Bullet points on Japan

I’m back from a great trip to Japan (specifically Honshu, the main island). Below are some things I learned(sidenote: Blanket caveat that I don’t really know what I’m talking about and I am not suggesting you should be interested.) and found interesting.

I also got distracted by Agnes Callard’s article The Case Against Travel and wrote some thoughts on travel in general.

Japan notes

• I was bracing for culture shock. It is often said(sidenote: “Oh, Japan? I love Japan. So alien!”) that Japan is the the most different first world culture you can experience, from the perspective of a country like the US or UK. If so, the first world is more culturally homogenous than I thought: I really did not feel deeply out of place. I find this kind of comforting.
  • You can travel around Tokyo on trains with English language signs and announcements, stopping by a Starbucks or MacDonald’s, past billboards and signs advertising in the Latin alphabet for UNIQLO and Sony and Fujifilm and other brands you already know, on the same large grey rectangular high-rises as near enough any other big city. Don’t forget the cities — not just Tokyo but Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, etc. — host millions of tourists yearly and are experienced at doing so, more experienced than ever. The feeling for me was one of hundreds of differences but, yes, not fundamental strangeness or weirdness or barriers.
• An important factor re above must be the way smartphones have made navigating and especially translating so much easier in the last 10 or even 5 years. Patrick McKenzie (an American who lived in Japan for a couple decade) says “[they] made Japan more than 100X more accessible than it was in e.g. the late 2000s”.
  • Translation apps now let you hold your camera up to a sign in Japanese and overlay the translated text in realtime. Imagine showing that to tourists 20 years ago, really. Both these things — navigation and translation advances — deserve to be on Gwern’s list of small improvements in quality of life since the 1990s.
• Having a very low crime rate seems to make a bunch of cool unstaffed services viable, like street vending machines and coin lockers.
  • In the UK I sense that vending machines exist pretty much only where products can be marked up significantly and the risk of vandalism is low (e.g. private spaces with few competing options). In the cities (and indeed in smaller towns and villages), drinks vending machines line the streets, facing sidewalks and other public spaces, selling at convenience store prices. And they serve hot drinks more often than not.
  • Why low prices? Maybe because their ubiquity in space means more competition between owners, who presumably lease the machines but get to set the price (if you see one machine, chances are you have the reasonable option of using another nearby). Would like to understand vending machine economics.
  • There are also (famously?) vending machines for many other products under the sun. Capsule toy (gashapon) machines seem second most popular to drinks, they sell little plastic balls with collectable toys.
  • Coin lockers take a coin or sometimes a card payment for indefinite use of a locker space. They were again far more ubiquitous than in the UK or US; in most metro stations and busy indoor spaces like museums or malls.
• Re above; why such low crime? Wealth doesn’t explain it: the richer US has a homicide rate nearly 100× higher. Nor does it seem to be trust: about a third of respondents agree that “most people can be trusted” (in China it’s nearly two thirds). Some factors I heard suggested:
  • The court system (and policing) are apparently very efficient
  • Gun control laws are unusually strict and criminal sanctions unusually tough and retributive in general
  • Japan’s income distribution is almost entirely middle class
  • Cultural factors I don’t feel placed to speculate about
• I can’t believe I’m writing about the bins before the cultural wonders, but it really is remarkable how few bins there are. Apparently this is partly a result of the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. Trash cans were removed as a security measure, and stayed gone. Walking a dog in metropolitan Japan is a special logistical challenge.
• The pound and dollar are strong against the yen and have been for a couple years, this means the whole trip was unexpectedly affordable. Beyond culture shock worries, my main concern was that prices (at least in the cities) would be similar to NYC / Paris / London. I did not do particularly fancy things but this was overwhelmingly not the case and wouldn’t have been the case even if the yen were decently stronger, especially for food and accommodation. Train travel felt like the biggest unavoidable cost(sidenote: All the same: at 500km the bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka works out at roughly £15 per 100km; Manchester separates London by 262km at around £28 per 100km.).
• Higher residential density means cooking for oneself is less practical, one reason regularly eating out is more of a norm compared to big western cities. So there are something like three time as many restaurants per capita in Japan than the US. Apparently Tokyo has the most restaurants of any city in the world, no I can’t find a citation. 5–10 seats per restaurant is not unusual, nor is specialising in a particular kind of food like soba and udon, ramen, teryaki, curry, sashimi, sushi. Since restaurants are serving a lot of demand from residents who want good affordable eating options, the eating options are very good and affordable. £4 for a great mid-range meal with miso and vegetables was typical.
• Did you know about the Tokyo Skytree? I didn’t despite it being the tallest tower in the world and third tallest structure in the world(sidenote: I got sidetracked learning about skyscrapers at this point. Did you know historically skyscraper construction has predicted recessions?). It is visible from almost anywhere in the city.
• I was told Osaka : Tokyo :: Manchester : London, vibes-wise. Note that while Japanese cities are much bigger overall (Osaka around 5 times more populous than Manchester, Tokyo 1.5 times more than London), the ratio between the capital and the next biggest city is larger for London than Tokyo: London is near enough 10 times more populous than any other city in the UK, Tokyo no more than 5×. I’d guess the UK is more unusual here among, say, OECD countries?
• It felt like there was more emphasis on private spaces, and physical distinctions between public and private. More two-person booths at restaurants, more options to rent small private rooms (like one-person booths at internet cafes or karaoke boxes). Many sliding doors and room dividers. Outdoor shoes off at the door, indoor slippers on.
• Something interesting about energy in Japan: the Fukushima meltdown caused other nuclear plants to be shut down for maintenance checks, and that caused rolling blackouts (by 2011 nuclear power was supplying ~30% of domestic electrical power). So in summer 2011 an unofficial movement movement (‘setsuden’) encouraged households and businesses to cut back on electricity usage, and this was (in terms of reducing electricity consumption) very successful. Peak energy usage fell 20%(sidenote: Not sure if that is electricity usage or total energy.), overshooting government targets. The government piled on with policies restricting energy consumption, but even after they repealed those policies, the lower energy usage persisted — the lower capacity was no longer causing blackouts. Before the Fukushima meltdown, the government had planned to increase the nuclear share of electrical power by ten percentage points; in the immediate aftermath they at least planned to fully restore lost capacity. But the success of the setsuden movement afforded an argument to green activists: it turns out we can get by without so much nuclear power, we just need to keep up our frugal energy use. And domestic nuclear power generation remains less than a quarter of the peak.
• Apparently there is a norm among working men, especially ‘salarymen’, to give most their salary to their spouse beyond an often modest monthly allowance. A typical allowance might be something like $150–350/month; they are often spent at izakayas for food and drink after work with colleagues.
  • Though the ratio of female to male labor force participation rates is not remarkably low and increasing, 75% to the US’ 83% and India’s 27%, plus young people are less embracing of the salaryman thing, so I’m also told these and other salaryman traditions are fading a little.
• The Japan Rail Pass was until recently the “best travel deal in the world”. But in late 2023 it increased in price by around 70%, now I’d guess it isn’t economical for most trips involving one round trip between Tokyo and Osaka and a couple other excursions. Sad!
• Sasha Chapin did not enjoy Japan as much as everyone said he would, it is worth reading his post. We met up with old friends (a video game and a professional stuntman) now living for a few months to a year in Tokyo. They love Tokyo and everything you can see and buy and eat but the biggest difficulty seemed to be making friends, or more generally even fleeting personal connections, and often mentioned how they missed how in some other country they remember the people there are so genuine, so open.
• Many daytime TV shows feature a little box in the corner (‘waipu’) with nodding heads reacting to the main content. If not celebrities then the people reacting are often professional reactors, represented by agencies with airtime requirements and so on. It is Gogglebox-by-default.
• We saw Wilco in Osaka(sidenote: Half-remembered setlist: Hell is Chrome, Handshake Drugs, Jesus etc., Muzzle of Bees, If I Ever Was a Child, Impossible Germany, Shot in the Arm, California Stars, Via Chicago.), I love them more now. Jeff Tweedy has a recent book called How To Write One Song; this interview with Ezra Klein on the book is fun. Try to see them.
• Relevant reading I enjoyed: above all two recorded lecture series from Mark Ravinas, one called Understanding Japan on cultural history and one called The Rise of Modern Japan on modern political history. There is also Japan Story by Christopher Harding that is more discursive and built around character vignettes and anecdotes; I know little enough that I really just want the more straightforward history first.
• Woodblock print art has a surprisingly cosmopolitan story: traditional Ukiyo-e inspired some early impressionists as part of a general European craze for ‘Japonisme’ after trade was (forcibly) reopened in the 1850s. But then a kind of rebooted school of print art (Shin-hanga) borrowed some Western and indeed impressionist painting elements and was driven mostly by export vs domestic demand (I guess it seemed kind of kitschy or inauthentic). And that new visual style and mass-production attitude feels close to modern graphic novels.
• Some things I wished I had time to do: the beautiful-looking Shimanami Kaido bike trail across the Seto Inland Sea, visiting Hiroshima and especially the Peace Memorial Museum, the Sunrise Express sleeper train between Osaka and Tokyo, seeing Tokyo from the Skytree tower. Of course hundreds more things.
• Which isn’t to mention many of the things I did do, I did in fact go places and do things!

(Thank you E, and A and K, for making it such a nice trip)

Thoughts re whether travel is good

Here is Robin Williams’ character in Good Will Hunting:

Robin Williams: You’re just a kid, you don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talkin’ about.

Matt Damon: Why thank you.

Robin Williams: It’s all right. You’ve never been out of Boston.

Matt Damon: Nope.

Robin Williams : So if I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.

• On the flight back I read Agnes Callard’s ‘The Case Against Travel’. The question is not just why we travel (as in, travel the expensive and time-consuming leisure activity(sidenote: Callard: “[o]ne sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it.” So we’re talking about going somewhere without having a reason to be there in this sense.)) but “why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue”. I do think many first-pass answers feel uncomfortably weak; too much “this feels a bit like a cover for less flattering motivations”. Yet I do feel like travelling is more worthwhile than video games and indeed a great privilege. What gives?

• I’d guess the most popular answer to “why celebrate travel” is what you learn some irreplaceable kind of education. To see things with one’s own eyes and to hang out in different cultures affords you knowledge you don’t get through book learning (it is said). But what kind of knowledge?

• Russell talked about ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description’ — to know that Steve enjoys origami because his friend said so, and to simply know Steve because you met him (at which point you gained knowledge by acquaintance without necessarily learning further facts about Steve). But, sure, you can make it so that by hypothesis you need to travel to Ouagadougou to earn knowledge by acquaintance of Ouagadougou. But that needn’t involve learning any facts about Ouagadougou, and what is left over — simply that you went to Ouagadougou — feels like a spurious kind of thing to call ‘knowledge’, and a curious thing to spend much time and effort to acquire.

  • But I do get the attraction of going places in part to say we went, acquiring the fact of having visited a place and seen various things. I get my experiencing self to slog it out in transit to go to a new place as a gift to my remembering self to say I went to that place and I have the postcards to prove it. But to say going someplace new to recollect that we went is worthwhile because we appreciate those recollections really fails to answer the interesting question of why we appreciate the recollections, which if honest will overwhelmingly be of “being a bit uncomfortable in a new place”.

• But if knowledge by acquaintance isn’t it then really the argument from education needs to say things about the factual knowledge you learn about a place from travelling to it. In terms of headline facts — I mean the big historical events that shaped a place, the political picture, the numbers — maybe you are better off saving your many hours of travel time and just spending them reading up?

  • Herbert Simon: “Anything that can be learned by a normal American adult on a trip to a foreign country (of less than one year’s duration) can be learned more quickly, cheaply, and easily by visiting the San Diego Public Library.”
  • I wonder if, in terms of important factual knowledge, even the best museums beat reading Wikipedia on a per time basis. Suppose you’re going to be quizzed on your knowledge of the Dutch masters in 2 hours, and you are teleported to the gates of the Rijksmuseum. Even then could the best play be to sit on the entrance steps and read Wikipedia?
  • Vitalik Buterin: “I think going to Beijing and seeing the Summer Palace, and then going to Tokyo and seeing some shrine and whatever, is basically useless because you don’t really get more than you would get by going to Wikipedia.” — yet — “But I think the kind of traveling that is valuable is the kind where it’s not even set up as explicit travel for the sake of travel. [That teaches things] I would not have learned by just reading about those places from the internet and the various mainstream ideological blab houses that talk about those places all day long.”

• So maybe it’s not big picture factual knowledge. Maybe it’s the subtle, ineffable, details of a place; the kind that don’t make it into textbooks or Wikipedia pages but which combine to something very worth learning. Like what people do to pass the time when they’re queuing, what the radio hosts talk about, landmarks of the soundscape like a regular call to prayer, what the local tabloid news reports on, what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You do definitely learn lots of small things when you travel (it is hard to help learning lots of small things wherever you go). Here I’m curious why I feel like I hold this kind of ‘small ineffable details’ knowledge in high esteem, if that’s what the argument from education is leaning on. Sometimes the justification sounds dangerously close to framing it as knowledge by acquaintance, and I’ve already thrown up my hands at the intrinsic value of knowledge by acquaintance.

• Tyler Cowen suggests that beyond what knowledge travel directly imparts, it also makes it easier to learn things subsequently by making you a better reader:

I have been reading two good books about Sri Lanka, namely K.M. de Silva’s Sri Lanka and the Defeat of the LTTE and also his A History of Sri Lanka.  Both would be very difficult to follow if I didn’t already have a decent sense of the place names, how the country “fits together,” and many other features of life here. If I read about a 12th century Buddhist kingdom, in fact I absorb and retain much more of that knowledge if I have visited the ruins of said kingdom.  It is more intellectually and emotionally salient to me, whether or not that process is rational.

• I think the word here is context — that elusive thing always left over from book learning; that which is scarce.

  • Daniel Frank: “It is only by spending time in new places do we gain the ability to contextualize our homes. Travel enables your inner fish to finally recognize the water engulfing your life.”

• If knowledge is a terminal good then it’s a heterogenous one: there is the canned stuff that gets shipped through books and screens; then there is the perishable stuff only available at the source; neither perfect substitutes for one another. The collector of worldly knowledge might just prefer the latter the same way the food connoisseur might swap a crate of mangos shipped to the UK for a mango that just dropped off a tree at Ratnagiri.

• Another reason to laud travel above (say) video games, is that travel is supposed to be transformative. Here Callard simply disagrees: “The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.”

  • I think you could reasonably disagree here, though I wonder if the trips most likely to change us would not be trips we tend to plan for leisure.

• Of course travel — and talking about it afterwards — might have signalling explanations of the eye-rolling kind. It shows you did something pretty much unavoidably expensive in time and money and so have both to spare. It shows you are logistically competent. And for the traveller who did something really edifying and adventurous, it shows you are full of energy and verve for life and aren’t so exhausted that with your time off you wish to as close to nothing as possible.

• This whole thing feels hand-wringing and neurotic, though. Another reason is that it’s fun — to do and to look back on — even the actual locomotion part if you’re with good company. And you don’t analyse what activities and reminiscences are rational to enjoy or not. That is, to put it mildly, missing the point.