Tokyo

I came to visit my friend Wei who had been working in Tokyo for a year. He's Chinese-American but spoke no Japanese, yet he got by fine with English. It seems not much talking is required to get by in Japan, and you can do almost everything you need by reading instructions. When we got into a taxi to get home, Wei handed the taxi driver a written note of where we're going. The taxi driver had some trouble figuring out how to get to it, he seemed dependent on the navigation system in the car to get around.

Our goal was to go to Mount Fuji. We took the train to a small town, then picked up a pre-reserved car. I drove the car (on the left side of the road) to the Mount Fuji resorts.

Tokyo is a unique place that I hadn't experienced before. I'm impressed that the local police routinely interview neighbors to keep tabs on everyone, so they have a good idea of what could go wrong before crime happens. It's a very safe city, which is a very eastern and traditional thing, but Tokyo is also very modern with a lot of conveniences, bookstores that never close, etc. However a lot of young people seem physically malnourished, probably due to high costs of living there.