The Japanese just love their trains. They love to buy electric toy train sets and make dioramas for it. Most cities also have entire museums dedicated to trains.
It's appalling that I've lived in Tokyo so long but have not blogged about the massive subway system. My bad, 悪いね. This is the map of it. If you think that's enormous, this system only covers the tokyo city centre. There are many other lines of several train operators sprawling out into the suburbs of different prefectures.
Unlike MRT trains that stop at every station along the line, Tokyo has several services:
1) Local: stops at every station
2) Express: stops at only a handful of stations
3) Semi-express: stops at about half of the stations (it's between Local & Express trains. Go figure.)
4) Limited express: It's a lot like the Express, except that it's a nicer train with plushier seats and pricier tickets.
The Express trains are good for commuters who live further in bed-town communities at the suburbs. These trains would cover 25km in 25 minutes. You select the service based on which station you're getting off at, and how fast you want to get there.
Other operators have names for their services like Rapid, or Rapid Express. You'd have to very carefully check which stations it stops at because these names can be rather misleading. The fast-sounding Rapid could actually be slower than the Semi-express.
These services run concurrently with each other, so a Local will remain at the platform of one station while the Express will pass it on via another platform. The most amazing thing is how there services run so seamlessly without colliding into each other, and without the use of a computer (which was the case in the 60s and 70s).
This is the front of a train. The right handlebar controls the gears while the left knob controls the speed. The train drivers take great pride in their work. I've seen many drivers, even while the train is on a nice cruising mode, stand earnestly in 'senangdiri' (drill: at ease position).
The Mama-Chari is probably the national symbol of road transportation. Used by almost every housewife in Japan for buying groceries and fetching the kids from Kindergarten, you will almost always see them plying the residential streets.
There is a road near my place that has been under construction ever since I moved into the neighborhood more than a year ago. It was supposed to be a road that connects a main arterial road to the train station, and would have made it a lot easier for many commuters. However, there is a house that simply refuses to budge (beige house with black roof tiles & red lanterns), and construction has been put on hold since.
One thing I've noticed about Japanese girls, which you may have too when you come here: They sit with their feet tucked in towards each other. Probably one out of every three women would be seated in the same manner as this lady in the picture. What's more, they walk with a certain gait, much like what you see in Japanese anime. It is possibly due to the fact that women in Japan sit on tatami mats (woven straw flooring) with their feet under their laps for too long. That's my hypotheses at least...
Everyone knows that the cellphones in Japan is space-ages ahead of those in Singapore. The Apple iphone seem to be making waves all over the world, but in Japan no one really bats an eyelid. With cellphones here, you can: make calls (duh), take pictures, surf the net, watch TV and pay train fares with it. Oh, did I mention you can track your position on GPS too? Another cool feature is that with your cellphone you can assess websites just by scanning barcodes published on advertisements (see photo).
The Japanese just love to play with words. Puns are very common in Japanese media: advertising, TV shows, consumer products etc). The language basically consist of 50 or so sounds, hence quite often you may get a same sounding word with different meanings, and you decipher it through its context and voice intonations.
