Missed the whole ten days of entries, will be hard to make up for it. Anyway, today’s piece is on differences between Japan and Australia, or, more specifically, Tokyo and Sydney. The two biggest ones that are immediately felt with your senses are noise and smell.
Sydney is much louder than Tokyo, mostly due to much denser and louder traffic. In Tokyo most of the heavy traffic passes on elevated roads so you don’t hear it at all at pedestrian level. Whatever traffic there is on regular streets is much quieter. I think this is mostly due to a lot of cars in Tokyo being electric, less reliance on cars as transport so there are not as many as in Sydney (even though there are 8 times more people in Tokyo/Kanto as in Sydney) and not many loud vehicles on the road. In Sydney buses make an awful lot of noise, whereas in Tokyo they’re much quieter. Another source of noise, the people, are also much quieter on average than in Sydney. People don’t talk much on their mobiles in public spaces, which is a common practice in Sydney.
As far as smells go, in Tokyo you can often smell sewage, which I haven’t yet felt in Sydney. In Sydney, on the other hand, there’s a massive assault of perfume/cologne on you all the time. People put on massive amount of cologne on them and even our hotel sprays perfume in the lobby for some reason. We’ve had to move seats in the bus to avoid sitting to heavily scented people, that’s the extent of it, so it’s pretty bad. In Tokyo due to common courtesy and density of commuters on the trains, packed like sardines next to each other, people don’t use perfume at all so as not to turn the train into a perfume shop. I like that very much and can appreciate more now that I live in Sydney.