More silly things about Japan...

It’s been a while since I added up basic everyday observations, so here it goes. It is amazing how the boundaries of “common-sense” can vary from country to country:

Soap: Even in western style restaurants, it is very rare to find soap in the public bathrooms. It is as if the entire country has never heard of Hepatitis A-Z. It doesn't matter if you are in a public school, a private school, a movie theatre or a friend’s house; if you find soap, you are lucky! Of course, this means, that I try not to shake hands with any Japanese person. EVER. It's a good thing they always bow, or they wouldn’t get any greeting from me at all.

Dryers and Towels: IF you find soap, you will need an equal amount of divine intervention to find something to dry your hands with. There is either nothing in the bathroom at all (save for big puddles of water by the sink made by people shaking their hands dry) or there are some really nice (and highly uncommon) wind-tunnel machines to insert your hands into and blow your hands dry. It is extreeeeemly rare to find paper towels. Since we are on an island, I guess I can understand the need to save trees, but it would be nice to have a standard alternative to dry-hands-on-pants-method.

Automatic doors: There are two types of automatic doors in Japan: pointless and maddening. I long for automatic doors that open gracefully as you approach, allowing you to continue walking at an even pace through the doorway with ease. Automatic doors are not like that here.

1. The pointless type has “automatic door” printed on it, but it has a button on the front of the door. So you walk up to the door, STOP, PUSH a BUTTON marked open, and THEN the door slides open. Needles to say, it would be much faster to slide the door open manually than wait for the big sheets of glass to mechanically move themselves.

2. The maddening type has no buttons. It is fully automatic, but it has a much slower reaction time than western automatic doors. While western automatic doors allow you to breeze through the doorway unabated, Japanese automatic doors wait until your face is about six inches from the door to open. So the doorway encounter is something like this: walk up to the doors, STOP, WAIT FOR THE DOORS TO OPEN, and then walk through. This is a very small inconvenience, but it can be very aggravating if you are having a bad day already. I swear I’m going to have a fit one day and smash through a pair of doors like the Kool-Aid man on a mission to quench thirst.

In other news, I was just awarded a new job and I will be moving soon. Stay tuned for an update on my new address. I will start the new job in the huge city of Osaka on September 12th, two days after my 31st birthday.

Good luck to me, my life has again become a blur.

Ta ta.
Erich von Meatleg

PS-Small new photo gallery called Ya-ya-. There is a festival on the 8th of August called Ya-ya- (which means 8-8).