Word of thought...

As we near the completion of our first week in Tokyo I feel I have experienced so much in such a small amount of time. Having never been here before, but having seen much of the media Japan has come to be famous for, my expectations for this country and it's people were running pretty high in the days leading up to this trip. I basically had this image of a very ordered and futuristic society in which people had a great sense collective thinking combined with a healthy amount of room for individual creativity, the latter of the two being very akin to the sense of freedom people in Europe and the US seem to have. I was also expecting very friendly and polite people that were no strangers to moral values and common sense. So in the end this whole trip, aside from having a heavy neurosurgical connotation, also served me as a means of getting to know a different part of this world, hoping to find something I have been looking and longing for in my life for quite some time now.

The first impressions I got from the japanese were mainly those of an clearly ordered society with many polite people generally keeping to themselves while strictly attaining to a huge amount of social rules prevalent in this society. Remarkable was the fact that among these people there was no lack of people voluntarily stepping up to the challenge of communicating with us and seeing whether we needed help in finding our way, this has been, up until now, a common sight.

As the days progressed and our contacts with the people became more frequent, my view of these peoples kindness did not diminish, this mainly because we met many people who ended up talking to us without knowing us, and we were even invited to dinner by a complete stranger. Now this is obviously not the end of it, for most of these people had either a possible economic interest in us or were simply of an older age, for the other side of this coin leaves us with the younger people. Keep in mind that the english speaking population in Japan is rather small, and by that I mean that you will be hard pressed to find someone capable of a language other than japanese, it is this small detail that is probably to blame for the fact that young people are not easy to confront. I say this because after having approached them, they do react enthusiastically but these situations quickly become a little awkward due to this obvious lack of verbal communication, this can be quite frustrating at times.

The main motivation for this message was a chat we had with an old japanese man who aside from being very friendly, also happened to be quite proficient at the english language. It was with him I talked about the differences between the japanese society and the more western oriented ones. One aspect of this conversation worth mentioning concerned itself with this old mans inability to agree with us on the idea that japanese people were of a friendly kind, and we quickly found out why.

It seems japanese people, being isolated as they are, are very dependent on the western world for their economic and general wellbeing. This, highly likely, promotes the friendliness that is shown towards people like ourselves. Another sad thing we discovered is that there seems to be a general disliking of most other asian peoples, the reason for this being that the japanese are very proud and even arrogant towards their close neighbors instead focusing their attention to the likes of Europe, which is clearly reflected in the way most people look on the outside. The whole of this story was also confirmed by another friend we found, this time not japanese but chinese.

So it seems there's more to my first batch of impressions I took home from this first week in Tokyo, and even though not all of them were as positive as I had hoped them to be, on the whole I do feel welcome among these people, as for the complete reason for this feeling...I'll most likely come back to this once I've had more time to think things through, for now I'll concentrate on learning the language and studying their habits and customs.