...I really think so.
I have decided that in relative terms Japan is like the 5 star hotel of travel destinations. Its expensive but across the board the country works for you, as if the tourist board long ago had some "Pull Together" ("Purr Together") campaign. The people everywhere are as helpful as I have ever encountered. Stories abound among travellers of help given so far above and beyond that it borders on the creepy. One girl I met had been trying to hitch from a bus station where she had missed the last bus. A local couple driving by picked her up and drove an hour and a half out of their way to get her to her destination and then spent another hour driving around the town looking for her hostel. But as they spoke nearly no english, the entire 2 and a half hours driving were spent in near silence. As I am much too experienced a traveller to ever require such drastic intervention by strangers my own experiences were milder but no less gratifying. One particularly memorable incident was when a security guard gave me the wrong directions to a guesthouse and then chased 2 streets after me to correct them, followed closely by the woman who had corrected him.
Beyond the helpfulness of the locals is the sheer quality of pretty much everything. Everything in Japan seems to be about a week old. Roads look freshly tarred and painted. You could eat your sushi off the floor of a public bathroom. And the swiss really have nothing on these guys when it comes to time keeping. Trains arrive and depart at the correct time, every time. {Rumour warning} It is a fact that the Japanese Rail company sent out a letter to all its customers recently apologising for being 17 minutes late that year. I shit you not, though someone might have been shitting me, as it were.
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I would accept (as would most people who've met me) that I wouldn't know trendy if it came up and powdered my nose. But I would still be confident that the Japanese are some of the coolest people on the planet. The girls are the best dressed I have ever seen, with vanity mirrors open as often as mobiles. And again I am not good with fashion but at the risk of offending a nation I would say the "Slut" look was in, skirts generally stopping closer to the waist than to the knee, and that was just the schoolgirls. What was weird was how well dressed the girls were in the most innocuous locations. Sightseeing on a weekday morning, girls would totter through gravel in high heels or try to maintain some decorum as they wobbled their way across cobblestones, clutching each other like drunks. It also took me a while to realise that the most common hairstyle for guys over here is one that involves highlights and a hairdresser, no bedroom blade 1 all over for these likely lads.
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I visited Hiroshima and it was one of the highlights of the trip. At "their" Ground Zero they have kept one building as it was after the blast over 50 years ago, complete with twisted rubble. I found it very effective particularly with photos of what the area had looked like before and just after the blast, the complete desolation of the area. The museum tour was grimly fascinating. It is strangely structured so that you spend over an hour walking through technical displays of the background, the blast, the repercussions and the global nuclear legacy, the detached facts of the matter. Then, thinking the tour finished and quietly contemplating the notion of blame and innocence in such a mess, I found myself in the second part of the tour, the personal accounts amongst the remains of clothing and toys and lunchboxes. The audio account telling me that the skin and fingernails in front of me belonged to a ten year old boy who's exposed skin simply dropped off after the blast. Somehow still alive (for a mercifully brief time), he was so desperately thirsty that he tried to suck the pus from his raw fingers. His grief stricken mother kept his fingernails and skin to show his father, who was off fighting in the Pacific. Another photo shows the outline of a person sat on some granite steps. The steps around where the person was seated are darkened by the blast, imagine the energy that person must have absorbed in creating that "shadow". Beside this are the remains of the clothes of a 12 year old girl who was burned horrifically and then found by her father and carried home. For some reason, amongst all these stories of horror, the idea of this poor man having to carry his little daughter home to die, of having to watch her suffer so much and know her only relief would come in her death, this hit me hardest. I had to switch off the audio tour and leave, unable to look at any more without losing it. When the rawest emotions had passed, anger was all that remained. Walking back across the memorial plaza, the Japanese flag flying high, thinking about the pride of empires and those who suffer to maintain it.
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