#292

Japan

The trip was great. I got back on Thursday, tired after a 14-hour flight with two crying babies (they’d be quiet for a while, then one would start to cry, which would set the other one off, and they’d enter a vicious cycle of louder and louder crying until the parents managed to shut them up; I would be totally in favour of banning babies from planes, if you want to take your loud spawn abroad, use a transport mechanism that lets you isolate them, like boats), and have been recovering from the jetlag.

We spent a couple of days in Tokyo while everyone arrived, then a week in Osaka, then another week in Tokyo. I also broke away for one weekend to visit some other friends in Matsuyama.

Here are a few things I noticed:

• Things seemed a bit less cash-based than when I was there in 2018. I still used a lot of cash, but I felt like there were also more options to pay by card, and most of the convenience stores had machines to feed cash into and count the change automatically, rather than needing the human cashier to do that.

• Even taking the exchange rate into account, the day-to-day living expenses are pretty low. The Tokyo hotels were expensive, but food and transport were cheap enough that we could ride the subway everywhere and eat out at restaurants every day without worry.

• Even the cheap stuff is good quality. A 300 yen convenience store onigiri, about £1.50, tastes good and is nourishing enough to be breakfast.

• There are almost no bins in public. So after eating the aforementioned onigiri, you end up carrying the empty packaging around for hours. I took to always bringing a bag with me to fill with the rubbish I produced.

• The Japanese love their single-use plastic packaging. You’d buy, say, a bag of snacks and find that inside the bag, each snack is individually wrapped in its own smaller bit of plastic. This does not combine well with the bin situation.

• It’s quiet. One day we were walking around a busy part of Osaka and someone remarked that unless you really listened… you couldn’t actually hear any other conversation.

• You’re never more than 5 minutes away from a well-stocked public drinks vending machine. They all accept cash and many of them accept card too. I’m already missing these in the UK.

• Cyclists will just awkwardly follow you and not ring their bell. I think you’re supposed to telepathically sense the bike behind you and move aside unprompted.

• Bidets everywhere. I saw more public toilets with bidets than I saw public bins.

One day we visited an owl place in Kyoto, leading to my favourite photo of the trip:

One slight problem I had during the trip was with my finance tracking. I have two bank accounts and had my holiday budget stored in the one that gave me the better exchange rate (and doesn’t change an FX fee), but the other one is where my credit card direct debit comes from, and whenever I paid for things with card I used my credit card. So I had to periodically sweep money from the one account to the other, to put it aside for the credit card liability, but for some reason the credit card transactions were taking 3 or 4 days to appear on my statement which meant I didn’t really know how much I had to sweep until days after the transaction.

This led to an entirely self-imposed problem, in that I have some validation on my finance tracking that raises an error if I spend money on my credit card without—on the same day—putting the same amount of money aside to pay it off. This is normally good, as it effectively forces me to treat my credit card as if I always paid it off instantly, which prevents overspending. But in this case I had the choice of sweeping late (and tripping the validation) or estimating the amount to sweep (and maybe tripping the validation).

I think the way I’d handle this for another trip is to leave a small buffer, say £50, in my main bank account to cover FX-related discrepancies, and to sweep the estimated amount on the same day as the transaction. That should ensure I always have at least enough put aside.

Books

While on planes and trains (but not automobiles) these past few weeks, I read:

• Kingdoms of Elfin a collection of short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Of Cats and Elfins another collection of short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Strange Relics a third collection of short stories, by various authors

All these books were published by Handheld Press. I have a couple of others from them too, and I’ve always been impressed with not just the content, but also the physical quality of the books. Sadly, it looks like Handheld Press is closing down next year, so I’ll have to pick up at least all their fantasy and sci-fi books before then.

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