard Clayderman-like music in shopping malls and bus stops. Everyone is so polite that even in the Japanese Aldi, they bow three times with their hands folded as a sign of eternal gratitude when you buy a 60 cent yogurt.

But before I could enjoy all of this, I had to enter the country. Because China blocked Dropbox (where I had parked my Japanese Lonely Planet) and North Korea doesn‘t have internet at all, I arrived at Nagoya airport quite unprepared: “How long will you stay in Japan?” – “Don’t know.” “Where will you go within Japan?” – “Don’t know.” “Where are you staying tonight?” – “Don’t know.”

Hmm, that didn’t go well with Japanese customs: they turned my whole bag upside down.

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