Little Things About Japan
When a foreigner first comes to live in Japan, there are many small things they'll notice. Ceramic roof tiles on every house, which makes them appear to the eye to be beautiful temples until you get used to looking at them. Menus listing "kcal" for food items, since what we call a calorie really is a kilocalorie. People pointing at objects with their middle fingers, which would be rather insulting back home but which means nothing here. More vending machines than you can possibly imagine. Another aspect of Japan that struck me were the men who stood in the road to guide traffic around patches of road construction, which seemed like the most ridiculously easy job in the world, although they take it very seriously. They'd hold up their little orange baton at you then bow their thanks to you when you stopped, and like a fool I'd bow back, hoping no one could see the stupid foreigner.
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:27 PM
11 Comments:
Those tiles still look like a temple to me.
9:00 PM
Aren't tiles an odd choice for such an earthquakeprone country as Japan?
How about brick buildings?
10:32 PM
I like that politeness, though. Seems refreshing. The guys guiding you around road construction here look like they'd just as soon spit at you.
12:20 AM
Yes, it's funny how there's a "class" of people who are okay with these jobs. The pay is supposed to be pretty good, too, since I wouldn't stand out by the road all day.
The tiles are ceramic to guard against fire, another big problem in Japan. I think they are held up pretty well by Japan's building codes. Brick is almost illegal in Japan, the only brick building I can remember seeing had a huge metal frame inside to support it. I get real culture shock when I visit my stepmother in Baltimore, where brick is pretty much the only building material I see practically.
12:28 AM
Ceramic is also quite economical in cooler climates as it retains heat well. Additionally, heats up slowly so cooling is more efficient in Summer.
1:12 AM
too bad it doesnt catch on here!`thellian. lol.
6:33 AM
My family was fascinated by the sheer number of people employed to direct traffic in Japan - particularly in the bigger cities, there would be guys standing near the entrance/exit of every parking garage making sure the pedestrians stopped when a car wanted to exit, and sometimes there were even guys out in the road to stop the traffic and let the cars out. What great service! And all of them wearing neat uniforms complete with the ubiquitous white gloves that everyone who works in a transportation-related job seems to wear.
Japan sure is a neat country. Can't wait to go back.
2:04 PM
Vicky, yes, it's interesting how it all works. Good service, and it's a nice creator of jobs since a lot of retired people work in these kinds of jobs. OTOH, you can make the case that Japan is extremely inefficient. For example, when they need to know how much use a road is getting for traffic planning, they sit a couple of guys down with hand counters to click! click! click! as each car drives by. No kind of device embedded in the road itself to do this automatically.
It's like Japan is choosing to be lower tech as a social engine for jobs, which is fine, although outright waste rubs my American free market mind-set the wrong way. I mean, if they want to do things to put people to work, let's get all those wires that are strung up around Japanese cities and bury them in the ground like every other country in the world.
3:43 PM
I thought the reason for the raised cables were also earthquakes.
While we are on those cables, do you know what those garbage-can like thingsat the top of some of the cable-poles are?
6:08 PM
It's a transformer.
It takes the higher voltage from the power lines to a lower voltage used in households, I believe from 240 to 120V.
10:55 AM
Peter, they also have car counting jobs in the United States. I have a friend who did it a few years ago during the summer when he was in high school. He would sit at intersections and had an electronic device that had different buttons to be pushed to indicate where the car was coming from and which direction it was going. It was a private company that would send counters to various places in behalf of a paying client.
3:57 PM
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