A gaijin's mini-guide to Japan

All the carp in Japan are handpainted. This explains the similarity between markings on some of the carp you may see and the brushstrokes used in traditional calligraphy.

There are not enough classrooms for all the children in Japan; to save space, a quarter of all Japanese schoolchildren are kept permanently on the move, visiting temples, sketching castles, travelling on trains etc. Due to scheduling conflicts, some children may graduate from high school without ever having once set foot in a classroom; they do, however, possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese history, culture and railway timetables.

Policemen in Japan wear white gloves and are very polite, like superior hotel receptionists. They live in a box called a koban, from which they never come out. You will never see a policeman on the street except to direct traffic. All crimefighting in Japan is done by animated cartoon superheroes with names like Pikachu, Atomic Monster Boy and 'that rabbit that does karate'. Happily, there are only three criminals in Japan. You can see their pictures on the wanted posters on display in each koban, along with details of their height, weight and the superpowers that allow them to stay ahead of Pikachu and Atomic Monster Boy week after week.

Business cards, or meishi, are very important in Japan. If you read about Japanese history, you will see frequent references to an event called the Meishi Restoration, which took place towards the end of the 19th century. During the Restoration, Japanese businessmen gave back all the business cards they had accumulated over the previous hundred years, thus starting a trend for recycling that continues to this day.

Do not speak Japanese

Few things are more depressing than the sight of an American or an English person abroad, addressing the bewildered natives in loud, emphatic English, convinced that if they just repeat themselves s-l-o-w-l-y and LOUDLY, eventually understanding will dawn. As a person of sensitivity and discretion, you may decide to do your best to speak the language of your hosts.

Don't. Yes, your gesture will be appreciated. The Japanese are delighted when a gaijin takes the trouble to learn their language. So delighted, in fact, that they are likely to plunge eagerly into conversation with you, responding to your halting phrases with rapid torrents of heavily-accented colloquial Japanese, employing an elaborate range of honorifics unrecorded in any dictionary and quite possibly invented for the occasion. Generously, the Japanese assume that a foreigner who speaks any Japanese is perfectly fluent. Long after you have used up the five or six phrases you have managed to memorize from the guidebook, your Japanese interlocutor - thrilled at not having to speak English - will be happily rattling on. What they are saying is anyone's guess. They may be answering your question. They may have finished answering your question and be asking you who you think will win the World Series. They may be telling you the entire plot of Genji Monogotari, with footnotes and cross-references. You will never know.

Admit your weakness, and speak English. It will be simpler for everyone.

Do not bow

The Japanese have been trained in the art of bowing from a very early age. You have not. Even the most corpulent or elderly Japanese can snap smartly and neatly forward in an elegant bow that - depending on the occasion and the degree of formality required - can take them anything up to sixty degrees from the vertical. When they eventually straighten up (ambiguous social situations can produce lengthy 'bobbing' displays in which each person, uncertain of the other's relative rank, tries to outdo the other by bowing lower, until one eventually gives up and the survivor claims a moral victory before being rushed off to a chiropractor), not a hair will be out of place.

Gaijin attempting to emulate them invariably look tragic. Your upper body will flop forward in a way that the Japanese find extremely distasteful. Your glasses - if you wear them - will slip from your nose. Pens, coins, keys and handkerchiefs will cascade from your pockets. Your tie will break loose and dangle absurdly in front of you. You may even headbutt the other person sharply in the face.

It is simpler for everyone if you do not attempt to bow, but simply give a brief nod, followed by a sheepish grin to suggest that you are uncertain quite how low you ought to be bowing and that the last time you tried it you spent fifteen minutes trying to recover your fountain pen from someone else's soup. The Japanese will understand, and be grateful not to have you flailing around in front of them.

Do not eat packet pastries

Japan has taken to Western-style pastries in a big way. At some point, desperate to eat something that looks even vaguely familiar, you may feel tempted to sample some of the pastries that you can buy handily wrapped in cellophane in any of the six-and-a-half billion 24-hour convenience stores scattered throughout Japan.

This is not a good idea. For some reason, the pastries sold in supermarkets and convenience stores are entirely disgusting. Part (but by no means all) of this can be explained by the tendency of the Japanese to improve on the original recipe, where 'improve' is to be understood with reference to the Japanese palate. Thus, when you bite into a sugar-coated donut, you are quite likely to discover that the strawberry jam has been replaced by red-bean paste. There are unconfirmed reports of muffins flavored with fish, seaweed, and even natto. To say that this kind of thing comes as an unpleasant surprise is an understatement.

Quite why the supermarket pastries should be so bad is something of a mystery. Pastries sold fresh in bakeries are often extremely good by any standards. Unfortunately, to get them you'll need to go through a lengthy mumbling and pointing routine with the bakery assistant, which is probably what you were trying to avoid by going to the supermarket. However, if you've ever once bitten into an over-sugared, stale-proofed, plastic-wrapped pastry filled with wasabi, you'll realise that it is worth the effort. A few moment's embarassment to avoid repeating the experience is cheap at the price.

Do not photograph the carp

Many first-time visitors to Japan mistakenly attempt to photograph the carp. This is understandable. You are excited. After all, you've never seen a goldfish the size of a large cat before. Nor have your friends back home.

It is only when you get the film developed that you will realise your mistake. For no reason you can adequately explain, half the film will turn out to be filled with pictures of blotchy-looking creatures paddling around in a foot and a half of muddy water. All the aesthetic appeal of carp vanishes when they are reduced to two dimensions. In fact, some scientists think that carp may be the only members of the animal kingdom other than humans to have mastered the trick of looking completely stupid on film. How they are able to do this without being able to yawn or pick their own noses is still a mystery, but the fact is that carp unfailingly, instinctively, turn their worst side to the camera.

Save your film for something else

Do not watch the porn channel

Your hotel room will (inevitably) have a TV. It will probably also offer one or more 'adult' channels, which you can watch either by feeding 100 yen coins into the coinbox on the side at the rate of approximately three a minute, or by calling down to the front desk, who will treat your request as the most natural thing in the world and add a 1000 yen charge to your bill. The charge will appear as part of your three-volume itemized receipt, prefaced by the words "Yes, I am a gigantic pervert" written in katakana.

You should not watch the porn channel in Japanese hotels for the simple reason that you will not enjoy it. Sex in Japan is, to judge from the television, an intensely serious and rather unpleasant business. The men frown fiercely throughout and occasionally grunt, servicing their female counterparts with great efficiency and determination but no outward signs of enjoyment. The women make small mewing noises and look entirely distressed. From time to time, a small cloud of colored pixels will descend on the screen to hide the participants' genital regions, Japanese censors having decided that the sight of pubic hair is liable to corrupt and deprave in a way that - for example - seeing a teenage girl in a school uniform being energetically sodomized by two adult males is not.

Japanese television has many more interesting things to offer, including lurid and inexplicable computer animations, seizure-inducing cartoons and an entire channel devoted to live footage of flowers blowing in the breeze somewhere in central Hokkaido, transmitting twenty-four hours a day. You are strongly advised to watch the flower channel in preference to porn, as it is less repetitive and significantly more erotic.

Do not trust the guidebook

To make things easier for yourself, you will naturally have bought yourself a guidebook before leaving home. Guidebooks come in two kinds.

The first variety are published by companies with names like Lonely Planet. There is a certain irony in trying to look something up in a book calling itself 'Lonely Planet' when you're standing in the middle of a Tokyo sidewalk which is so densely packed with human beings that six births, two deaths and three marriages have all taken place within a metre of you in the time it took you just to get the book out of your backpack. The biggest problem with these books, however, is that they are written by professional super-travellers. Parachute the average guidebook author blindfold over Borneo at night, and within half an hour of landing they will have located four budget restaurants, a youth hostel and a sauna, and will be entertaining the locals with improvised song and dance numbers while quizzing them about the location of the nearest nightclub in fluent Dayak. As a result, they tend to make light of any difficulties you may encounter. You should remember that if the book says something is easy, it is probably difficult, and if they note that something is not entirely straightforward, you can expect it to be nearly impossible.

The second variety are far more forgiving of basic human weakness. They understand that Japan is disorienting and confusing for foreigners. Rather than expecting you to rough it with the Lonely Planeteers, they will lovingly guide you to a selection of major American hotels and suggest organized coach tours to the local McDonalds and Haagen-Dazs as a way of settling in gently to the unfamiliar environment. If you follow their advice, you may occasionally encounter a Japanese person who does not speak fluent English, but the chances are that they're simply taking a short cut through the lobby of your mega-hotel on their way to the high-speed train station which is mysteriously located just behind the Hawaiian bar and grill on the fourth floor.

The biggest problem with this kind of guidebook is that the authors feel obliged to find something positive to say about every area they cover. Tokyo, for instance, has a reasonably large but strictly finite number of interesting sites for tourists to visit. The bulk of the city, having been subjected to a vigorous bombing campaign during WWII and an even more vigorous post-war reconstruction effort, consists of anonymous residential districts sprinkled with 24-hour convenience stores and those intimidating Japanese restaurants that write even their prices in kanji and hang curtains in the windows to prevent you getting even a vague idea of what kind of food they serve, assuming it is in fact a restaurant and not a chopstick factory or something even more inscrutably Japanese.

The guidebook is unlikely to admit that there are some parts of the city that simply aren't worth visiting. As a result, you will occasionally find yourself rushing off to see a "quaint, charming neighbourhood, that has been described as the _______ of Tokyo". Don't believe a word of it. Guidebook writers are obliged to fill up the space, but you can save yourself a wasted trip by learning the code that they use. Some key words and phrases include: