I arrive in Japan

Today was my first proper　day in Japan - yesterday I was jetlagged out when I arrived and spent the afternoon walking around like a zombie.
Yuuka had booked a coach tour of Tokyo which left from the station at 9.00, so I got my first taste of a packed subway train on the way. It wasn't quite at the level of guards ramming people in like stuff in an overpacked suitcase, but I did feel the potential for things to get that way, if the trains were anything less than punctual to the second. On the subject of the notorious exactness, discipline and politeness of Japanese people, at lunchtime on our tour the bus had stopped outside a hotel while we went to have a succulent barbecue cooked on a lava stone from the Mount Fuji area (the food, not us). When we returned five minutes early, the driver was not having a fag or reading the Sun with his feet propped up on the wheel - he was polishing the wheel hubs, with a level of concentration that would shame a painter. And earlier, on the previous stop, we saw an old-fashioned tea ceremony in a tradition which began with Buddhist monks in the fourteenth century, when tea first came to Japan from China. Everybody sat around a low table while two ladies in kimonos conducted the ceremony - they were the tea masters. Every movement from the cleansing of the ladle with a ceremonial cloth, to the handling of the bowl itself, is ritualised to a precise form. It's something you only see in Western culture in a sporting context, from anxious looking, waif-like creatures with scraped-back ponytails. (I'm not going to talk about the Scotland team any more in this post - should Burley go? In a word, yes! Who should replace him? In a word, Jordan!) There, stop. What was I saying? Oh, yes, precision. Well the Japanese do seem to walk a funny kind of tightrope between zen-like spirituality and frenetic rushing around. The temples attract a lot of people who you wouldn't see in European churches - salarymen, students, all sorts, having a quick (ritually formal) pray, then re-hitting the throng of the streets to have a meeting about making an even faster phone, or whatever it is they all do in these gigantic Tokyo office blocks.
Anyway, that's enough insights for today - I'm going to go out in search of BAN GOHAN with my wonderful kanojo. Next subject for this blog will be Food I think... Mata ne!