Two Weeks in Japan: Everything I Wasn't Prepared For

I landed at Narita on a Tuesday morning after a 14-hour flight from Dallas, and within the first hour I had already made three critical errors: I tried to tip my cab driver (mortifying), I walked through the wrong door at a convenience store (twice), and I forgot that in Japan you stand on the left side of escalators in Tokyo but the right side in Osaka.

Nobody tells you these things.

The Shinkansen Changed My Life

I know that sounds dramatic. But I grew up in Texas, where the prevailing attitude toward public transit is mild suspicion and the car is king. Boarding a bullet train for the first time — watching the conductor bow to the cabin as he entered, feeling the platform vanish in an instant, staring at rice paddies blurring past at 300 km/h — genuinely rearranged something in my understanding of what infrastructure can be.

The Shinkansen runs on time. Not "on time" in the American sense of "it showed up." On time to the minute. The average delay across the entire network is something like 30 seconds. I checked three times because I didn't believe it.

Kyoto in Bloom

I timed the trip around cherry blossom season — sakura — which meant I was competing with approximately everyone else on earth. The popular spots like Maruyama Park and Philosopher's Path were beautiful and absolutely packed. But venture 20 minutes off the tourist circuit and you'd find temple gardens with petals drifting into still ponds, and no one else around.

The secret with Kyoto is to wake up early. Like, embarrassingly early. I was at Fushimi Inari at 6am, walking through the tunnel of torii gates with only a handful of other early risers, the whole place glowing orange in the morning light. By 9am it was shoulder-to-shoulder tourists.

The Konbini Problem

I did not expect to become dependent on convenience stores. But Japanese konbini — 7-Eleven, Lawson, FamilyMart — are a different species from their American cousins. Hot food, onigiri that costs $1.50 and tastes like it was made by someone who cares, surprisingly good coffee, and a complete absence of the fluorescent sadness you associate with gas station food.

I ate at konbini roughly six times. I regret nothing.

What Caught Me Off Guard

The thing nobody prepared me for was the quiet. Japan has a population density that should produce constant noise, but there's a social contract around sound — speaking quietly in public, no phone calls on trains, music from headphones and headphones only. After a week I found myself in Seoul, where the energy is completely different, and the contrast was striking.

Also: the toilets. Every travel writer mentions the toilets, and I understand why — they deserve their own essay.

Practical Notes

• Get a Suica card at the airport immediately. It works everywhere.
• Google Maps is surprisingly reliable for transit routing.
• Learn to say "sumimasen" (excuse me) before anything else.
• Budget more than you think for vending machines. There are 4 million of them.
• The best ramen I had was in a basement restaurant I found by wandering down a random alley in Fukuoka. Yelp had nothing to do with it.

I've been back for three weeks and I'm already looking at flights for next spring. Some places do that to you.