What surprised me most about Japan coming from Spain
From the silence on a packed subway to how little litter you ever see on the ground. Here's what surprised me most about Japan coming from Spain.
There are destinations you arrive at with a fairly accurate idea of what you'll find. Japan wasn't one of them, not at all. These are the things that struck me most coming from Spain.
The silence in crowded places. Tokyo's subway at rush hour is packed to the very last corner, and yet nobody talks on the phone, nobody shouts, there's no background music.
How clean everything is with almost no trash cans. You can walk for half an hour through Shibuya without finding a single trash can, and yet there isn't a single piece of paper on the ground. I never quite figured out how they manage it.
That punctuality isn't an aspiration, it's the absolute norm. A shinkansen leaving one minute late is practically front-page news.
How kind people are even without sharing a language. More than once someone literally walked us all the way to the door of the place we were looking for, without us even asking for that.
The stark contrast between tradition and modernity, on the very same block, is one of the hardest things to explain until you see it with your own eyes.
How strictly the line is respected, for absolutely anything. For the train, for a restaurant, for whatever there is to wait for. Nobody cuts in, nobody pushes, nobody complains.
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