(-＿-) I meant two weeks, not two days. I've been awake for too long at this point.

I can't relate at all. Please, write more about your trip! What did you see, what did you do and what caused the wrong size sensation? JKs' tiny pussies?

>I feel conflicted because having only seen Japan through anime and a few films, it was not what I expected at all.
>The best way I can put it is that everything is physically the wrong size.
>I liked it but not the way I expected.
did the girls have small bewbz?

I had a few encounters with young Japanese girls (nothing immoral). Japanese kids are shy (like all kids), but also very forward (unlike most of the adults when they're not drunk). One hebe on a school trip to one of the tourist attractions I was in said "I love you" to me because she probably didn't know any other English words, and her friends teased her about it while laughing and trying to say random English things to me. It was very heart-warming.

About the size thing. Buildings are extremely size-efficient, and everything seems shrinked down or packed tightly. Even in rural towns. You see it in media, but when you are in front of it IRL, it feels weird. Like you've stepped into a model. The aesthetic is similar to China's, but more compact.

The most uncanny experience was probably a maid cafe I went to just to see what it was like. This was a constant everywhere I went: you can see where the inspiration came from when you see these places in anime, but IRL it looks much more low-budget and shabbier. More real.
I did fall in love with the maid cafe girls, though. I only went to one, but despite their cutesy dumb act, you could tell they were very smart and quick-witted, despite probably being high school or university students. I expected something dumb, but I ended up feeling a lot of respect for them, which I didn't expect. You can tell they take what they do seriously. And the other patrons were mostly older men (lonely), and you could tell the girls totally understood the importance of their work. I ended up seeing it like a modern version of geishas. It's serious business. There were a couple of girls there too, and it didn't feel seedy at all.

I went to Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hiroshima, plus a few very small rural towns. Hiroshima had a very "island" 90s short-haired long-skirted schoolgirl riding her bicycle in summertime kind of vibe, although everything was larger there because so much was reconstructed after the bomb and looked different/more western. I hope to visit an actual coastal town or one of the islands in the future.

The one place I felt at home was the second-hand shops and hobby shops full of otaku. Despite being an outsider there.

I tried to do everything I could think of: maid cafes, night life, onsen, rural ryokan, touristy stuff, going into working-class restaurants where they were very wary of me until I managed to get out a couple of sentences in Japanese... I stayed in hotels and in an appartment to try to pretend I lived there (but I was rich, because the living standards there are lower compared to my country). The default attitude towards westerners is being wary, but when they see you're not American, and you make an effort to speak the language, they relax. Especially in izakaya where the staff gets drunk with the patrons and the differences start to blur if you speak a bit of the language and you lubricate it all with alcohol. I had such an experience in Osaka, and it was fun. If you manage to step out of the dumb tourist stereotype, people are amiable. Only once did I come across a couple of gang types and their aura was scary as fuck.

IDK. This is all through my personal lens and I'm trying to make sense of it all. I packed so much in so little time that I'm still trying to integrate all of it. You can tell because this post is a mess of random things lol

That's kewl, thanks for the post
Only having seen Japan in animu, among things I like about it is how you can seemingly get around the life relatively easily without needing to interact with others. That's not so much the case in my country - though even if I went to Japan, guess I would stand out as teh scary gaijin unless I demonstrated my sk1llz, defeating the whole point...

I went to a ton of shrines, like all tourists do. But one experience in particular stood out. One day I decided to just explore the neighbourhood I was in, and I ended up finding a relatively important shrine in the middle of the urban landscape. This was not a place for tourists at all. There were no English signs at all.
I got there just before opening time, and I found the priest and a miko performing a prayer service.
Now, I'm the spiritual type and prone to psychic sensitivity from birth, so bear with me because this might sound like absolute nonsense to you, but that place was intense as fuck. Unlike most shrines I visited, and unlike most religious establishments in my country, whatever was there was fucking real.
Someone had asked me to buy a talisman for them, so I decided to buy it there. While I was waiting, a couple of locals came to pray before going to work. I was somewhat familiar with the procedures, but I observed them and waited for them to leave before going through it myself. The purification, donation box, prayer... I followed the ritual the best I could once I was alone at the shrine, and I could feel there's something real there. Again, I apologize because you might roll your eyes reading this, but I'm initiated in a different esoteric practice totally unrelated to Shinto, and I could feel the telltale signs of real spiritual power. Those of you from Asian backgrounds might find this obvious (or not), but I realized Eastern religions still tap into something very much real and available to everyday folk, and that was a nice surprise.

I spent maybe an hour walking around the deserted shrine and taking in the early morning atmosphere. Once the service was over, the priest came back to the talisman shop and I made my best to purchase mine in Japanese. I'd like to think the priest mistook my fear of looking like a tourist and fumbling my Japanese with earnest desperation for a talisman that worked (it is, after all, a health talisman for someone with cancer). If nothing else, I could sense actual compassion in his gaze when he reached for an English handout explaining the talismans and I asked for an illness recovery one clumsily without looking at it. If nothing else, I can say I had as close to a spiritual experience as I could have there.

>it looks much more low-budget and shabbier
i noticed the same when watching vlogs from japan. zoomed in irl its not as pretty

did you fuck some girls?

Tangentially related to the spiritual thing were the crows. There's pigeons there (they're everywhere), but the bird that stood out the most for me where the crows (or maybe they're ravens?). They seem to be in every city, and they give a more civilized vibe than pigeons, that's for sure.

>>196807
>scary gaijin
I think the thing they're most scared of is having to speak English. Outside of the tourist service industry (and even then), their English is surprisingly severely limited. If you look like a fucking American chad, you will be instantly stereotyped as someone who will behave like a dumb pigeon trampling everything while you shit all over the place, but otherwise you just need basic Japanese and showing you're as language-vulnerable as they are, and they relax. Coming from a non-English speaking country, this was easier for me. In my country, people who know English are proud to display it, but those who aren't are terrified of speaking to tourists. Just don't assume English is the lingua franca of the world (even if it is).

I was hoping to get the perspective of other anons who have been to Japan to help me make sense of my experiences.

One afternoon, I had to take a regional train to visit a nearby town. The station signage did not make sense to me and I suspected I was waiting at the wrong spot. I saw a couple of local women waiting there, and that reassured me at first. Surely, they knew what they were doing.

But after a short while, and seeing as my suspicions did not disappear, I decided to approach them and ask.
>sumimasen. eigo dekimasuka?
When I walked towards them I could see they were startled, but as soon as I said "sumimasen", they visibly relaxed.
>dekinai!
One of the women almost proudly declared she did not, in fact, speak English.
I proceeded to try to communicate my worries to them in very broken Japanese and a lot of gesticulating and pointing at my and their tickets, and they assured me we were in the right spot. However, as the time for the arrival of the train approached, reading some signs with the aid of Google Translate I was almost sure we were not at the right spot, so I tried to make them know.
It turns out we weren't, and thanks to that interaction we avoided missing the train. They tried to strike conversation with me, but I completely dropped the ball and they probably thought I was being rude or uninterested, because we ended going our separate ways. I probably gave them the wrong non-verbal cues, but I did my best (another thing I noticed is that they are very perceptive to this kind of thing; picking up on subtle body language and running with it).

>>196809
>i noticed the same when watching vlogs from japan. zoomed in irl its not as pretty
Right? I went to a cultural event/training thing for foreigners where only another two people turned up. It was in a rented room in some shitty building where there were some escort pubs (the event had nothing to do with that). The thing is, the hosts behaved it was the most normal thing. Like the venue we rented was totally appropriate. It's like you can see the sanitized pieces of the experience they pick out when depicting it in anime and they obviate everything else that sticks out like a sore thumb to us. IDK if that makes sense. It's difficult to explain if you haven't experienced it.

At one point I was in a crowded event with other foreigners, and I experienced the anime trope of the couple that gets separated by a torrent of people as if it was a river. I've seen that scene a hundred times in anime, but only after the fact I realized what I had experienced (especially in Tokyo crowds seemed to move in relentless streams). Over the span of my stay there I realized most of the tropes in anime that seem so characteristic to us outside of Japan are actually taken from IRL situations that at the time look nothing like the anime depictions.