Early impressions of Japan

Since the very moment I arrived at the airport, I have consistently gotten new impressions of Japan. Maybe not at quite the same furious pace now as I did during the first week or so, since I am beginning to grow accustomed to some of the things that really struck me as different in the beginning.

One of the first impressions was that tradition and history seem to be so well represented everywhere in society even today. On my way to school, I pass a number of different shrines and also several beautiful traditional Japanese gardens. And this for me is something exotic, that this industrialized and technologically developed country still has such a strong connection to their past. What is even more fascinating is how these things are seen alongside modernities in the melting-pot of contemporary Japan.

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I think that this picture quite clearly shows an example of this impression.

A traditionally pruned tree, right next to a Coca-Cola vending machine.

Another early impression is one that I, in a somewhat greater sense, expected before I first got here: the lack of space and how it is in some places extremely noticeable. Some of the streets among the houses in the neighborhood look like bicycle- or walking-roads, but they are actually driven upon by the cars of the people living there. Many of them are extremely narrow (and crooked), and I still wonder how a situation with two cars meeting in some of the narrower passages would be handled. Even though many of the cars are small as well, they wouldn't be able to pass side by side in some areas. Streets and cars are not the only things that are small; many of the houses I have seen are small and most of them are extremely close together, in some of the cases cramped like in the picture below, where the walls are almost scraping against one another.

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