Konichiwa from Japan

Stepping onto Japanese soil is like stepping into the future. From bathrooms with control panels, to electrical stores selling the latest and tiniest gadgets, Japan feels like a huge spaceship at times; quietly efficient and extremely advanced. Yet despite its modernity, it respects the ancient. Not only does it have its shrines to the native Shinto religion, but it also has that old-fashioned, quaint piece of technology - the public phone. Whereas the public phone is dying out in Britain for two reasons (people increasingly using mobile phones and morons vandalising them on a regular basis, making them expensive to maintain), in Japan, where pretty much everybody carries a mobile phone, they still exist because they do not get vandalised. Young people in Japan clearly have better things to do.

And if you head out into the city at night you will see the young Japanese out and about. Life expectancy in Japan is one of the highest in the world and maybe the younger generations, who have their own sense of fashion and aura of vibrancy, know that.

Of course it doesn’t mean that nobody misbehaves. A couple of days ago, as my family and I stepped onto a local train, a young man was completely sprawled out on the floor of the carriage, his t-shirt lifted up so his torso was on display, his head comfortably resting on his bag. He hadn’t just passed out, more bedded down for the night. So as everybody got on the train and walked to the seats away from him, my four-year-old niece, with a big smile, decided to sit on one of the seats near to him. We all then watched as a guard tried unsuccessfully to wake him, before fetching an emergency officer who also failed. Eventually they dragged the comatose man out of the train and propped him up, still trying to wake him. When he finally responded, they decided to put him back on the train where, faintly smelling of booze, he fell asleep again and probably spent the night going back and forth between Tokyo and Kawasaki.

I have been told that recently, after a heavy drinking session, a member of a Japanese boy band ended up publicly naked and shouting out that there was nothing wrong with being publicly naked. But generally people behave and so on this, my fourth visit to Japan, it still feels like the safest place I have ever seen.

A Japanese friend once told me that a characteristic of the nation was that everybody, regardless of their job, worked with a sense of pride. And wherever you go, everybody is extremely courteous. Even ticket inspectors on trains bow to and greet the carriage before carrying out their work. But then a Japanese ticket collector is unlikely to be abused or threatened…

This doesn’t mean that crime never happens. On my first visit to Tokyo in 2005 an apartment lent to me was broken into after my friend and I had left. Whoever did the deed smashed a patio door on the second floor balcony, let themselves in, stole nothing and then considerately patched up the window before leaving. Of course for a potential burglar it was all very polite, but we were left completely embarrassed because until the police found a man-sized footprint, it looked as though we had broken the window by accident, patched it up and done a runner without telling anyone. But from what I have been told, crime levels are low.

There are many things that I wish Japan would send to Britain; heated toilet seats with their built-in bidets, showers programmed to the exact temperature you want, really compact bread-makers, seasonal sweets made with cherry blossom, my brother with his wife and children, and shiatsu massage shops. Two weeks on from carrying my backpack and the hard bed in Dharamsala, India I was still suffering with a painful hip, sciatica down my left leg and problems with my left arm, so the first item on my Japanese list of things to do was to visit a walk-in massage shop in a busy shopping centre in Tachikawa. There, along with three other fully-clothed people on a line of massage beds, I lay face down as a young man with fashionably-dyed brown hair found all of my painful bits and poked them very firmly, transforming me into a new woman. My Japanese sister-in-law says that these massage shops can be found elsewhere but one word of advice is to look out for packets of tissues with slips of paper outside the shop. In Japan it is common to see people hand out little packets of tissues with a slip of paper. These are invariably discount offers and in the case of the Tachikawa massage shop, offered the first ten minutes for free. And when you have a sore back, painful leg and arm, and have to run after your fifteen-month-old nephew like a really decrepit old aunty, ten minutes of extra poking is a bonus.