Japan vs Amsterdam

hey all,

So various people have been asking me about Europe/Amsterdam, and it began to dawn on me that Japan and Europe/Amsterdam are actually pretty similar in some ways.

1. Businesspeople on bikes
2. The prevalence of traveling by biking
3. The type of bikes used (heavy, old-fashioned granny style)
4. The quality (generally very high) and ubiquity of public transport
   
5. Train stations have so many shops and so many types of shops they are basically malls
6. The centrality of the train station to navigation, cost of housing (houses closer to train station are more expensive), and shopping (a halo of shops surrounds each train station, growing less dense the further away from it you go)
7. The general rarity of clearly visible tattoos
8. The status of fashion/being fashionable (many not-gay guys can be seen carrying around Louis Vuitton purses)
9. The generally high cost of living
10. The difficulty in finding towels (when I moved to Amsterdam, and when I moved to Japan, I didn't bring any towels, so I had to find a store that sold them. In Amsterdam, I had to walk for 45 minutes to get to an Aldi, and they only had these hand towels. Same deal in Japan: I bought some at a 100 Yen shop, but they are small and thin. Of course, since then, I've seen about 3 places to buy awesome thick, full-sized towels, but they cost the same as 1/5 of 1 month's rent.)
    

Of course, there are some blatant differences. In Amsterdam, the sex and drug trade are regulated and mostly legal. In Japan, both are illegal, but the sex trade seems to be tolerated to some extent. In most places in Europe, I had no trouble finding my way around or ordering things from a menu, because even if I mispronounce something, I can still read the letters. In Japan, unless the menu is written in English or in hiragana or katakana (the two phonetic alphabets that Japanese uses) I just get to point and say "Kore-o onegaishimasu." (Please give me this, I'll have this, etc.) In Holland, I'm really short, but in Japan, I'm almost average: there are some guys and a few women who tower over me, but for the most part I don't stick out too much.

One of the really weird things is that you see a ridiculous number of decrepit old people in Japan, which I've never seen in Europe or America. The thing that gets me is their backs: their legs come up straight from the ground, but then their upper body is almost parallel to the ground. Even if they could straighten their backs, they'd still only be 4'6".

Cheers