“South of the Border, West of the Sun”

I didn’t know much about Japan, just what Manga Series are willing to let us know about their country and inhabitants. This is why the news of going to the Land of the Rising Sun excited me so much. I was going to spend 15 days travelling around the centre of Japan, a country with a totally different culture and traditions.

During those days I tried to learn as much as possible about their character and I found out that Japanese people are extremely polite. So much so, that sometimes it makes you feel uncomfortable. It didn’t feel right to me to leave a shop and have a row at each side of the front door made by the shop assistants bending their backs 90 degrees.
This politeness goes hand in hand with their inability to say ‘no’ as an answer. We didn’t find anybody during the whole trip who spoke English –not even anyone who understood it-- nevertheless, when we asked if someone could talk to us in English their answer was ‘yes’. After that categorical answer, the conversation couldn’t continue. This made it pretty difficult to solve our problems and sometimes we got exasperated, but, much to our surprise, we ended up developing a quite detailed sign language.
However, these extreme good manners that sometimes seem strange to us, show that –in many aspects-- they are a more civilized country than we are. For instance, they are an incredibly trusting population. At the shops it was costumary to see that there was no shop assistant because he had to excuse himself for a while. And nobody stole anything! Every time this happened I wondered: if this was Spain, how many people would have stolen at least one little thing?
Moreover, if they make a mistake they don’t try to blame someone else (in fact, they feel so guilty that sometimes a tiny little mistake has a fatal end). It is not strange to hear that a train that didn’t arrive on time ended up with the driver commiting hara-kiri.

In short, every community has its own character. We may like some things more and others less, but people who like to travel around the world should try to catch the good things of every different culture.




“These people who live smiling, who quickly forget sorrow and misfortune, who are sober like any other, who take childish delight in tree blooms and landscape ornament, who know how to find in life thousands of tiny little things which they love and which make their existence carefree and peaceful, are at the same time those who easily depart this world by a voluntary act under the impulse of the most frivolous pretext.”

Wenceslau de Moraes