Collected over several months of... ahem... rigorous field analysis.
About bodily contact:
In Japanese culture, physical contact among casual acquaintances or strangers is not really allowed. It can be rather strange and uncomfortable for the touchee.
BUT… the rules are broken when boarding trains. With regards to getting a seat or just getting onto the train, it's every every man, woman, child for him/herself. Pushing, elbowing, and grabbing the side of the door or the top of the door frame to leverage body into the car is the norm.
One cool trick: turning your back to the doorway of the train to “back into” the car – as if it is less intrusive than just walking directly into the car face first.
For women, the rules are back in force once they sit down. Woman shy away when men sit down next to them; seemingly afraid of incidental and even unpreventable contact. Something as minor as brushing your arm or elbow against theirs seems out of bounds for Japanese women. I usually have to sit with my hands on my lap (not resting on my crotch... that might offend their sensibilities), resting on top of my backpack, or out in front near my knees so women don’t think I am trying to feel them up or grab them by pretending to cross my arms in front of my chest (a technique used by Japanese guys). Considering how perverted lots of Japanese guys are, I guess they have good reason to be paranoid but it leaves me feeling just a bit dirty.
About being subservient:
Lower managers modify their voices (kind of like what we in the West consider as baby talk) with upper managers. This is accompanied with constant bowing and the shuffling of feet.
Office ladies (a.k.a. secretaries and often, glorified secretaries) with otherwise normal (and oftentimes amazingly husky) voices speak with a timbre reminiscent of the 3rd grade or perhaps Shirley Temple. Again, imagine baby talk, but in an office environment. Office ladies, or OLs, also usually wear black shoes (no heels) and black stockings that cover their calves. My guess is that they are not allowed to look sexy in any way whatsoever as this would be a distraction for the male occupants of the office, and that my friends, would be an indication of the sway of sexual power that women have over men. Generally though, I wouldn't think it makes a big difference to the guys, as they are usually fantasizing about digitally-created bimbos, school girls, and tentacle sex.
Note to reader: the Japanese have an odd fascination with sexual intercourse involving a human and a tentacled partner, preferably a giant octopus or squid. This has been portrayed in Japanese wood block prints from the 18th and early 19th centuries, so I am not making this up.
The word “to arrive" or "to come” – mairimasu vs kimasu – both carry the same denotation, but the former is used by the subordinate to lower his/her position in regards to the other person. For example, if I were to tell my boss that I am coming to his office, I would use mairimasu. If he were to tell me the same, he would use kimasu. Mairimasu is also used in the train station announcements to say that the train is arriving. To whom the train is subordinate to, I couldn't tell you.
Things that are not strange, just different:
Japanese people like to say otsukaresamadesu - this is a short phrase to express acknowledgement that what you just had to endure was tiring and perhaps troublesome. This is spoken between friends and/or colleagues after drinking parties or group dinners or a night out singing karaoke, said to the passenger by the taxi driver after arriving at your destination, and between colleagues after work when leaving the office. It is also necessary to say this to colleagues when answering phone calls from them, or vice versa.
Once I saw an old woman using her shoe to push a piece of garbage into a rain water gutter running along a flight of stairs. The strange thing was, the gutter was, at the most, 1 inch deep and a couple inches wide, so shoving the garbage (it was a plastic wrapper) into the gutter didn’t hide it at all. The pragmatist in me says that she was moving it out of the way of other pedestrians so they wouldn't slip on it and fracture a tibia. The cynicist in me says that she cared so much about the appearance of the stairs that it didn't register in her mind that she could have better preserved the purity of this public through way if she had just picked the garbage up and thrown it away in a rubbish bin.
Note to reader: The reason that Japan is so clean is because there are practically no trash cans or rubbish bins in public areas like sidewalks and train stations. No trash cans = no trash. Where does all the trash go then? That, my friend, is the million yen question. Answer? On the sidewalk! And no, Japan is NOT as clean as the rest of the world thinks. The trash is just more well hidden!
From a pep talk given to me and another colleague by our Japanese manager (and I paraphrase) – "It doesn’t matter how much you really know or what your skills are – all that matters is that if asked to do something… anything… your reply every time should be: 'Yes, I can do it.' "
The person at KFC forgot to add the side dish to a set menu that I ordered for take out. After calling them to let them know about it, a person from KFC came to my apartment to deliver the food and apologize. All I can say is... wow.
One night I decided to order sushi from a sushi restaurant that delivers. After taking my order on the phone, I innocently asked the sushi restaurant worker how long it would take. She replied that the delivery would take over 2 hours. What kills me is not the fact that there was a 2 hour hold up on sushi delivery on that particular night but rather that she would not have told me if I had not asked. Again... wow.
