Night shift digging up the road
A lot of construction and maintenance is done during the night hours. Roads are dug open, station buildings taken apart, but in the morning everything is back to normal. And then when the night arrives once more, the workers rule the city again.
McDonald’s has free wireless internet in some of it’s restaurants, but only if you have bought the services of a certain Japanese internet service provider and has the codes and passwords to log in.
In Japan you can’t buy mobile phones with a prepaid card anymore. The official excuse is, I think, that because the criminals used them, it should be illegal. A logic that is used, not only in Japan, for more repressive laws and surveillance. Maybe a foreigner committed a crime in Japan in the past? A good excuse to have all the tourists fingerprinted at arrival now.
World traveler in Kyoto
If you are traveling on a tight budget or just don’t want to spend money staying in a hotel, there’s all night open internet cafes where you can stay pretty cheap during the coldest and darkest night time hours. In Fukuoka I paid 1 200 yen for five hours and got a very comfortable chair in a private booth that I could sleep in. For a couple of hundred yens more I could have had a tatami floor to sleep on instead. There are manga and videos to borrow, and you can buy instant ramen and drinks from vending machines. You could bring your own food too if you would prefer that.
When I came to Japan first time I thought it was strange when all the workers in a shop greeted me with a loud voice when I entered and thanked me similarly when I got out. I thought it was funny. But then when I went back home and didn’t get the Japanese treatment as a customer anymore, I missed it. I didn’t get anything, hardly a smile when I entered, and many times I felt like being just a nuisance interrupting conversations between employees.
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