Impressions of America after visiting Japan
Impressions of America after visiting Japan
I was going to try to completely tell this story from the perspective of a Japanese person, but since i can’t say that I exchanged more than 100 words, total, with any japanese person all week, I can’t say I know anything about them, really. So the voice is somewhat odd. Other than that.. Yesterday (or some definition of “yesterday”) we were at the Seattle Airport. We stepped outside to smoke cigarettes and I was appalled at the pile of cigarette butts on the ground, in the street, next to the curb. Welcome to America. You can’t buy cigarettes in vending machines, and vending machines selling drinks (hot and iced coffee, green tea, water, juice) are non-existent. You have to go into a shop to buy a drink. Plus, it seems like everyone here drinks carbonated soft drinks, not so much coffee and tea (at least not prepared and canned). They get them at nearly any fast food restaurant, in stores, etc. Starbucks, however, seems to be a really popular place. The traffic on the roads here is much less dense, but the roads are almost all free!!! It does seem to be pretty busy during the commute time when people are going to and from work. There are many places to park cars, but you sometimes have to pay for a spot in a parking lot which just seems to be an empty lot with a toll box (sometimes this is computerized, but not very often). The public transportation, on the other hand, is much less useful. If you miss a bus, you could have to wait 30-60 minutes for the next one. The buses use a fixed price for use, which is great if you’re going a long distance, but it costs the same amount of money to take a local bus from one part of town to another as it would cost to just go to the next stop or so. You can get a “transfer” which lets you get on another bus for the next few hours. You can find these transfers on the ground downtown. Its a good thing that the price for a bus ride is fixed, because there isn’t a change machine on the bus itself to let you get the correct change. They do have monthly passes that allow unlimited use of the bus system. In Japan, a similar pass for a single day for a particular line cost over 1000 yen, but it allowed is to get on and off at several stops without having to revalidate our tickets. To get on the trains you would need to get at least 140 yen or so, but then have to pay as much as 5000 yet at the other end, depending on how far you went. Despite the high price of the trains, they are much less than the highway: To get from Atsugi to Narita and back cost between 5000-6000 yen in highway tolls, and this is on top of the gas for the car! While I was downtown, I noticed that trash cans were everywhere, but that doesn’t seem to make much difference, there’s a lot of trash in the street. And they don’t separate glass, metal, plastic and paper. I guess this must mean that it all gets put in the landfill, unless there’s someone at the other end separating it. I’d hate to have that job. The downtown “mall” on 16th street is not very dense with pedestrian traffic, even during the lunch period. There are a lot of young people, dressed in clothes bearing disrespectful messages. Everyone seems to be dressed differently. This place seems to have a lot of open space. I wonder if the people here get lonely from lack of contact with others. * But despite all this stuff, I’m glad to be here. * this was seriously the response I once got from a German cab driver in NYC when i described my 45-60 minute commutes alone in the car each way to work