One thing travelers to Japan say all the time is that the people are so nice, polite, and helpful. This is really handy when you have a lot of traveling to figure out.
When I landed and got through immigration (permission for my “body” to enter the country) and Customs (permission for my “stuff” to enter the country) my son, Eric was waiting for me in the main waiting area. (By the way, there was sumo wrestling on the giant TV) he was happy to see me but a little frantic.
It takes about 3 hours by bus to get to his town, Utsunomiya, and the travelers hotel (called a hostel) registration window was due to close before we got there. Eric called the manager and explained the delay. The manager graciously agreed to stay late and wait for us.
Now we needed a faster way to get to Utsunomiya, so Eric traded in the bus tickets and we bought two train tickets. One for the Narita Express to get us INTO Tokyo and one for the Shinkansen (high speed rail) to get OUT of Tokyo and up to Utsunomiya.
Buying a ticket is easy. finding the exact-right rail line at a major station when most of the signs are in Japanese is hard. Between my elementary studies of Nihongo (Japanese) and Eric’s 5 months of experience we figured out the ticket and asked a lot of questions. Every major station has either a police officer or some other uniformed official standing by to help travelers. But you don’t have to always find a uniformed person.
When we were looking for where to stand in line for our reserved shinkansen seat Eric asked other people in line whether we were in the right place. Everybody we stopped was helpful. (Remember this, the next time you see foreign visitors looking puzzled….see if you can help!)
When we got to Utsu, we still needed to get the address of the hostel, Weekly-Sho and addresses in Japan are NOT ORGANIZED LIKE OURS!. More later, perhaps on this. Eric asked the けいさつかん (keisatsukan) Police officers where to find the hostel. They looked it up on a giant map, wrote the address on a piece of paper. We took the paper to the taxi stand (helpfully there was a sign that said TAXI in English) and gave it to the driver. The driver called his dispatcher to find out where that address was actually located…because you can’t locate an address by any organized system and he drove us there.
The manager was waiting outside for us. What a relief!
I have been chasing the sun this whole trip, it was daylight outside the plane the entire 13 hours but most of us slept as much as we could. Still the time difference is disorienting. My body thought it was morning and the sun was just setting in Japan.
After a long sleep I’ll probably be adjusted.
Questions:
Why do you think the addresses are not arranged like ours?
The way locals treat visitors gives a city or country a certain reputation. What are things in your city or country that give visitors a good opinion when they visit?
In my travels in Europe I have found that the “natives” are friendlier when you attempt to speak their language than if you go up to them just speaking English. I especially noticed this when I was in France and Germany, I got further because I attempted to speak my high school french, then those I was with who did not.