Japan - amazing

I have never been anywhere like Japan.  Everyone so hugely polite.  Absolutely zero rubbish.  The technological toilets!  The massive structure and hierarchy everywhere.  I enjoyed it so much more than I thought I would.  Anyone have any experience of actually living there rather than just dipping your toe in and sodding off?

(Now in Shanghai - toilets not as good)

There were basically no fooking bins anywhere!  Everyone just programmed to take your shit home with you.  I felt so alien too, apart from when I went to our office.  Bit disappointed how much english signage there was as I wanted to be properly immersed and confused.  Would defo go back but bit of a trek with the fam...

My high level observations are:

1. Tokyo is basically what people in 1980 thought the year 3000 would be like. It looks and feels like an Arnie movie set on the moon

2. Everything sounds like an arcade/ fruit machine. Little bings and bongs. I half expected money to drop from the ceiling of the tube.

3. Japanese people are just ace. Polite, respectful, friendly and hospitable

3. Japanese people are just ace. Polite, respectful, friendly and hospitable

This.  A million times this.  Never experienced anything like it.  My back was cricked from bowing so much.

One of the most morbidly obese people I know lived in Tokyo for seven years and tells me (and I believe it) that he had never had more unpaid-for sex than when he lived there.

(He was sent there on suspension from an MC firm for a bantz email that went viral.)

I loved it when I read a tourist guide on do's and don'ts that the Japanese word for no exists but is "rarely used".

Probably explains why your fat pal was ploughing through the poon.

massive ??? at (not with) anyone who cites “hierarchy” as a reason for loving somewhere

only the contemptible love hierarchy. respect should be earned and deserved, not defined by arbitrary status

"Everyone just programmed to take your shit home with you."

That sounds phucking awful. The last thing I want to do is spend half the day lugging waste products around in my pocket, because the State doesn't want to employ operatives to sort it out for me.

Been 5 times, last time was October last year.  I may yet end up living there post retirement as my wife wants to go back and look after her mum. Unfortunately mum lives in Iwaki, which is basically the Middlesbrough of Japan. 

Looking forward to my first trip there this Christmas. I may be so inspired that I will quit my job and devote myself full time to be a Nipponophile.

Am really hoping to learn Japanese but the class times for the usual providers don't really work. Any recommendation, including for individual instructions?

I learned in evening classes at SOAS which are generally Tuesday or Wednesday 7-9pm but I think there are also weekend classes. If you go there, try and get Tomoya Yamaguchi Sensai if possible - excellent teacher.  

They're kind of accepted as a deeply fooked up people though aren't they?  Massively unhealthily repressed in some ways and utterly nutso in others.

Friend lived there for a while working for one of the big accountants, married a Japanese woman ,came home and made beautiful babies.  Then the wife started beating the shit out of the eldest daughter and fooking someone else.

My small anecdote obviously being hugely relevant to Japan as a whole.

I really want to see the snow monkeys though.  My wife has no interest in Japan so I'm reckoning a solo trip there or out to Iceland for a photo tour given she owes me.

PP there are loads of videos about living in Japan by westerners on Youtube. I like Abroad in Japan (sarcastic English guy) but there's also Sharmander and loads of others.  

Japan is ace.  Totally bonkersace.

My mrs reckons the local ladies in her gym in tokyo had amazing bushes with long straight hair that they blow dried. I cant really conceptualise that

 

I was there at the time it went viral Brrap.  I remember very distinctly the mixture of schadenfreude lola and there but for the grace of God go I dread