Japan. 10 days.

Three ideas continually struck me from our 10 days in Japan: Abundance, Humility/Respect, and the Paradox of Calm/Chaos.

Abundance: I was completely blown away by the sheer magnitude of everything. I was expecting big but not THAT big. So many people, restaurants, luxury stores, malls, high end fashion, cool trending fashion, trains, train station exits, skyscrapers, coffee shops bars, and basically everything else I can imagine but mind blowing. If you believe in a world of scarcity, i.e. there isn’t enough for you to do your thing, just go to Tokyo and stare. You just can’t believe in such a thing after that experience.

Humility/Respect: Given the size and numbers, I wasn’t ready for quiet subways, restaurants, and just a general pace of life. You can’t constantly bow to one another without some degree of respect for one another oozing into your body. I’ll say I was humbled too, just as an American. I knew Japan was cool but holy shit. The efficiency, cleanliness, and overall smoothness of the crowds is mind boggling. I read a book of a Japanese exchange student in the US in the 90’s and she was in a fellow students truck and he asked her if they had radios in her country. She said she didn’t have the nerve to explain what Sony meant on his radio. And I’ve been to lots of countries, I don’t consider myself an arrogant American, but I just felt some of Japan saying to me, you’ve heard of Sony, right? Yes I knew about free healthcare, cheap college, the treatment of the elderly, manufacturing… but sometimes I felt like. Do you all have… Yes, they have it and they have it cleaner and more efficient and probably ten times more. I know it’s not a perfect country, but no country is and it’s certainly doing a lot of things a hundred times better than my own country, including just being aware of the people around them and acting as though they matter as humans on a pretty consistent basis.

Calm/Chaos: I think we saw 3 homeless people in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto combined over 10 days. I think we saw 2 dirty cars and maybe 4 stores that were empty and not rented. In Osaka my wife said to me, have you seen the shoes here? Everyone has clean shoes. How? And then we started looking and it was hard to find dirty shoes. The temples, the order of making a bowl of Ramen, the old man who took a minute to take off his jacket and scarf and sit down with his paper. And yet, the ads. The video ads. The sound. The masses of people everywhere. The packed trains. The packed sidewalks. The neon and lights and trucks driving around with video/audio ads blaring. There’s that colorful, bold, busy, blaring Japan and that calm, ordered, quiet Japan everywhere. The onsens… the gardens - in winter - the smiles and politeness.

It was an interesting time to be there, for sure. Anytime would be, but juxtaposed with the US and the chaos of ICE, politics, immigration, tariffs, war, and leadership that lives with a scarcity worldview, no humility or respect for much of anything and tons of chaos without calm that has, and is, infecting our country more every day, made it all the more interesting and powerful for sure. We can do so much better in so many ways.

Thanks Japan for all the inspiration. You’re a beautiful country and people and I can’t wait to get back.

And travel is the best education in the world. Every single damn time.