I was fortunate to spend bunch of time working from Tokyo recently. After visiting three times prior for 1-2 week trips, spending extended time there deepened my understanding and appreciation for Japan. Here are a wide range of impressions and lessons from this fall:
Tokyo remains a world-class city — as clean, functional, and fun as ever. From my first visit in 2006 to today, Tokyo remains dynamic and vast and mysterious. The world’s largest city has always been a fun spot for adventurous tourists; these days, for those interested in longer stints of visiting or living, Google Maps + Google Translate + various on-the-ground evolutions makes Tokyo significantly more accessible to non-Japanese speaking expats than 20 years ago.
Now’s a good time go visit. It’s comparatively cheap. Go spend more time in Japan. Go spend time in Tokyo and just walk around the neighborhoods. Go spend some nights in ryokans and at onsens and in small towns and in the other larger cities. Go, go, go.
The Japanese smooth out the rough edges, in a quest for perfection. So much has been written about the Japanese aesthetic, quality of service, cleanliness. From the explicit exposition of someone like Noah Smith who called Tokyo the “world’s great city right now,” to the lyrical moods of Murakami (my various book reviews of his epic novels), or the poetic reflections of Pico Iyer, whose book A Beginner’s Guide to Japan I’ll quote at times in this post.
So let me share just one anecdote on the overall topic of Japanese perfection. On one of my first days in our private office in Tokyo, some light jazz music suddenly began playing out of a speaker built into the ceiling. I couldn’t figure out how or why the music started. 30 mins later, the music hadn’t stopped, and I grew concerned that what was supposed to be a quiet, private office in a coworking space actually was subject to some building-wide music system steered by a jazz aficionado building manager. (Hey, it could have been a worse genre of background music.)
I pulled out Google Translate and typed English sentences: “There is jazz music playing in my office. I did not turn it on. Why is it playing? Can you turn it off?” Google Translate spit out out the Japanese version and, clutching my iPhone, I swung open the door to my office to stomp to the front desk and inquire.
As it happens, two men were already standing outside my office in official, erect poses. What luck. I clicked “Play” in Google Translate to ask my pre-loaded question in Japanese. They micro head bowed as they listened — the micro bow where your head drops ever so slightly in rapid succession: the most common type of bow in Japan.
Then they spoke back into my phone: “Deep apologies,” Google’s translation’s said back to me. “The jazz music means the fire alarm system is working. We are conducting a test of the fire alarms in the building. The jazz music plays if the alarm is working. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.” They proceeded to deeply bow and walked off. Only then did I notice they were wearing fire department helmets.
It had never occurred to me that a fire alarm building test could be anything other than bone-tinglingly loud.
It turns out that the Japanese have figured out ways to smooth the jagged edges of modern living. Yes, there’s a dark side to smoothing out the edges in a question for perfection. Here’s Pico Iyer: “Perfection, in fact, is part of what makes Japan wonderfully welcoming to foreigners, and unyieldingly inhospitable, deep down.” But all visitors and most long-term visitors never get “deep down” — they just enjoy the wonderful surface. They exist in the mid-depth warm bath of perfection.
Singaporeans follow the rules because of laws. Japanese do so because of culture. In my observations of Singapore, I pointed out the cleanliness and orderliness of the society — and the frequent public signage reminding locals of the fines or caning that result from littering, excessive noise, taking photos up the skirts of women on the subway, or engaging in other uncouth conduct. In Japan, it’s as clean and orderly as Singapore, but there are no warning signs. I’m not even sure there are well understood laws around littering and noise. Yet the population upholds the norms perfectly and voluntarily. (There’s a neighborhood clean-up competition in Tokyo where people walk around and see who can pick up the most trash.)
How rules/norms are enforced illustrates a key difference between Japan and Singapore: Singapore is a 58 year old country with various immigrants from across Asia who cohere into a single society. Japan is a thousands-year-old culture that’s pure Japanese from top to bottom.
No jaywalking even if there are no cars — extrapolate this norm society-wide. There’s no jaywalking across the street on a red light. No matter if there are no cars to be seen and the sidewalk is a narrow distance. Wait until the hand turns green. Always follow the rules. This leads to some frustrating moments: Want to move a table around in a private room at a restaurant? Want to ask for someone at a hotel or serviced apartment to make an exception to some arcane building rule that doesn’t matter? Good luck.
When you follow the rules, you fit in. Here’s Iyer on fitting in: “Japanese couples on honeymoon traditionally plan matching outfits for every hour of their trip. Even girls on a Sunday shopping spree often sport the same hairstyles, false eyelashes and white boots. Fashion becomes less about standing out than fitting in, at least within the micro-group of which you are a part.”
Japan is at once futuristic and stuck in the past. There’s a lot that’s quite analog in Japan. Starting with the emphasis on paper. Sign a lease for an apartment and you’ll have a million pieces of paper to sign. In that shuffle, one important piece of paper in the stack explains how to open your physical mailbox — to receive yet more paper. When you rent an office, one of the key features that gets explained? How to open your mailbox to receive print mail — to supplement your home mailbox. When you hire a tour guide, the first thing she does upon greeting you? Hand you 7 different pieces of paper explaining the different aspects of the upcoming tour. (The one place you won’t find paper — in public bathrooms, for drying your hand, because of the prominence of air blowers, which are the worst. )
On the other hand, Japan has a reputation for being a blade runner, robot friendly, futuristic country, too. I didn’t see too many robots. The most telling futuristic attribute of Japan today may be the invisible macro stuff: low birthrate and low religiosity, for example. Among the visible are its efficient mega cities. Tokyo and Osaka, with their small densely packed apartments and constant redevelopment, portends our increasingly urban future as we seek more energy efficient ways of living.
The reels that go viral on Instagram promote the wacky side of Japanese culture and there’s certainly some of that. These aspects of Japan feel neither forward looking nor backwards looking but rather an artifact of its singular, isolated culture that stands apart from the harmonized globalized soup of developed countries.
In our residential building in Tokyo, for example, there was a daydreaming competition in which several dozen people sat out in our courtyard and competed for who could daydream the longest without falling asleep. Local reality TV shows are truly bizarre and involve many similar types of “competitions.” Harajuku also offers an otter cafe (sit with real live otters).
And the weirdness may be a result of an inclination of Japanese people to retreat within versus engage with a broader, normalizing sphere. The Japanese have separate words for the self inside the home and the one that’s out on the streets. Here’s Iyer: “Nowhere else I’ve been, in fact, are individuals so disengaged from the political domain… they turn their backs on the public sphere, and make fantastic worlds out of their passions, counter-societies out of their hobbies.”
Will globally relevant startups be born in Japan? Unclear, with many reasons to be optimistic or pessimistic. The knock on Japan has long been its risk adverse, salaryman culture which stymies the freewheeling individualistic rebel who might otherwise aspire to be the next Steve Jobs. It has, indeed, been awhile since Japan birthed new innovative companies. The Panasonics and Sonys of the world are old. Rakuten is a more recent hit but there’s aren’t many.
Is there reason to be optimistic that startups could blossom in Japan? Based on my conversations and casual poking around on the ground, I’d say it’s decidedly unclear. On the positives:
– Japan’s highly skilled workforce appeals to companies seeking non-China options in this moment — it might lead Japan to be a natural deep tech manufacturing partner to Western allies. I could see semiconductor, deep tech, nuclear energy, and related startups flourishing in the next couple decades in Japan.
– A novel reason for optimism I heard from my friend Alex Rampell at a flashy a16z event in Tokyo this fall: if you can change the culture to be more risk seeking and entrepreneurial, you can change the entire culture all at once. It’s the silver living of a more “collective”, homogenous mentality: change could happen quickly and comprehensively if and when it happens at all.
– The government wants a thousand startups to flourish — a Japan business federation, with the endorsement of the ministry of economy, wants to see “100 unicorns by 2027”. Lots of governments try to stimulate the startup economy so this is not unique but helpful as a baseline. I suspect the government will pump considerable capital into venture funds and startups in the coming years.
– Finally, Tokyo benefits from Hong Kong’s decline in terms of attracting expats in search of a good, first-world base for doing work across Asia. Tokyo benefits not as much as Singapore in this respect but it’s the second biggest beneficiary. To some, Taipei is seen as too risky given China’s ambitions, and Seoul the same given the possibility of war on the Korean peninsula. The quality of life in Tokyo is spectacular and the weather is better than Singapore and it’s easier than ever to not speak Japanese and still find your way around. It’s easy to see founders and VCs from around the world who seek an Asia outpost might set up shop in Tokyo.
A central reason for pessimism, at a human behavior level, seems to be the cultural impediments that are by now well written about. A preponderance of risk-adverse cultural pressures from age zero to 18 squelch a lot of entrepreneurial instincts and it doesn’t seem like that’s changing.
Framed differently, there remains a reverence for authority and age-based seniority hierarchy that suffocates the opportunity for some creative youth to flex their wings. Pico Iyer: “In terms of wealth distribution, Japan in 2017 was ‘the most equal’ society on the planet; many CEOs in Japan earn less than some of their employees do. But in terms of the gulf in public status, Japan is much more unequal than the United States. There’s no overturning the hierarchy.”
At a more macro level, Japan’s population decline is what it is — likely devastating to long term growth — and seemingly impossible to solve without a massive overhaul to how the country thinks about foreigners + immigration. (Interestingly, Korea’s demographics are worse than Japan’s.) Meanwhile, it’s still impossible for immigrants of any kind to achieve authentic “Japanese” status in the eyes of locals. One friend who’s third generation Japan native (i.e he was born and raised in Japan, as were his parents and grandparents) — but who’s ethnically Taiwanese — told me he’s not considered truly Japanese by any local companies or investors. (Here’s a counter argument about why to expect more immigration to Japan.)
All in all, I wouldn’t bet on a startup revolution the next 10 years in Japan. Beyond that, it’s possible but hard to say.
Quiet envelops public spaces. I was admonished a couple times, by a shop owner, for talking too loudly on my cell phone standing outside a restaurant on a public sidewalk. It turns out people don’t talk on their cell phone at all in public. Malls are generally quiet. Honking is rare. Talking loudly on the subway never happens. You find yourself constantly embarrassed at how loud American tourists are.
So safe, so clean: Little children wander around on their own in the big city. You’ll see kids who are barely five years old walking alone on big city streets of Tokyo — wearing cute little hats and rectangular box backpacks. As in Singapore, children can walk around and lick the streets if they want without a care in the world. Leave your wallet somewhere, and someone will try to return it. Etc. Walking big city streets packed with people and not caring at all about your safety — what a feeling.
Sumo is fun. Try the practice session more than the tournament. We went to both the official sumo tournament in Tokyo and to a practice stable off-season. While the live match was a fun atmosphere — thousands of people in a big stadium — it’s pretty slow going, with each match taking mere seconds and various ritualis between each match taking many minutes. So, advice for tourists: Don’t sweat trying to figure out how to go to an actual tournament, just check out a practice stable workout. You can find many such tours online and you’ll get up close and personal with the wrestlers and see much more real action, one after the other, with no ritualistic delays included.
One fascinating moment from visiting a sumo stable was when the sumo master said his own son, of sumo age, is staying in school and not wrestling. This guy goes around the country to recruit young talent to stop out of school and wrestle full time…but to his own son, he says, “Get an education.”
Restaurant and food observations. Japan is such an incredible food country. Some general observations on restaurants and eating generally, followed by food specific comments:
- No matter how many people sit at a table, generally only one menu will be put down at the table, for the group to share. What could explain this cultural norm?
- There’s a bag container next to each table to put your briefcase or bag or jacket. Without fail — a bag container. Is it to keep your individual bag clean? Or to keep the floor clean and tidy for the collective aesthetic?
- Even in meals where they offer western cutlery, I encountered multiple instances of forks eschewed in favor of spoons. Spoons to eat a salad, for example. Always few knives — not as dramatic as in Singapore (which never offered knives) but still scarce.
- Too many tourists stress about finding “the best” ramen place, the best sushi, the best whatever. Don’t do that. Just wander around and walking into random restaurants that seem popular with locals and using Google Translate to scan the menu. Rolling the dice works in Tokyo.
- Many casual restaurants have table dividers to allow single patrons to eat alone without having to make eye contact with anyone else at a shared table. There’s something a bit eerie about a restaurant full of people — mostly businessmen — slurping their noodles in otherwise silence, head down, talking to nobody, even as they all share a table.
In terms of the food itself:
- I found myself newly appreciative of soba noodles, and of the “soba soup” you eat at the end that’s the broth that cooked the soba.
- I learned to love natto, the breakfast superfood that’s a sticky set of beans.
- Eating miso soup nearly every day — at breakfast, as part of set menus for lunch and dinner — gets you in touch with all the different styles of miso: the carrots or mushrooms or what have you on the inside; the clear or darker broth.
- Fruit is delicious and of a luxury variety, and what’s in season matters at lot. 7-11 carries the seasonal fruit.
- Nigiri sushi was quite good but not dominant in the diet. What you notice relative to Western sushi is the quality of the rice — the texture of each individual bead of rice. Sashimi is far more popular than nigiri.
- I hadn’t had high end tempura before until eating at this place. Quite a step up from the usual assorted tempura side dish served at U.S. sushi restaurants.
- You notice the lack of bread in the diet.
It’s all Japanese people, no immigrants (other than in convenience stores). In Tokyo, it’s Japanese people wearing suits and ties walking into epic skyscrapers. And it’s Japanese people cleaning hotel rooms, bathrooms, and dishes in the back of the restaurant. Japanese people working on the construction sites. The only place I reliably saw immigrants? Convenience store workers. Speaking of which…
Convenience stories rock and the meals are very much ready to microwave. It’s well known that 7-Eleven, Lawson’s, Family Mart, and Mini Stop all rock. And not just because, say, the triangle rice squares with salmon inside — onigiri — are addictive. What’s less well known is that all the fresh food and ready-to-heat meals — which get freshly delivered 3x/day to convenience stores in Tokyo — contain clear microwavable re-heating instructions for how long to heat the food at different wattage levels. Everyone microwaves their food in plastic containers. You’d easily see 20 people in line for lunch at a 7-11. There are more than 50,000 convenience stores in Japan, including convenience stores just for the elderly. (Convenience Store Woman is a fun novel and a bestseller in Japan.)
They’re the best fans in baseball. All the fans singing the same song at the same time, for different players, is also quintessentially Japanese: united, orderly, respectful.
Rituals over philosophy. A gym has a million little rules about where you can wear your shoes, how you change, etc. And an onsen has even more. The Japanese love rules, processes, and — in a grander sense — rituals. Here’s Iyer: “When he gives lectures in the West, I heard the Dalai Lama say, the audience tunes out the minute he starts speaking about ritual and comes to life as soon as he speaks about philosophy; in Japan, the formula is reversed.”
And on religion: “Shinto has no texts or doctrines; Buddhism in Japan is so much a matter of rites and recitations that for centuries no one even bothered to translate many of its canonical texts into Japanese… “The most important things in our practice,” said the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, “are our physical posture and our way of breathing. We are not concerned about a deep understanding of Buddhism.”
Other random observations and odds and ends:
- Colors and culture: Taxis in Tokyo show a red light on the front of the car to indicate their availability, and a green light to show they’re full. Similarly, in Japan (and in China and Korea perhaps elsewhere), when a stock is going up, a news finance TV show will show it in red font, whereas when a stock is plunging in value, it’ll show in green. Red = good fortune and success.
- As a train pulls into a metro stop in Tokyo, the station plays a distinct jingle so that passengers who aren’t paying visual attention can know it’s time to get off for their stop.
- The Japanese seem obsessed with golf. Golf stores and ranges at every corner at in Tokyo, seemingly. At the gym, I saw a lot of people working with their trainers on golf-specific movements and strength exercises.
- Shoehorns are everywhere next to sitting/shoes areas. Shoehorns are also included in business class amenity kits in Japanese airlines. Part and parcel with a shoes-off-inside culture, but it’s not something I’ve noticed elsewhere in the Asia (the shoehorns per capita, that is).
- Summers in Tokyo are hot and sticky. The Japanese society isn’t built around A/C in the way that Singapore is. So the humidity can get to you in summer. One government initiative is called “Cool Biz” — encouraging folks to dress more casually in the summer to stay cool, and forego the suit and dress shirt look that 99% of businessmen wear to work year-round.
- Single use plastics everywhere. Individual, single bananas wrapped in its own plastic. Individual rice crackers — perhaps 30-40 of them in a package, all individually plastic wrapped! Saltine crackers in packets of four, each wrapped in plastic. Apples wrapped in plastic. On and on.
- Toranomon Hills is an up and coming and terrific neighborhood for expats. The Mori buildings are phenomenal. And the neighboring Shimbashi district is great.
- Dogs treated are as children, adorned with luxury clothing and strollers.
- Napping in public seems socially acceptable. I saw literally hundreds of different people nap in public during lunch hours or early afternoon siesta hours.
- The dense web design in Japan is fascinating. Locals prefer what to to my eye are super overwhelming pages, stuffed with content from top to bottom.
- Twitter is so popular here. Look over someone’s shoulder on the metro — and they’re on Twitter. Japan is the second most active market for Twitter after the U.S.
- Japanese people seem very into stretching. There’s a great chain in Tokyo called Dr. Stretch in which Foot Locker-dressed trainer will stretch you out. Better than a massage! At the gym, many personal training sessions involved a trainer on the floor stretching out their client.
- This nine minute history of Japan is amazing and remains one of the best history videos on YouTube.