Japanese hospitality, a wonder of another world?
Recently I just finished a cultural immersion trip around Japan, and I have been left without words to describe how glad and happy I am for the people I have met on the way. Not only Japanese people, but foreigners who have been living in Japan as well. It looks like hospitality is contagious.
It has been a very rewarding experience, since I had the chance to be surrounded by many local people on my way. Definitely the kind of trip I chose has been helpful to let me experience the Japanese culture in it’s most beautiful esence. I decided to hitchhike, except for a few days at the beginning of my trip, and a few days at the end. Mainly because I was around big cities and it makes it much more difficult to get a ride. About accommodation, I got to do more than half of my trip in homestays with locals (Japanese and foreigners, although more Japanese people hosted me).
The length of my trip has been 57 days, from which 32 nights I managed to get hosted by local people, more than half of my time in Japan. From those 32 nights, 4 of them I got hosted by my friend Wataru, a Japanese guy I met in Norway on 2011 thanks to the Erasmus university programme. The rest of the nights I used an online travel community named CouchSurfing. For those of you who have never heard about this community, it is a great website where people can look for hosts in many cities/towns around the world and share time with local people, so you can get to find the best spots (places where to eat, secret viewpoints, bars where only locals go, etc). Not only that, but you can actually make new friends from very different places and hear stories they want to share with you, like travels they have done, tips about certain places or perhaps cultural facts. Of course, if you can find hosts, it also means you can host people in your house from all over the world. By the way, it is free accommodation, so this makes it even more interesting, as it is one of the advantages (not the only one, don’t forget about the previous points I mentioned) of using CouchSurfing.
Thanks to the people I met in the homestays, I managed to find places, food or activities I wouldn’t have found otherwise. So in a certain way it has made my trip much better than it would have been. For example:
- In Osaka, at the end of my trip, one of the hosts recommended me to go to a local tempura restaurant where I managed to see how tempura is cooked in live, and since it was a local restaurant, the price was quite affordable.
- In Kyoto, another of the hosts came with me for the Kyoto trail, a hiking route in the Northern part of Kyoto, where you go through paths next to rivers, across the mountains, forests and near temples.
- In Tomakomai (Hokkaido), a 60 years old Japanese woman, hosted me for a weekend and shared with me a couple of hikes in the area. Shikotsu Lake and Mount Sapporo. She also cooked local food from Hokkaido like “Genghis Khan”, mutton with soya sauce.
- In Nagano, I was hosted a couple of days by a 30 years old Japanese girl, who lives with her family (her father and mother). I really felt like I was home, since they were very kind with me, offering me so much food and sake. Her mother even prepared lunch for me (a few onigiris and some bread), and the morning before my departure she took a few chopsticks and socks with nice cartoons and offered them as a goodbye gift. They told me about Zenkoji temple too, in Nagano, a temple with an underground passage, where you have to walk in the dark, until you find a metallic piece attached to a closed door. It was an overwhelming experience, since I never walked in the dark (absolutely no light) for so long time, like if I was blind.
- And my favorite experience happened to be in Hase, 30km South from Nara, where the French girl who hosted me for 2 days, and who has been living 9 years in Japan, asked me if I wanted to harvest ecological rice in the fields of some Japanese friends of her. They grow the rice up exactly like it was done lots of years ago. No machines, no pesticides.
About my hitchhiking experience in Japan, that has probably been the most exciting part of the whole trip. You never know if you would be picked up or not, it’s up to the weather (when it rains it’s much more difficult to get picked up, because you are wet and because people can’t see you properly), up to the people on the road and up to the place you chose to be picked up.
I have to admit that based on my experience, hitchiking in Japan is extremely easy. Even in remote places like Hokkaido. Basically what I took care of was to:
- Write a sign in Japanese (Kanji). It’s not too difficult, and you can find places in the internet where they even show you in what order to draw every stroke. I didn’t use any of this and asked to people if they could read it well, and everybody said it was clear.
- Pick the right spot to be picked up. This is something quite subjective, but in my opinion looking for a bus stop or a parking near the road is the best option. Why? Because people can easily pull over and pick you up without disturbing the traffic.
- Wear a cap to protect me from the sun and choose places without shadows so people can see your face properly. This might not look too important, and perhaps it isn’t as much as the previous recommendations, but it is something you will be glad of. Specially to wear the cap when the sun is so bright and strong.
Normally I got picked up in 15–20 minutes. Sometimes it was 5 minutes, other 1h. One time was 4h, that was the longest time I was waiting, and the only time I waited more than 1.5h. There was a heavy rain and a bit windier, so I couldn’t put my sign. Nobody stopped until it stopped raining and I put my sign. However, I was picked up twice in a rainy day, from Gero to Nagoya. It wasn’t windy, so I could handle the umbrella and the sign with my right hand, and use the left hand to do the wellknown hitchhiking sign.
A few stories that made my trip unforgettable:
- I got picked up by a 30 years old Japanese in Tomakomai (Hokkaido). First I had a sign to go to Noboribetsu (concretely to Jigokudani), so he drove me there. When we arrived, he parked (and paid the parking fee) and walked with me around the place. Quite a beautiful place by the way. And after we’d visited the area, I told him if he could drop me in the national road near Noboribetsu, since it was on my way to Hakodate (South Hokkaido), my final destination that day. He was thinking for a few seconds and the said “You know what? I think I’m driving you to Hakodate”. I couldn’t believe what I was listening. He was in a 4 days holiday, so he actually had time, so I guessed he was changing his plans a little bit. It was a road trip for him. The trip to Hakodate from Noboribetsu was a 4h ride on the highway. When we were about to arrive to Hakodate, after a fantastic talk and sharing music in the car, I told him that I was going to sleep in a cheap hostel, so maybe he was interested to stay there as well. And he just replied “Oh no, it’s OK. I am coming back to Tomakomai”. :O I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, he did not change his trip, he changed everything to drive me and share his time with me. It’s something difficult to understand for me, since he spent 9–10h driving (5h on the way to Hakodate, including the stop in Noboribetsu, and 4.5h for the way back), plus the oil and the tolls. He was extremely kind with me.
- In a further trip from Towada Lake to Yamagata, I got picked up in the last part of the way, by a guy who was going to Sendai (a little bit before Yamagata). This man spoke great English and was really nice to talk with. At some point of the ride, the sake came into the conversation and I said I really liked it, so right after he took a 0.7L bottle of sake (which was a little bit more than half full) and said that it was for me. I thought he wanted me to try it, so I did, but actually he was giving to me the bottle. It was a great sake, probably one of the best I tried. After that, and when we were approaching to Sendai, we were discussing where could he drop me, since I wanted to hitchhike from Sendai to Yamagata. And after a few minutes of checking the map in our phones, he actually said that it was OK, he would drove me to Yamagata (40min off by car from Sendai). So he drop me at the city center of Yamagata.
- On my last hitchhiking trip in Japan, I was going from Nagoya to Kyoto. Since Nagoya is a big city, I took the train for a while, until I felt I was out enough of the city and there would be many people going to Kyoto from there. I had to walk for a while, to get into a nice parking place, since the train station was in the middle of a town. And then I started to hitchhike from there. I was a bit worried it will start to rain soon, but I didn’t wait for too long. 10min after I started a funny Japanese guy stopped and told me he was going half way to Kyoto from where we were, so I agreed to go with him. After 15 or 20 minutes driving, it started to rain, as I though it will. However, when we were near Hikone, he asked me if I’d visited the Hikone castle. And I said that I hadn’t, since I was coming from the North and it was my first visit to Japan. So he asked my if I was up for a little detour, and said, hell yes! Let’s do that! So we went there, he paid for the parking and he insisted on paying the ticket entrance for the castle and the park. It was a really nice view from Lake Biwa, the biggest lake in Japan. And the castle was quite cool as well. The garden was simply amazing, they really took care of it. After that, we kept going and he stopped near a well known sake brewery so I could do some sake tasting. The owner came and offered me 3 kinds of different sake and the guy asked me which I prefered the most. I told him that the last one was really good. So he bought a little bottle of it as a gift to me. After this, we kept going South, to Omihachiman, and I asked him to drop me at the train station since it was raining quite a lot, so I would take the train to Kyoto. But he told me “Hey, it’s raining, I actually can’t work when it rains, since I’m a construction worker, so I think I can drive you to Kyoto”. He kept saying, “Rain, no work, holiday” all the way :).
So these are some of the stories I experience along my Japanese trip. Perhaps there are many countries where I could experience similar ones, and it’s related to the kind of trip I decided to have in Japan. Perhaps Japan is a unique country, with so lovely people who are indeed pleased to help other people, specially travelers. Perhaps I just had luck. I don’t know. But I know I feel tremendously glad to have met all these people on my way, it made my trip definitely life changing.
However, there’s something I want to transmit that I learned by the end of my trip from a 50 years old Japanese who hosted me in Osaka. He has lived in France for a few years, traveled around the world, and changed his mind quite a lot from the Japanese culture. He told me that the main reason why these people helped me is because they would regret to not pick me up. They would be thinking for hours or days what happened to me, if I made it or not, if a bad person picked me up, if I got stuck in my way and couldn’t reach my destination as I wanted…So they must pick me up and help me in order to avoid that little voice on our heads that from time to time tells us about what we should or shouldn’t do.
I don’t know if most of the people who helped me on my way had that feeling or not. But I know I feel grateful to have met them, and I would do my best in order to help them in the future or to help others too. Sharing is caring :).
