Reflections from Japan
by Matthew Cawood, winner of the NSW Star Prize for rural writing and recently returned from the 51st IFAJ Congress held in Japan in September 2007.

After spending a couple of weeks in Japan, courtesy of the NSW Farm Writers Association and Meat and Livestock Australia, I'm home with more questions about this intriguing country than before I'd ever set foot on it. For instance:

• How does a nation with such a keen sense of beauty create such hideous towns and cities? Building interiors, meals and agricultural landscapes all have an order and aesthetic about them that is part of a long Japanese tradition. Towns and the endless suburbs of Tokyo, on the other hand, are a blight on the eyes. It's perplexing that a people in love with beauty and order allowed such ugliness to happen.
• How do Tokyo women manage in their high heels? Tokyo is largely a pedestrian city - from the apartment to the train station, and then from the train station to the office, and back again in the evening. It seemed to me that most of the women I saw did this trek in stilletos, and with style. No teetering, no swapping high heels for runners, no band-aids on the heels. Admirable - although I wonder whether there will one day be a generation of foot problems to deal with.
• How does Tokyo work? If you made a city and stocked it with 20 million Australians, the place would be a disaster zone. But Tokyo works with this population, and works well - if you can forget the smog. Which begs another question: why can't Australia devise a decent train system? In Tokyo, where one train station handles up to two million commuters a day, the trains - immaculately clean, no signs of vandalism - operate to the second. In Sydney, pop. four million ... commuter chaos. And I won't start on the fantastic bullet trains vs. the XPT.
• When can I go back? I saw only a tiny slice of Japan, but like plenty of westerners before me, I fell for the food, the history and the Japanese aesthetic. That's not to say I want to swap the New England for Tokyo, but as something completely and refreshingly different, Japan was a blast.

/ends