Final Reflections on Japan

It's now Sunday the 10th of April, nearly 9 weeks after my return and 4 weeks after I finally finished writing and editing the posts recording my actual travels there - and I still haven't started wiring the report I'm supposed to produce for the Japanese Government. Japan is now bunch of distant memories. Great memories though that I'm sure will endure. Japan is an amazing country. Its culture must be one of the most unique in the world, (although it's one of only five countries I've visited).

The things that struck me most about Japan were:
- it's so crowded - so many people on such small islands and then the technology employed to alleviate this: man made islands, extensive subways, three storey freeways and continuous sky-scrapers.
- The contrast of excessively polite and formal Japanese culture with the cultural release mechanism of heavy drinking and outlandish but completely acceptable drunken behaviour.
- Levels of corporatism and consumerism Australia has not yet reached.
- Limited contact with the natural environment.
- We weren't served much fruit.
- A rich country with probably the best infrastructure in the world built on a six percent income tax rate but everyone complains of how poor the government is now because it's not quite as rich as it used to be.

The highlights of my trip were:
- Exploring Tokyo, particularly leading the 12 other Aussies on an evening adventure with nothing but my instincts and a map.
- Karaoke with our Japanese hosts in Nagasaki
- Traditional Japanese hotel in Unzen with traditional dinner and naked spa in the hot springs in the snow
- Throwing peanuts to a crowd of 400 local Japanese people at the Setsuban festival in Tarami
- Visiting the A-Bomb Museum and Peace Park in Nagasaki
- Visiting some of the shrines

In terms of learnings I guess visiting any different culture (plus spending time with the Swedes and American's and their reactions to Japanese culture) increases your perspective teaching you more about yourself and your own culture, but I'm not sure I can put this into verbal form yet. Probably one of the biggest things I've been reflecting on relates to Japan being further down the corporatist, consumerist society track than we are. Consequently Japanese civil society has more developed thinking and analysis of the effects of this type of culture so we should be trying to learn some of that from them with a view to avoiding the worst of the excesses. How we do this I don't know but it's good to know what's out there. So more learning to come I hope.

All in all it was a great trip. The people were fantastic both our Japanese hosts and the visiting Swedes, American's and Aussie's who were a real mix of interesting characters. We've haven't had a lot of contact since returning, there was an initial burst of emails over our egroup mostly "I'm back safe and thanks for the great time" type comments. It's a little disappointing that we've all just slipped back into our lives again but I've certainly felt that pressure of life and time moving on. I've swapped a couple of personal email with people I got on well with and had lunch with Phil, another Melbournian. I'm hoping to duck over from the UK to Sweden and catch up with Josephine and Pernilla later this year but we'll see how we go. I've now booked my ticket for the next trip leaving for London on May 20 for a cycling tour of the UK, Ireland and Spain. I'll blog this trip again but probably not as extensively as this blog. This trip will be several months so a day by day account is out of the question. This blog has certainly been a useful experiment in preparing for that trip.

So it's cheerio from me for a while, thanks for reading!
James