最初に、A Paltry Few Notes on Being in Japan

For this first post, I've been instructed to write about my "early impressions of Japan." Since this is my third trip to the country date (albeit the longest), I feel it's a tad difficult to live up to that request properly. Still, by using very first experience in Japan last summer (2010) as a sounding board for my current experiences in the Kansai region, I think I can make a few points.
My first trip to Japan was a three-week vacation for the purposes of sightseeing and visiting my friends, all of whom live in or around Tokyo. Because of this, my first glimpse of "actual Japan"--that is, after the train ride out from Narita Airport--was Shinjuku Station, the world record holder for the busiest station in terms of passengers. Indeed, if anything can be said of Japan at a glance, even towards statistics, it is that for a relatively small island country, Japan has a very high population density.

お正月/New Years  2010-2011; People waiting in line to pray at a temple in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture.

Never has the word 「人川」(hitogawa; lit. "human river") been so applicable.
One would expect the shock of such an impressive human torrent to be abhorrent, especially to a foreigner, and even more so to one such as myself: I hail from a small seaside town in California where public transportation is limited at best. Where I come from, there are wide roads, open swaths of solitude, and if one does need to travel anywhere, one takes a car. Nonetheless, in my visits to Japan, it has not been my impression that the crowds were overwhelming. Or, perhaps better stated, in Japan, I have never once felt the the need to label such masses of people as--what should perhaps rightly be--chaos.
One could perhaps call it "order," or 「秩序」(chitsujo), as did my Kansai-born Japanese teachers of this past summer. To be sure, order is important in Japan.

September 16, 2011; Apartment building in Hirakata-shi, Osaka.

Perhaps ironically, though, I feel that sums it all up a little too neatly, and too simply. Rather, I would say that order exists in these basic visible patterns in Japan (i.e. though people may cross the street or pass each other in great numbers and in what appears to be a great jumble of bodies, it is rare for anyone to collide, even to stop-start as many of us do when by chance we meet a stranger who seems bent on passing us on the same side by which we mean to pass him) because of a mutual understanding.
Japanese verbal communication is somewhat infamous for this quality: in a good deal of Japan's common discourse, much of what is said is not actually said aloud, or if it is, the true or implied meaning is understood by both parties. An American friend of mine discovered this the hard way after studying abroad. He returned to Japan the following year to visit, and stayed with his previous host family for a time. When he was about to leave their home, they objected, and told him he should stay longer. Though I know not how many times he may have been asked and refused (as in the so-called '3 Times Rule': refuse an offer three times before it can be assumed to be sincere), this friend eventually accepted the family's offer and stayed on. As his host parents became increasingly disgruntled, he soon realized that they had only invited him to stay longer out of something like common courtesy. In fact, their offer was not sincere.
Unlike my unfortunate friend, most Japanese people are well aware of such word play. It is a delicate business to tune in to one's partner's thoughts through the minutest visual cues, tone of voice, timing, and so on, but it has been my experience, as opposed to my own American culture, that the Japanese are generally speaking much more in tune with one another to this effect. With this kind of mutual understanding of one's own space, that of others, and others' body language and so forth, crowd navigation, too, becomes easier. Certainly, however, this can only be said to be my hypothesis, based on my own experiences (and one that definitely can't be explained with the attention it deserves in a short blog post).
How well I'll navigate them from here on remains to be seen!

September 15, 2011; Keihan Rail Line.