Last month, after our trip to Japan, many people were curious to know what struck my wife and me the most about Japan. My wife is way too diplomatic to answer such direct questions. But I have no such inhibitions and quickly replied, “Speed breakers. There are none in Japan whereas here, even in a small community like where I live, there are 8 in the perimeter road of 800 metres.” My response was prompted by a bump on my head because of an unmarked speed breaker. So I said what was uppermost in my mind.
The thing is it’s not as if the place where we live is full of junglis. Not by any reckoning. It might have been, when journalists were in the majority. It is, after all, a complex built by media persons. But not any longer. We now have some highly educated non-media people living in our housing complex. But despite that we need a speed breaker every 100 metres. Likewise with dog excreta. True, that in that respect, Japan isn’t unique. Europe and most other countries are the same. But in India it’s the “love my dog, and love its poop as well” attitude. So if you are driving in our housing colony you have to deal with the speed breakers. And if you are walking, you have to deal with the dog poop. It’s best to stay at home.
One other major difference is walking. The Japanese walk three or four km a day and not because someone has asked them to walk 10,000 steps a day. It’s because there’s very little parking space and they have an absolutely marvellous subway system. In India, however, we take the car or motorbike to go a couple of hundred yards. I asked a neighbour’s son about this one day. He said walking was boring. “Boring? What about that earphone you wear all the time?” I asked. “Uncle,” he said, “now you are being boring”. There wouldn’t be a single Japanese person who would say that to a senior citizen — and believe me I am very senior, nearly 75 years old.
We saw something else in Japan that you don’t get to see in India — the tendency to defer to others, what in old Lucknow was called the “pehle aap ” Tehzeeb (politeness), or way, even if it meant huge inconvenience for you. The Japanese take politeness to an extreme unheard of anywhere else. This is in sharp contrast to India. I recall once how on a train in our lovely and polite country two young louts had placed their suitcases about six feet in either direction above their own seats. This deprived at least 15 passengers of space on the overhead racks. I was one of them. But when I protested, they asked me if my father had bought the train. In Hindi, of course, in which it sounds much better. It was only my wife’s intervention that prevented fisticuffs.
But, she says, Japan is also becoming ruder. She has been there several times and notices the little changes, especially in the attitude towards foreigners. Too many tourists have made the Japanese wary. They don’t, like we often do in India, welcome foreigners, and then proceed to cheat them. They think it’s undignified to do things like that and they do place a lot of store by dignity.
Anything else, asked my interlocutor. “Well,” I said, “dustbins. There are hardly any in Japan. India and Japan are identical in that respect.” The reasons are different, of course. There, people don’t litter at all. Never. If they have something to throw, they put it into their pockets and take it to their home dustbin. Here we simply steal the dustbins which is why no dustbins are seen here. Hence India-Japan bhai, bhai.