Japan.  A country about the size of California, with over 80% of the land claimed by mountains and volcanoes, and with about half the population of the USA.  So if you take 20% of California and cram into it half of all Americans, there you have Japanese city life!  Kind of sounds like playing 'how many people can you fit in a VW Beetle,' doesn't it?!!  People are so packed into the less than 20% of the country flat enough for habitation that often there's no room for parking ramps -- yesterday I saw what looked like a normal tall and narrow office building, but the gutted-out inside of it in fact it was kind of like the conveyor system at the dry cleaners with the clean clothes circulating around at the push of a button:  flip that vertically and you have a conveyor parking lot, where you park in a slot like a ferris wheel box, and at the push of a button your car is circulated up the inside of the building!  Then when you come back, they just push the button and you watch all of the cars rotate down, over and up until yours is there!  Then there's no room to turn the car around to get back into the street, so there's a turntable which spins your car 180 degrees to face the street!

Here are some other tidbits for your reading pleasure (I hope!):

- Continuing on the strapped-for-space theme, the cheapest hotels are called "capsule hotels" where for around $35 a night, you can buy the privilege of sleeping in something quite similar to a drawer in a morgue!  Walls in the hotel hallway look like honeycomb on a bees' nest, and one of those little holes is where you get to sleep.  The hole is about 2 feet tall, 2 feet wide, and 6 feet deep, just barely big enough to fit a non-tall person and not much more.  Once you climb / squeeze in, though, some places are quite nice with a TV and climate control system all built in!  Nope, didn't stay in one but loved seeing it.

- Moving on to other tidbits, it's fun to get into a subway car and see big signs in English for "Virginia Slims" cigarettes!  Good ole Virginia has made its way to the other side of the planet!

- Punctuality is such a critical custom that people often will show up early for an appointment, wait outside, and knock exactly when their watch says it's time.  No such thing as being fashionably late here -- being late is quite unfashionable.  Japanese people literally seem to have an internal alarm clock such that in subway cars, nearly EVERYBODY sleeps, and their internal alarm clock wakes them up when they're near their stop.  I'm not simply assuming this is the case; a few Japanese people explained it this way to me!  People sleep on the subways because work days are very long and one-way commutes average 1 to 1.5 hours.  Mine is one hour.  I learned the hard way that my internal alarm clock doesn't ring loudly enough to wake me up in time for my stop!

- The Japanese way of going drinking with your buddies at college is a lot of fun.  Rather than go to bars, you go to a place with long rectangular tables with a big group of your friends, sit down, order lots of drinks, and order zillions of little bowls of different foods even if you've already eaten dinner.  Then while drinking and picking at all of the tasty foods with your chopsticks, you proceed to watch everybody's faces turn bright red very quickly and the general noise level go through the roof.  Then after a while it turns into musical chairs, with people swapping seats to mix up the conversation groups.  It's very fun and much better than drinking and eating nothing or just potato chips!  Also, as a polite custom people always fill your glass; you hardly ever pour your own -- for if you do it can mean that you're an alcoholic!

- It's really easy to eat in Japan even if you don't speak or read the language, because most restaurants have display windows with plastic life-size versions of the dishes they serve!  They look incredibly real, and you can just point to what looks good, and the meal you're served looks EXACTLY like what was in the display window!

- Japan is incredibly safe.  People carry around hundreds of dollars worth of yen all the time, and since it's safe to do that they rarely use credit cards.  Some (including me) leave their bags unlocked at train stations to go grab a bite to eat or stroll around the area while waiting for the next train.  Once in extremely busy Tokyo Train Station I saw a man leave a full Tiffany's bag outside a bathroom completely unattended while he went in to do his business.  No problem!  It's quite safe for both men and women to walk around at night, though if you're female and in the bar district a completely wasted company man might howl at you before he proceeds to take a leak on a wall somewhere or puke on the sidewalk.  A LOT of drinking goes on.  I participated in that for my first two months here, and with all the eating that goes on while drinking I was sure I would get fat but instead I think I might have lost weight.  I don't quite understand it -- there is fat in the diet here (for example:  a Japanese favorite is chicken skin shish kebob -- yuck!) but there aren't many fat people outside of the Sumo wrestling ring.  In fact, perhaps 15% of the people look to me like they're anorexic.  In France, food there is incredibly rich what with heavy sauces and whatnot, but there are relatively few overweight people in France as well.  What's in American food that there are more weight-challenged people?  Someone told me that it may have to do with preservatives? 

- With society being so safe and crime comparatively so low, it's no wonder that in many ways Japanese exclude/isolate foreigners, considering that like most places in the world the news about foreign countries mostly centers on heinous crimes.  It's nearly impossible for a foreigner to become a Japanese citizen.  Nearly all 3rd-generation people of Korean descent, whose grandparents were forced to do hard labor in Japan before and during World War II, and who were born in Japan, raised in Japan, and know no home except Japan, are not Japanese citizens.  And I think if you're not a citizen, you can't vote.

- Life as an employee in a big Japanese company, by American terms, sucks.  Lifetime employment is shrinking but still is the custom in the vast majority of big companies, and feeling devoted and loyal to the company for such a gift of security, employees will do anything for the company.  Typically you cannot choose what type of job you will do, what product line, what division, or what location.  When you are hired in right out of college, you don't know where you'll end up -- it's all staged as a surprise.  For an example I know a very smart girl who has a degree in law; and her first 3-year assignment is to do accounting.  The company circulates you around many different departments, once every two or three years, to give you a wide range of experience and ultimately turn you into a general manager.  Along the way you have no choice; you do what and go where you're told.  Quite often is the case that you have to leave your family behind and go work in a place far far away, only to return home to your spouse and kids on an occasional weekend.  Each big company location has one or more dormitories where you get a room to live in, far from home.  (In fact I'm living on one of those dorms right now!)  There's not much you can do about it; quitting is high-risk because the vast majority of reputable Japanese companies hire fresh college grads and no one else.  It's normal life here and I think not a big deal because that's what everybody is accustomed to, that's what the life experience is like.  But seen from a pair of Western eyes, uh, well, I don't think I'll go to work for a Japanese company after graduation.

- Back to fun stuff, outside Tokyo there's an INDOOR ski slope!  It's a huge structure sloped for skiing, and inside, year round, it makes snow!  It's parking lot is packed on weekends, so is Disneyland's; and for that matter most Japanese restaurants and stores are very busy, too.  You would never know that the economy has been stuck in an outhouse for the past decade.  I don't understand this one!

- Finally, my personal favorite:  When I traveled in China, a man on a train kindly informed me that I'm not tall.  He was being perfectly cordial, but for some reason felt obliged to inform me of my shortness relative to other Westerners.  Well, when drinking in a restaurant a person I just met, right after our first minute of conversation, kindly informed me that I have a big nose.  I was shocked to hear that!  Later I learned that in Japan, if you're a guy, a big nose means you've "got it where it counts!" 

Cambodia ~ Thailand ~ Malaysia ~ Singapore ~ China ~ Mt. Fuji ~ Japan ~ Egypt