Japan is really different.
I lived in a number of countries and Japan was the one place that left me totally confused. They were nice, polite, sweet, generous and then totally bonkers all at the same time.
Korea (south), Kenya, Venezuela, Germany, I might not be able to explain why they were doing something in detail but I knew what would trigger the action. Japan I never even reached 50% in knowing where the trigger was.
I lived in Japan as a kid back in the mid-late Sixties, and I liked them. I was only 11, but I had a major crush on a young Japanese woman my parents hired as a maid. (possibly in her mid-twenties)
She was very slender and beautiful, and she loved all six of us kids as if we were her own. She was a very sweet woman with a wonderful smile. I adored her and she was very nice to me.
Her name was Mieko-san.
She and my mother became very good friends, and she took my mom to all the places, taught her Japanese customs, cooking.
I liked Japan. It was, for me, culture shock. Everything.
Suffice to say that for an eleven year old gaijin kid, Japan was a very strange place. Odd toilets that you had to squat over...open sewers...the smell of fish...large groups of people walking around wearing face masks, pachinko ball machines...restaurants with bizarre plastic food in the front windows...
But one of the oddest things to me was that whenever an aircraft carrier came into port, there would be these HUGE demonstrations outside the base.
At around 9:00 AM several hundred Japanese riot police would assemble in a field near my house, then on cue shortly thereafter, the crowds would assemble outside the fence near the main gate with banners and megaphones...I seem to remember large groups, but it might have only been 500 or even a thousand. They would get vocal and demonstrate for a while, then again, on cue, some of them would go over and begin climbing the fence. The fire trucks inside the base parked nearby would begin spraying the demonstrators on the fence with fire hoses, knocking them off, then they would begin spraying the other demonstrators through the fence.
Shortly thereafter, the demonstrators would disperse, the area would be quickly cleaned up, and when the water evaporated, there was no indication that anything had transpired.
When I think of it now, it seemed like one big, huge, ritualized kabuki dance. Everyone knew their roles on both sides, the whole thing went down like clockwork, and then it was over until the next time.
I remember my brother and I going over and talking to a bunch of the Japanese riot police, and inviting them back to our house after the demonstration was over. We went into the cabinets and opened up a bunch of cans of stuff and poured them into bowls. I recall that we had maybe ten bowls of things like chick peas, corn, whatever.
My mom came home, and politely told the Japanese guys to leave, which they did. I have no idea what my mother thought of that. I think she must have thought we were just crazy.