It’s my second night in Osaka, Japan, and the 13-hour jet lag is finally starting to wear off.
For the next week, I’ll be traveling around the country with nine other student journalists from the U.S. as part of this year’s Roy W. Howard National Collegiate Reporting Competition. Each year, the Scripps Foundation awards the free trip to Japan in conjunction with Indiana University to recognize and educate promising college journalists, as well as to honor Roy Howard, who reported from East Asia and led Scripps Howard Newspapers for more than 30 years.
Over the course of the trip, we will visit several different Japanese cities, including Hiroshima and Tokyo. Yesterday, we went to Kyoto to see Kinkakuji, also known as the Golden Pavilion, and Ryōan-ji, one of the most beautiful zen rock gardens in the country. It was about an hour train ride from Osaka — our home base for exploring the Kansai region—which gave me some time to reflect on what I’ve observed so far in Japan. Here are some of my favorite things I’ve seen.
1. Its unbelievably clean and quiet streets
In New York, or any city in the United States for that matter, you’re bound to see trash littering the sides of roads and literal dirt lining the sidewalks. But in Japan, everything is spotlessly clean, from the train tracks and buses, to the stores and streets. It’s so clean that you feel bad just walking on the pavement because you’re scared your shoes will dirty it. What’s more, no one really talks loudly or eats in public because it’s traditionally considered rude. Maybe it’s simply a product of Confucian ideals of societal coherence and collective good, but it definitely makes for a calmer and cleaner experience, even though you feel obnoxiously American.
2. The entire country is interconnected
When we landed in Osaka, we didn’t really land in Osaka. The airport serves all of the Kansai region, and therefore was about an hour away from the city. But, after buying some absurdly expensive 7-day transit passes, we took an hourlong train ride to the city, during which we saw how developed Japan is — even outside of its major cities. And the entire country is like this, a massive web of transit lines and roads that connect one part of Japan to another, which we’ll experience firsthand when traveling to Tokyo and Hiroshima via bullet train. The system is reminiscent of the United States’ myriad of tangled highways, but more condensed and accessible. It upends the image of a broken post-war Japan and speaks to the country’s collective unity. Plus it’s just plain convenient.
3. Juxtaposed modern and traditional architecture
While visiting Kyoto, we went to the Golden Pavilion and a zen rock garden — two of the most beautiful places I’ve been abroad. Our trip thus far has been pretty busy, a nonstop whirlwind of hours-long flights, bus trips and train rides to get from point A to point B. But yesterday that all stopped; we slipped off our shoes, walked across a zen Buddhist temple and sat in front of a rock garden in complete silence, contemplating the natural beauty around us. What initially looked like a bullshitty series of rocks in the middle of a gravel garden proved to be a much-needed moment of reflection. It’s moments like these, perhaps the most stereotypically Japanese scene one could conjure up, that present the most obvious contrast with the country at large. In cities such as Osaka and Tokyo, some of the tallest buildings in the world rise above streets teeming with millions of people. The mix of old and new is what makes Japan seem so cohesive — a place that balances the memory of its past with the promise of its future.
4. The food is healthy and delicious
Sushi. Udon. Fresh fish. Green tea. These are a few of the things I’ve had in the past 72 hours, foods that grace the shelves of Fresh Markets and Whole Foods across the United States. But here, authentic Japanese cuisine is as common as humid forecasts and doesn’t come with a side of cosmopolitan pretention. It’s all relatively healthy, which is good news for my post-finals waistline. Every person I’ve seen in Japan so far has been both skinny and short, the latter which I attribute to the popularity of fresh veggies and abundant seafood, not to mention an absence of dairy. I still want to try ramen, matcha, don katsu, tako and actual bubble tea — a foodie’s wet dream. I can dig it.