50 things that surprised me when I was in Japan - Part 4

   Hey guys ! Look what I've found : the unpublished 4th part of the 50 things that surprised me when I was in Japan ! Of course, it dates back to 2016, when I first traveled to Japan, but if you've never been there yet, it might surprise you as well.
   Let's stop talking and get right into it !

1. Bathrooms

   As a first point of this article, I am going to speak about a very famous fact : Japanese bathrooms have othing to do with ours ! The washbasin is separated from the bath. The bath-room (literally speaking) is composed by… a bath, a shower head, and is built with materials that make the room completely waterproof. Yes, this means you can put water all around you !   This is the way Japanese bathrooms are made. Japanese people do not use shower stalls at all. My boyfriend was really surprised when I showed him how the French bathrooms were looking like.   But, this is understandable that Japanese bathrooms are equipped with baths only, as we know the « bath-culture » they have.

2. Onsen, or a place where you take a bath naked together with people you don't know

   Onsen are one of the most famous places in Japan ! I do believe it is worth trying. However... I would completely understand if you don't feel like doing such a thing !

   Actually, onsen are something that I didn't really understand, related to the japanese culture. It's wordly known that japanese people are very shy, and kind of prudish, in some way. But, for them, it is absolutely normal to take a bath, rounded by people that they do not know, and in their birthday suit. The best thing is still that most often, you are separated depending on your gender, so, don't worry ladies : no male pervert hands ! (But I can't guarantee anything about the other women ^^).
   As a foreigner, and someone out of this culture, I found it pretty odd... mainly when my boyfriend told me his family was going to bring me in this kind of places for New Year (i.e. : I will have to show my naked body to his mother in the first place... I kind of feel awkward about that).

3. Tattoos are everything but cool

   Tattoos are kind of related to point number 2 : if you have a tattoo, there are lots of chances that you won't be able to enter onsen. You will clearly be forbidden to. And the reason of that is the following : tattoos, in the past, were the sign of Yakusa, who are members of a transnational organized crime syndicate (wiki says). As it is still something anchored in japanese minds, you won't really be welcomed in onsen, public baths, swimming pools, etc. ...

4. Car parks

   Here is a completely different subject ! As my japanese school was approximately one hour away from my home (and that my sens of direction is pretty... awful), the first day, my host mother brought me there. As she parked the car, I noticed that there was this green weird thing on the ground (cf photo bellow). I had never seen that before #littlecampaigngirl, so I was kind of surprised. However, you can find that, and hundreds of small car parks in the open air all over the streets in Japan ! There are even these places, looking like buildings, in which you give your car, and the people in there, thanks to machines, put it in this kind of places :

5. "How can you do it so fast ?!", or Japaneses addiction to Purikura

   The first time I went to Japan, I hanged out with my penpal, one of her friends and her brother, we went to the famous and beautiful Canal City ! As Purikura is something rather specific to Japan, they wanted to bring me there.

   If you do not know what Purikura is, here is a quick summary : Purikura are big photo boothes in which you can enter alone or in group. To each Purikura corresponds one style of picture and effects. They even tell you what kind of posture you can take before the photo gets taken. However, you cannot do anything : like in a standard photo booth, you cannot really control when the photos are taken, and, if your face looks creepy, you unfortunately cannot take a new pic.

   After the shooting ended, you have to go to another small room included in the square construction that is the Purikura. There begins your most important mission : you have to choose which pictures you will put on your final copy, and you can customize them. Easy, will you say. It would be, indeed, if you weren't timed. We had to be so fast that I completely let my friends decorate the pics for me !
   The reason why Japanese people are so good at doing it so quickly is because they do it pretty often. The girls I hanged out with had literally dozens of Purikura pictures in their wallet.

6. Interactive TV

   Japan is for sure a very technological country. Once, while I was spending the evening with my host family, we were watching Meitantei Conan (also known as Case Closed), when I suddenly saw one of the kid doing something with the remote control. It took me a while to realize that the program on TV was interactive, and that he was actually playing a game !

7. TV with subtitles

   One other amusing thing with Japanese TV is that they have subtitles. Not the kind of subtitles we all can put on our western TVs. No. Subtitles are INCLUDED on TV shows (but not on animes or movies). Their use is somehow to underline something that one of the presenters or the guests said. Kanji have no furigana, so it forces you to link what you hear with the complex caracters written at the bottom of your screen.

8. Do not say bless you

   I really enjoyed my stay in Japan, but one of the hardest thing for me was to not say "bless you" each time that someone was sneezing ! They litterally do not have ANY word to say bless you.

9. You can say hello... but stay far away

   You might know that we, French people, do "la bise" to a lot of people every single day. As a good representant of my country, it was terribly hard to wake up every morning and just nod with the head to say hello to my one-month family !

10. What is wrong with physical contacts ?

   Japanese people do not "touch" each other a lot. They actually almost never do. As I said in the previous point, you do not make any physical contact to say hello to someone. It is considered as very inappropriate to be physically close to somebody in public. No kisses, no hugs, ... No PDA guys... It can be considered as truly shocking and rude by Japanese people to do this sort of things in front of them !


   I hope you enjoyed this article ! Don't forget to leave a comment telling me about what surprised you the most about Japan.

A~