Kyoto

I arrived at Osaka-Kansai airport yesterday with no hotels booked -- and was rescued by the kind women at the tourist help desk. They spent over an hour phoning around and were able to book me 3 hotels, one for each night of my stay here. Kyoto is a popular town.

The Japanese are back in the 90s when it comes to doing things over the internet. It's very odd and surprising. I was also having trouble finding a hotel in Tokyo, so just a few minutes ago I walked into a major Japanese chain hotel (APA) to see if they could book me a room at one of their Tokyo hotels. I expected them to just look it up on a computer. But no. The young lady who helped me took a hotel brochure and started calling them individually. Fortunately, she found one on the second call, thus saving me hours on the internet, paying a fortune, or showing up in Tokyo with no room at all.

First observations in Kyoto: Lots of Pachinko parlors, there are coin-operated drink dispensers absolutely everywhere, and it's hard to know what is a restaurant and what is not. And then there's the women's fashions... The young women here like mini skirts, mini-mini skirts, Daisy-Duke-style short shorts, and wearing their nighties in public, leggings and tights optional in every case. It's kind of a high-class prostitute look that sometimes makes you feel like a pervert, sometimes makes you want to say "halleluyah", and sometimes both at the same time. It's a little odd, especially since the nightie look seems to be most common among teenage girls walking around with their parents.

For some reason, Japan is very confusing. Or maybe it just seems confusing after China. Everything feels familiar, contemporary and normal on the one hand, but completely strange on the other. I have the vague sense that the Japanese generally do the opposite of what we think is right. For better or worse, the Chinese as a people seem a lot like we Americans. Better: Easy-going, casual, friendly, short on ceremony, practical, straightforward, liking noise and fun. Worse: Idiotic politics, stubborn, uncouth, uncultured, accepting of ugliness.

I remember the realization I had in Yangshuo when bicycling around and trying to figure out how the traffic worked: You can basically do whatever you feel like and everyone else just has to deal with it. That seems rather American, too. And anti-Japanese.