Danilo Prestint

Japan is a peculiar country – the Land of the Rising Sun. I visited Japan during the summer for an entire month but it rained constantly. People in Japan are odd. Everyone says they’re as “yellow as a gold coin” but they look pretty ordinary. Slightly unusual faces and slightly-slanted eyes and nothing more – people with their own customs and habits. They work tirelessly throughout the day and in the evening many of them play Pachinko, some type of slot machine game. They spend hours playing but often win nothing at all! I tried playing it myself, spent a few yen but quickly grew bored. You simply feed some sort of balls into the machine and pull a lever. If the ball falls into the right spot, you win more balls, but if it doesn't, you continue to pull the lever until you run out of balls. Their other pastime is drinking. Many Japanese people go to snack bars where they buy a bottle of Suntory whiskey, and drink it. The owner of the snack bar, Mama San, writes the customer's name on the bottle with a piece of chalk and places it on a shelf until it's empty. Another activity is called machiko, which is suitable for dancing, but usually only foreigners participate as the evenings pass. Japanese people love singing their hearts out, mostly sad songs, or they sound sad to me. Every snack bar has a stereo and a microphone with recorded tracks of music. To sing a song, you need to take the lyrics booklet and pay 100 yen per song (the exchange rate fluctuates, but approximately 1 dollar is equivalent to 220 yen). No one interrupts the singer, and no one shouts while another is singing – what strange people!
The Japanese also love sports – strange sports. Baseball, golf... I’m not sure whether there was a world baseball championship during my visit or not, but there was a television channel that exclusively aired baseball games, which I found extremely boring and incomprehensible. Baseball for breakfast, baseball for lunch and for dinner – you guessed it – baseball.
Despite the well-known fact that people from the East tend to conceal their emotions, the Japanese people can get angry and shout during baseball games. They shed tears for every point lost, laugh, sing, and some girls even dance on the sidelines like American cheerleaders. Some may even curse, but I didn't learn any curse words during my visit. This means men, women, children, and the elderly. Knowing the Japanese people, I believe that they are fond of betting on the outcome, which is why they cry and laugh, are happy and sad, because the Japanese are born gamblers. You can walk down the street and see a crowd gathered around a green roulette table in a window. Gambling is a common and legal activity. However, one can only imagine the level of illegal activities that take place in unregulated casinos. They have only begun to copy golf from the English, just as they had copied baseball from the Americans long ago, because the Japanese are quite unoriginal and copy everything from the others; they even copied transistor radios from the Americans, even though it's widely believed that they invented this ingenious device. But back to golf. A person unloads a truck when it begins to rain – and he takes out his golf club to hit the raindrops, saying that’s the best swing practice.
Fishing is quite a sight in Japan, where the coastline is lined with locals holding fishing rods. Between boats, on the waterfront or the breakwater, they stubbornly fish rain or shine, but there is no catch. No fish – maybe they migrated to our plates. They have even made artificial ponds filled with fish in city centres where one can fish, but the catch is returned into the lake. It’s all for the pleasure, or perhaps the fish are fake, those Japanese can invent anything! They also enjoy archery and the compulsory martial arts, and I’ve almost forgotten sumo. Sumo is a traditional sport where two corpulent men take each other’s measure for half an hour, and then suddenly bang: their bellies and heads collide and whoever is stronger wins. They then bow to each other – and that’s it.
There are countless TV channels! Unfortunately, receivers don’t have enough knobs to receive them all. Each city has its own settings, and after a month the television’s channel settings are all ‘off’. Even though different cities offer different channels, the same shows are often played. Commercials air in the morning and evening. However, there are no televised sporting events aside from baseball. No football or basketball. Since these Japanese are passionate about gambling, quiz shows are aired three times a day. Morning begins with a quiz show, whose difficulty level is unclear, but the prize money is small. In the evening another quiz show is aired followed by an American film. The film is dubbed in Japanese so you can’t understand a single word. I saw John Wayne speaking fluent Japanese and even the gunshots were Japanese. I searched for the animated Japanese beetle in vain.
Young people can be found playing baseball or are simply not seen. There are no promenades for strolling so people can see and be seen. There are Motomachi and Isezakicho, shopping streets five or six kilometres long with roofed shops selling a variety of goods, little bars, and ice cream parlours. Although it seems like the perfect place to stroll, locals-only shop and leave. We once asked where young people hang out but they couldn’t answer us: we don't speak Japanese and they – the Japanese – are clueless about English. However, one rainy night we finally stumbled onto a place called ‘Disco 1000 Queen’. We were knocked on our butts by the cover charge of 2500 yen (about 13 US dollars or 500 dinars). When we recovered from this shock, we hit with another: food and drinks were free of charge and unlimited. We drank a small cask of whiskey and ate a small mountain of grilled shrimp with chopsticks. We returned the following night and everyone already knew us. Girls approached us and asked us to dance (they fall for guys with beards and moustaches and seemed to be attracted to our other hairy parts). Oh, boy, no drinking that night. The disco itself was phenomenal: mirrors everywhere, air conditioning, an excellent sound system, two large screens, no crowding and the Japanese men and women danced separately, no couples. They stood in rows and followed a simple one-two, one-two-three routine. We busted it up with our disco moves and they immediately declared us John Travoltas. The owner of the club asked us to come back because he didn't get many Europeans and we Yugoslavs were good dancers (even though he wasn’t quite sure where Yugoslavia was – “somewhere close to Greece!”), even more so when the drinks are free. Young, female Japanese punk rockers drank heavily (I would actually call them barflies), smoked like chimneys, got high basically in public and openly offered to spend the night with us. So we made our own contribution to better relations between the youth of the two races.
There are very few buses available, but taxis can be found at every step. Their rates are quite affordable, so they were our exclusive means of transportation. The starting rate is 380 yen and each taxi is air-conditioned and plays your choice of music. Additionally, there are also streetcars, underground and aboveground railways, and the Shinkansen – a super train that travels at speeds well above the legal limit. They are not crowded because the tickets serve as a reservation. You know exactly which car and seat, and the platform indicates where the train will stop. The ticket inspector takes you to your seat and you can sit and wait until the voice on the intercom tells you that you have five more minutes until you reach your destination. Highly efficient and well organized. No need to say that the trains are never late. There is a story circulating about a train conductor who committed suicide because the train was five seconds late.
There are cars, I’d say too many of them, but Japan has an extensive road network with underground and elevated roads and wide lanes making it comfortable for drivers with no traffic jams. All the Japanese car models resemble those in Europe or America (except I never saw an imitation of the fićo [Zastava 750]). Surprisingly motorcycles are not as common as one would expect. Where are the Suzukis, Hondas and Yamahas? Perhaps they are all exported.
Having spent a whole month in Japan, we realized that we knew less about it than before. Except that it’s an island, as the sea is everywhere. I arrived by ship and visited only harbour cities – Sakata, Wakamatsu, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, Iawata, Moji, Kudamatsku, and Kawasaki (Rijeka’s sister city). And I left by ship amid a typhoon that had a female name. Sayonara.