The first thing I noticed about Japan was how incredibly quiet it was. And it wasn’t just the people — though the people are very quiet as a general rule — but the cars and seemingly everything with a motor were quiet too. In comparison to the large cities of the world I had visited — London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, New York, Rio — it was like a library, a very tidy library full of happy smiling people.
The Japanese excel at making all sorts of robots, gizmos and computerizing EVERYTHING. They are constantly fine tuning those machines we take for granted and making them more efficient. Japan has the largest geezer population in the Industrial World, so they are all about the machines doing the work for us humans. For instance, there was the fully automated Denny’s restaurant we ate breakfast in that had just one employee who brought us our meal. And the elevators in our hotel were absolutely noiseless and had virtually no sense of movement. It was weird. Every time I pressed the button for the sixteenth floor, the elevator was dead silent and after a few seconds, I would invariably look up to see if it was going up and we would be steady climbing.
And there aren’t loud motorcycles — other than the occasional black-leathered ninja on a whining rocket bike or a Harley that has been modified to look cool but is significantly quieter than its American counterpart. I’m not sure the Japanese would allow you to make the kind of un-muffled noises we regularly tolerate over here in the Land of the Free.
The trucks are modern and make little or no noise. And there were no honking horns — not even once. Honking your horn is considered rude and disrespectful. The Japanese vehicles might as well not even have a horn because a driver will never use them, not even in the case of a near collision.
And you rarely, hear sirens, and then only ambulances and fire engines — not the police. In Tokyo, we heard a siren maybe twice a day! Most of the time they just turn on the lights and proceed at a safe and reasonable speed. I guess they figure folks will see the flashing lights and don’t need a lot of additional racket.
As in the U.S., it’s the politicians who make the most noise. They drive up and down the streets in vans, blasting slogans over loudspeakers. No one pays them any mind as far as I could tell.
They have even designed the monorail cars down near Tokyo Bay to run on rubber tires so they don’t make any noise.
The Japanese value silence and I can say without fear of contradiction that my little hometown of Annapolis, Maryland with a population of only 38,000 people is exponentially noisier than Tokyo, one of the largest cities on earth.
* I will be posting daily snapshots of Japanese life for the next month or so on my blog — short little pieces and some interesting photos that will hopefully brighten your day. So, please keep coming back for more.