I had heard enough about the country to know it would be good. I hadn’t quite anticipated that it would be the kind of trip that stays with you — not just in photographs, videos and food memories, but in the more uncomfortable way that makes you look at your own country differently when you land back home.
The First Thing You Notice
Within hours of arriving, Japan announces itself in a way that nothing quite prepares you for: it is immaculate.
Not the curated cleanliness of cities that clean up for visitors, while the back streets tell a different story. The streets, the stations, the back alleys, the corners where litter would accumulate in other countries I’ve visited — here, you find them clean.
And this was one of Osaka’s busiest streets that witnesses maximum footfalls during the evening.Â
If you want a reliable metric for how seriously a country takes hygiene, look at its public toilets. The ones in train stations, convenience stores, fuel stations, and roadside rest areas. In ten days across three Japanese cities, I used public toilets several times. Nine out of ten were spotless.
As for the one that wasn’t, I’m fairly convinced the previous user was a tourist.
There are hardly any bins on the streets. After a coordinated nerve gas attack in 1995, Japan removed them. While the cult members who carried out the Tokyo subway attack dropped their lethal packages directly onto the floors of the train coach, public bins thereafter became viewed as a massive security vulnerability.
Authorities realised that a trash can was the perfect hiding spot for any such device. Someone could drop a chemical agent, a bomb, or a biological weapon into a public bin and walk away completely unnoticed. Removing the bins eliminated thousands of easy hiding spots for future terrorists. And what happened next revealed everything about Japanese culture: people simply started carrying their rubbish home.Â
No campaign required. No enforcement needed. The culture adjusted to fill the gap left by the infrastructure.
Try imagining that anywhere else.
How They Got Here
The cleanliness isn’t accidental, and it isn’t enforced by threat.Â
It’s the product of something far more durable: a habit installed in childhood and never uninstalled. Every day, classes stop for about 15 to 20 minutes. The PA system typically plays upbeat music, and students instantly break into their assigned cleaning groups.
-
Shared Responsibility: Students aren't just tidying their personal desks. They sweep and wipe down classroom floors, scrub the blackboards, empty the trash bins, and clean the hallways. Beyond the Classroom: In many elementary and junior high schools, students also clean the school cafeterias, the faculty room, and even the public restrooms.
-
Beyond the Classroom: In many elementary and junior high schools, students also clean the school cafeterias, the faculty room, and even the public restrooms. Beyond the Classroom: In many elementary and junior high schools, students also clean the school cafeterias, the faculty room, and even the public restrooms.
-
Teachers Participate Too: Teachers do not sit back and watch; they clean alongside the students. This reinforces the idea that no one is "above" the work, fostering a sense of equality and mutual respect.
In Japan, school is seen as a place to develop a child’s character, not just their academic mind. By removing professional janitors from the daily routine, the system teaches children that if they clean a floor themselves, they are much less likely to litter or make a mess on it later. It strips away social hierarchies.
Whether a child comes from a wealthy family or a low-income home, everyone does the same manual labour for the collective good.
The understanding that public spaces belong to everyone, and that keeping them clean is everyone's job, beginning with yours. The adult who carries their rubbish home on the Tokyo subway is the child who swept their classroom floor thirty years ago. The habit formed that early doesn't need reminding.
Tokyo’s waste management system takes this further still.Â
Residents sort their rubbish into up to ten separate categories — burnable, non-burnable, plastics, glass, cans, cardboard, electronics, and more — with designated collection days for each. The compliance rate is extraordinary. If you don’t sort your rubbish correctly, it will be left uncollected.Â
The People
Japan’s underground rail network, for all its precision, takes a day or two to decode, and in that learning period, I found myself stopping strangers for directions more frequently than I would in any other city. I was struck by how the Japanese people go out of their way (literally) to help strangers.
Â
Each time, they would open their phones, pull up the map, and trace the route. Not just that, they would lead you down the path for a few hundred metres at least, even if that meant going in the opposite direction from their desired destination.
This wasn’t just one or two do-gooders on the road. It happened with me at least twenty times across three cities.
But the moment that showed me what Japanese solidarity truly looks like didn’t involve a wrong turn.
At one point during the trip, we lost Sara. Fifteen minutes — which sounds brief until you’re living them, in a foreign country, in Kyoto, a city of a million-plus people, with a thirteen-year-old nowhere in sight. Before we had fully processed what was happening, strangers around us had already understood the situation and mobilised.Â
What moved us just as deeply was that Sara, separated and alone, had her own strangers show up for her, telling her they wouldn't go anywhere until we were together again. Two separate groups of people, unknown to each other, were holding both ends of the same family until we could reach each other.
We found her, and those fifteen minutes remain the most harrowing of the entire trip, and I don’t think I’ll forget those who showed up for Sara and for us.
In Japan, people don’t just go out of their way to help you; they also deeply believe in not bothering others with their actions.Â
The word for what drives this behaviour is meiwaku — causing inconvenience or trouble to others. Avoiding meiwaku isn’t a nicety; it’s a social obligation, woven into how people commute, eat, speak in public, and move through shared spaces.Â
Talking on the phone on public transport is considered inconsiderate. Eating while walking is frowned upon. Playing music without earphones simply isn’t done. The result is a public life that is quieter, more considerate, and more comfortable for everyone, including bewildered tourists trying to find the right platform.
The Details That Make You Stop
Japan has a gift for solving problems elegantly and then making those solutions available to everyone.
Every public toilet — almost every single one — has a bidet. This is not a luxury fitting. In Japan, it is simply what a toilet is.Â
Designed for convenience, personal hygiene, and environmental friendliness, it renders the toilet paper debate largely academic.Â
For an Indian traveller accustomed to packing a mug for most overseas trips, this was a revelation I did not expect to feel so strongly about.
Then there are the convenience stores. 7-Eleven in Japan bears almost no resemblance to its equivalents elsewhere. Open around the clock, they serve freshly prepared, hot, genuinely good food, stocked daily.Â
Our breakfasts, sourced from the nearest 7-Eleven every morning, were fresh, varied, and — I say this as someone who has never considered himself a sandwich person — consistently excellent.Â
You can also pay utility bills there, use the ATM, have packages delivered, and print documents. The convenience store in Japan is less a shop and more a neighbourhood utility.
Getting Around
We used a taxi perhaps three times in ten days, and only because we had too much luggage to manage on local trains. Every other journey was by public transport — the Tokyo Metro and its connecting lines, the shinkansen between cities, and buses in Kyoto, where the train didn’t quite reach.
The Google Maps integration is near-seamless.Â
You can see which train to board, which platform it departs from, and precisely when it arrives. The first day is disorienting; by the second, you trust it completely. By the third, you’re navigating confidently, which is a sentence I didn’t expect to write about a city where I can’t read a single sign.
I wonder if punctuality originated in Japan. The average delay across Japan’s entire rail network is under one minute. A train is considered on time only if it departs within fifteen seconds of its scheduled departure. When a train runs more than five minutes late, the operator issues a formal written apology to passengers.Â
No rail system in the world operates anywhere near this standard.
The Safety
Tokyo has a murder rate of 0.3 per 100,000 residents. For context: Paris is 1.2. London is 1.5. Delhi is 2.4. These are not comparable numbers — they are numbers from a different category of urban experience entirely.
This isn’t accidental.Â
Japan has the strictest gun control laws in the world. Handguns are banned for civilians entirely. To own a hunting rifle, an applicant must clear a written examination, a mental health evaluation, a drug test, and a background check. Then, a safety course, a shooting-range test, and an annual inspection of the weapon.Â
The written exam is a gruelling, all-day class and test on gun safety and law (held only a few times a year), and the mental health evaluation requires a formal diagnostic note from a licensed psychiatrist certifying that the applicant is mentally fit and free of cognitive decline.
The background check is exceptionally rigorous. The police don’t just run a digital check; they interview the applicant’s neighbours, family members, and co-workers, while investigating their personal debt, employment history, and any potential links to organised crime.
The process is designed to be demanding, and it works.Â
Gun violence in Japan is so rare that when it occurs, it makes national news. The result is a country where you feel safe walking alone at night, without having to maintain optimism.
The Part That Got Me
In ten days across Japan, I did not see a single poster or a billboard featuring a politician’s face.
This is remarkable for anyone who lives in India and has grown accustomed to crossing roads lined with photographs of elected representatives celebrating themselves on public money. Japan has some of the highest concentrations of digital out-of-home advertising in the world. And yet none of that space is used for political self-promotion.
When you’re there, it becomes hard to shake the feeling that Japanese politics, whatever its challenges and internal complications, is anchored by a fundamentally different question: how do you make public life materially better? The flawless infrastructure, the clockwork public transport, the invisible waste management, the absolute safety—these are not accidents. They feel like the output of a technocratic culture that ultimately measures itself against what it delivers to the sidewalk, not how well it photographs on a campaign poster.Â
We were there for ten days; We breathed clean air every day. We walked safe streets every night. We moved through a city that worked—reliably, efficiently—in ways we have largely stopped expecting from the city I live in.
Coming Home
I am always glad to come home.
But something has shifted, particularly since the pandemic. As a law-abiding, salaried, taxpaying citizen living in the NCR, I look at the gap between what we contribute and what we receive — clean air, functional infrastructure, safe public spaces — and the maths doesn’t hold up. For roughly half the year, the air in Delhi (the National Capital) is genuinely dangerous to breathe.Â
That has been true for years, it continues to be true, and it continues to be met with the political inertia that all parties that held power are guilty of.
And the air is only part of it. Navigating Delhi’s roads is an experience that requires a particular kind of resignation — the kind that locals develop slowly, without noticing, until rash driving and boorish behaviour simply become the background noise of daily life. We have normalised what should not be normal.
Â
For anyone visiting from overseas, there is no such cushion of familiarity. What we have learned to absorb, they experience raw — the dangerous overtaking, the casual littering, the spitting, the complete indifference to anyone else sharing the road. It is, by any measure, an embarrassment. But people don't behave in a vacuum; culture is shaped by what systems reward, what leaders model, and what societies decide.
Japan didn’t build what it has in ten years. It built it across generations, by deciding — collectively, politically, culturally — that the quality of daily life for ordinary people was the point. That it mattered.
That it was worth the effort.
Sara’s question on the flight home was simple: “Why can’t we just do what they do?”Â
I’m still working on the answer.Â
This post is part of an ongoing series sharing life lessons and observations from lived experience — including, occasionally, the ones that show up on a holiday.
About Me
I am a thinker at all times. I see, I think. I hear, I think. I read, I think. Every weekend I write. I would love to know what you think.