Being Polite in Japan - the Complete Guide for Beginners

Thanks for all the birthday wishes! How very lovely to get them here, far from you all.
And very polite of you all as well - and as we all know, politeness is highly valued in the rather formalistic Japanese culture.

On the train from the airport, I was thrilled, when the girl with the tea trolly turned round and bowed deeply to the compartment before leaving. Since then I have seen so many conductors and tea ladies bowing themselves out of train compartments, that I hardly notice it any more. However I did enjoy watching a maintenance man on the street buzz someone in a building to be let in the stairway, and when they answered, he bowed deeply to the door phone (no video connection).

It is also polite to wear a face mask, when feeling under the weather. Though officially the masks are worn to prevent other people catching your nasty flu, I rather suspect they are also worn to prevent getting those nasty flus in the first place, since so many people wear them. Well, either that or else there is a really, really nasty flu going round. Though they could also be a fashion statement: I've seen several girls taking selfies of themselves with masks on.

Politeness also has a lot to do with sound, or rather not making it. There is no speaking on mobile phones or jamming to loud headphone music in nearly all trains and trams. And even a notice on the Shinkansen bullet train reminding you to be considerate of other passangers, while using your computer and avoiding keyboard noises. (I am tapping this ever so silently in my sleeping capsule).
And those irritatingly noisy drones! None of that please!

To be polite, one should also remember give over priority seas to people with implanted medical devices.

 

And at sumo matches, one should refrain from throwing the thin pillows one sits on in the air after a good match, a traditional sign of approval, since this could cause bodily harm. Which seems a bit   superfluous, when 150kg sumo wrestlers are being thrown down from the raised ring.

 

Using the toilet also poses many challenges for polite behaviour. Fistly you have to work out, which way round you should sit on the Western style toilet. 

Having navigated this successfully, you then have to work out, which button to press on the toilet to create the sound of water running to cover any unseemly noise from your moving bowels. Accidentally pressing the wrong button can send a very precise and high pressure water jet to your back, or front bottom (no age limits on my text!), depending on which button you accidentally pressed. Some of the buttons I haven't worked out yet.

Finding the button to flush the toilet is another challenge. This usually tends to be a separate button somewhere in the toilet cubicle. Occasionally this is operated by waving your hand in front of the sensor. In one toilet the sensor for flushing the toilet and the sensor for starting those rushing water noises to cover other toilet noises were placed impractically close to eachother, whereby I managed several times to start the noise of a flushing toilet, but not to actually flush the damned thing. People waiting in queue must have thought I had a bad case of indigestion. 

There are also strict rules about shoes. Firstly, you always take off your shoes on entering a Japanese home, guesthouse, ryokan, hotel, which comes very naturally to us Finns anyway. You leave your shoes in a shelf by the front door and slip on some slippers, provided by your host. Then you walk a few meters until you come to a tatami area. You must always take off slippers on tatami and walk on it in just your socks (or barefoot as the case may be). However if the urge to use the powder room overtakes you (and you've worked out how to use the toilet), you must first slip your slippers back on to walk along the corridor to the toilet, upon entering which you must change your slippers to special toilet slippers, which will be provided. Phew! That's a lot to remember, and should your host catch you absent mindedly walking on the tatami wearing toilet slippers... well, that would be a sin akin to pissing on the sauna stove. You_just_don't_do_that!

Of course part of the fun is being altogether much too big by Japanese standard, so I usually manage to squeeze about half my foot into the toilet slippers in the Ladies. This leaves me feeling somewhat like Cinderella's evil step-sister trying on a glass slipper.