2. Japan 1.0

I’ve been to a lot of airport lounges in my 14 years as a consultant, but the nicest one I have ever been to is the Cathay lounge in the international terminal at Tokyo’s Haneda airport. Which happens to be where I’m writing this from. This was my first real trip to Japan, having previously spent a couple of hours marvelling at vending machines and heated toilet seats on four separate transfers through Narita airport, but never actually making it past Japanese immigration.

I had never heard of Haneda airport. But the trip from central Tokyo to Narita is famous for being long and eye-wateringly expensive (taxi: 25,000 yen, 250 bucks!). So I essentially concluded that Haneda was Tokyo’s equivalent of La Guardia, with Narita being Tokyo’s JFK. And in a way it is: Haneda was the primary Tokyo airport until 1978, when Narita opened. At that point, it became a domestic-only airport until a new international terminal was opened in 2010. Unlike La Guardia there are no arbitrary rules, though (who knew there was a rule that nonstop flights from LGA must be within 1500 miles? Except if the flight happens to be on Saturday, or happens to be going to Denver. You can’t make this up.)

But in another fundamental way, this is not La Guardia. It turns out that by passenger numbers this is the fifth busiest airport…in the world. 75 million passengers in 2015; smaller only than Atlanta, Beijing, Dubai and O’Hare. And more than twice the number that fly through LGA. In a more practical way, it’s not La Guardia either: it took me seconds to check-in, there were two people in front of me for a very polite shoes-on security screening, and no queue in immigration. 10 minutes from taxi to hand-made spicy noodles and cha siu bao at the (free) lounge noodle-bar.

The infrastructure in Asia in general, and Japan in particular, does indeed make much of America look like a “third world country”, as Joe Biden pointed out in 2014 (when he also suggested that a blindfolded person would think the Hong Kong airport was in America). Earlier today I was at a meeting in Nagoya – Japan’s third largest city and home to Toyota – a 350km trip from Tokyo that takes one hour and 40 minutes by train. Which translates to an average speed of over 130mph; the bullet train (“shinkansen”) may no longer be the fastest in the world, but it’s pretty incredible. They apologised profusely because the train was three minutes late; in rush hour they run services at this speed every 10 minutes. The free wifi worked seamlessly too. A half-hour conference call resulted in exactly zero dropped calls, even with tunnels.

The Olympics are a fascinating time for someone to be away from home. On the surface, it’s one event. Everyone sees Usain Bolt’s incredible smile at the end of the 100 meters, his legs too fast for the camera. But dig a little deeper and it’s like the parable blind men and the elephant: everyone’s touching a different part, and each of those parts seems like a very different animal. The power of the media to define what we see, and what we don’t see, of one single event is incredible.

Anyway, watching the Olympics in Japan is pretty amazing. Everything sounds like one of those gameshows where people battle on obstacle courses while being covered in slime, and the enthusiasm of the commentary is infectious even to someone who doesn’t understand a word. Tuesday night was the bronze medal match in the women’s team table tennis. For those that missed it, the Japanese won the bronze, beating Singapore. Ping pong has never, ever, been so exciting. I cannot actually describe it, so here’s a YouTube clip.

At current count, 14 of Japan’s 36 medals have been won by women, including not just in table tennis, but also the absolutely awe-inspiring Kori Icho, who has just become the first wrestler to win gold at four consecutive Olympics. The table tennis team made the front-page of the English language paper, the Japan Times. Their star, Ai Fukuhara (who plays in China), was described as follows: “The four-time Olympian’s doll-cute looks and friendly personality have won her legions of fans among Chinese men and women…”. A ‘Beijing-based table tennis journalist’ (such things exist, who knew!) said: “She’s so cute. She’s 27 years old but she’s like a child. Whenever I meet her, she always gives me chocolate and candy”. A separate sports reporter (generalist!) adds that “She’s popular with young people, and maybe a lot of males like her because she’s very cute. She’s beautiful.” The article – completely devoid of table tennis related information – also informatively adds that “unfortunately for China’s single men, Fukuhara, who is known as “Fu Yuan Ai” in China, is already taken.” She has a table tennis playing boyfriend from Taiwan. Somehow this is front-page news.

Try as I like to be impartial, much like the local coverage of the Olympics it’s hard not to view things through my own cultural lens. Through that lens, I can’t help asking – how can a place be so advanced in some ways and yet so backward in others? Do ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’ even have meaning – are there absolutes when it comes to values, in the same way as there are with airports?