Eel and Japanese People Observations

The 6^th was a very rainy and very muggy day in the evening.  Even so when the work day was done it was not raining yet and I decided to walk to the hotel and stop at a store on the way.  The store was called Don Quixote in Japanese of course and I bought 5 umbrellas for 50 yen each (like 50 cents each).  By the time I reached the hotel it had rained a lot and I was sweaty from the humidity.  There are many store type places where the Japanese can gamble by playing a game called Pachinko.  It is VERY loud in these places and people sit there mindlessly playing.  I even saw people waiting in line for over an hour before the place even opened up in the morning.  

 We enjoyed a dinner at a teriyaki place where you have a menu with various things to have grilled for you and you buy them by on individual skewer sticks.  Here's Sylvain trying to decide what to order.

 Here was my choices.  They were quite good.  I had a pork wrapped asparagus one, a bacon wrapped sticky rice cake thing, and I can't remember what the spiral things were.

 The restaurant requested patrons to remove their shoes and you walk down these elevated paths past the tables.

 Here's people waiting in line for the bus we take every morning.  They wait patiently in neat lines.

 I met up with Sylvain to go to dinner and we decided to try the place that Yoshi describes as a fast food Japanese restaurant, Yoshinoya.  There I had a rice bowl with eel on top.  I was nervous at first but the eel tasted just like normal fish and wasn’t bad at all. 

I have made some observations about the Japanese people that I wanted to be sure to make a note of.  First of all, you rarely see kids around.  I know that the Japanese people don’t have large families and actually I think have less than 2 children per family (declining population) but it is still strange.  Maybe the culture is not to bring the kids with you when you go out I don’t know.  The kids are quite cute and are like you’d expect kids to behave.  It’s a shame I haven’t been able to see more of them.  Another thing I learned about the culture is that there is virtually no hugging in their culture and no saying of “I love you”.  This is true even among families, parents don’t hug their kids.  Sylvain told me that that’s essentially true in French culture as well, the no hugging thing.  That is so odd to me since hugging is so integral to my relationship with my wife and kids and my parents and siblings.  I have also noticed that people here very strictly form in lines.  There is no cutting and no crowding.  As people wait for the bus they form a line and strictly stay in that line.  People don’t crowd the curb when they wait to cross the street either, they’re happy to wait back away to make room for any cyclists passing the other direction.  Another thing is that the teenagers and college students, and even young adults are ALWAYS on their personal electronic devices.  A bus will drive past you and you’ll see everyone looking like they are hunched over sleeping, but most are texting, surfing the web, and listening to music (like Americans I guess).  Some are actually sleeping and it’s likely due to their very long work hours.  It is actually very common for people to work essentially all day long and every day in fact.  They do stop for meals and do non work related things while at work but they are always there.  They also work on Saturday and Sunday, not the whole day but at least part of the day.  Another interesting thing is that you’ll see many bikes parked in an area behind a bus stop and it seems that most of these bikes are actually not locked up.  Many people feel free to just leave their bikes in a public area and not worry about them being stolen. This is also true downtown when people go in to a restaurant.