Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

I have to be honest, there are a few times that I wish I was my sister. Like that one time I got caught with Hillary Duff on my search history… Anyway, right now is one of those times, because my sister is currently running around in Japan. That’s right, Japan: land of short pasty people with bad teeth and horrible weather. Wait, no that’s England. My bad, Japan is home to short pasty people with bad teeth and decent weather.

Okay, so I’m being a little bitter, I actually love Japan. I’ve been there three times, and I’ve had fun all three times. Japan truly combines all of the positives of traveling to a different country (exotic hotels, great food, lower drinking ages) with none of the drawbacks you often encounter on trips to other foreign countries (French people).

With that said, Japan is definitely a foreign country. It’s not like Canada, where the only real difference is that everybody adds an “eh” onto the end of their sentences and it’s suddenly okay to openly like Celine Dion. The second you step off the plane in Japan, you are instantly aware of the fact that, as Dorothy so eloquently put it, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in AHHHH!!!” At that point, Dorothy was run over by a mob of Japanese business men in a rush to get off of the plane. As you will quickly realize, people in Japan really want to get to wherever they are going. This becomes painfully obvious when you attempt to get around via public transportation, which takes pride in being on time. In Japan, when they say the train leaves at noon, the train will leave at noon, even if there are business men currently stuck in their doors because they were only at the stop for five seconds. Slow people like me spend most of their trip looking at the back of the trains they were supposed to catch (coincidentally, all of the English ads are on the back of buses in Japan).

Anyway, once you somehow figure out how to get around, you can get a feel for the Japanese people. The first thing you notice is that Japanese people are ridiculously polite and bow a lot. Of course, there is a certain etiquette to bowing, but as an ignorant American, the best you can hope to do is just keep randomly bowing like some kind of drunken weeble-wobble doll. But as polite as they are, it turns out that Japanese people (prepare yourself) speak Japanese. This is inconvenient, because Japanese is not English, which is what I supposedly speak most of the time. Luckily I took three years of Japanese in high school, so I was able to (with awestruck fellow Americans watching) order my food at a Japanese restaurant:

Me: “I’ll order THIS.” (Points randomly at Japanese words on menu.)

Okay, so I actually know absolutely nothing about Japanese. The only thing I learned from my three years of Japanese is that my Japanese teacher hates me. So to get past the language barrier I just speak slowly and pronounce key words really loud and gesture randomly a lot with my hands, which would work if they were deaf or retarded but doesn’t help much with Japanese. When it comes to ordering food at restaurants without pictures, we employed the strategy of pointing at random words and hoping the food was good. This is of course how we end up with a dinner consisting of five different types of ice cream, ten beers, and one actual entrée (which was liver). We also confused the waiter when we apparently were pointing at words that actually said “Breakfast served until 11 am.”

Speaking of which, another great thing about Japan is their vending machines. Japanese currency is very coin intensive, and by the end of the day your pants are around your heels because of all the coins you have to put in your pocket. So to alleviate you of all those pesky coins, the Japanese put vending machines every five feet everywhere in the country, and they sell everything from drinks to food to cameras. But I’ll give you three guesses as to what my favorite vending machines sell. I’ll give you a hint; it rhymes with “beer” (no, not deer, although there are numerous deer parks throughout Japan where you can be molested by overly aggressive and hungry deer).

Anyways, these machines are great, because they sell beer and can’t check IDs. The only thing is that they stop working after midnight, which is information that I probably could have used before my trip. I looked like some kind of degenerate gambler at the Vegas slots, just muttering to myself and trying to put coins into the slot until I got frustrated and just sat down on the ground and cried to myself. You also have to be careful, because they don’t let you wear shoes indoors and so they give you these little indoor slippers that never fit and fall off if you lift your feet. This means you will be hung over and shuffling your feet and leaving a winding trail of small fires on their tatami mats.

So most of you are saying to yourselves “Mitchell, you said Japan was great, yet you’ve done nothing but complain about Japan. The only positive you’ve written about is beer in vending machines.” In response, I would like to again reiterate, this is beer. In a vending machine. Yeah, there are other great things about Japan like culture, history, blah blah blah blah beer in vending machines. But if you insist on getting a feel for what the “natives” do there, go to a karaoke bar and convince the drunkest Japanese person there to sing Elvis Pressley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” What follows will inspire you to the point of tears (trust me; I’ve seen it in person):

“But I can’t herrup, farring in ruv, wiz YOUUUUU….”