The old slow boat to China cliché

Sometimes it is very hard to escape the old clichés about the countries you travel through. And we’re sitting on one now, steadily swaying about in the indigo waters of the East China Sea, as our ferry ploughs a slow path between Japan and China.

There’s no doubt about it: the MS Su Zhou Hao is definitely a slow boat to China.

It’s hardly the image I had in my mind of course, you know the romantic one of am old-style Chinese junk, all rigging and multiple different decks, laden with manufactured goods and opium, and calling in at various exotic ports on a mission to discover the secrets of silk.

But it is certainly slow and, I would imagine rather more comfortable than some rickety old wooden tub.

I rather like leaving a country by ship, indeed I prefer it to leaving by plane. The pace of travel gives you time to relax and reflect on your time in the country you have just left and to anticipate what lies ahead in that to which you are headed.

Rather than zoom into the clouds in burst of kerosene, on a ship you can slip gracefully away, giving you chance to bid a long farewell to the country you’re leaving .

It allows you to appreciate the physical space between countries - so important in determining the character of a nation such as Japan - as you watch the land slip slowly out of sight and you enter the embrace of the open sea.

Time to digest your adventures in one country before scanning the horizon for the first sight of the next.

I found this a particularly pleasurable experience doing this from the luxury of my own large, albeit slightly grubby Japanese-style communal bath. As the sun set and I sloshed about in the warm water, I could gaze out the window across the island-strewn Inland Sea towards the lights twinkling on the shore and reflect on a month in Japan.

We had spent the previous day in the somewhat down-at-heel port city of Osaka.

Perhaps it should be expected, typical of port cities the world over, or perhaps it was just our chosen part of town, but after clean, tidy, well-behaved Japan, Osaka was a rude dose of reality.

The city seemed populated entirely by gaunt, middle-aged men in grimy vests, its streets lined with cheap hotels, gaudy pachinko parlours and discount manual clothing outlets for manual workers.

It felt like a great receptacle for all Japan’s unwanteds: down-and-outs; drunks; and disabled people, airbrushed out of the tourist sites and dumped here like some embarrassing mad Aunt locked away in the attic.

Osaka is looked down on by citizens of some other cities, seen as less glamorous than Tokyo, less refined than Kyoto. It proudly boasts of its status as ‘Japan’s kitchen’ (well it sounds better than ‘Japan’s answer to Southampton’) and seemed stuffed with cheap, slightly grubby eateries where you could enjoy the pleasures of battered octopus balls and other such greasy delicacies.

Indeed the food seemed to lean more towards China rather than Japan, drenched in oil and served up with little of the excessive finesse we found elsewhere.

It wasn’t just the food either which came with a distinct Chinese flavour. We the influence of Japan’s largest neighbour in the Mahjong parlours in the scruffy arcades, where old men gathered to smoke rollups, and amongst the people, where Chinese and Korean immigrants remind you of Osaka’s role as Japan‘s gateway to the world.

Raffish, bawdy, lively, exuberant; was Osaka a harbinger of what was to come for us in China?
Leaving Japan for China, I anticipate some clear similarities but perhaps many more differences.
Certainly the Japanese I encountered have always stressed that, though echoes of their Chinese-influenced past resonate throughout many aspects of modern Japan, theirs was a very different path towards the 21st century, and one which has made them very distinct from their continental neighbours.

I don’t expect to make many of the same wonderful discoveries in China as I did across the Sea of Japan: the Shinkansen bullet trains; excessive politeness and incessant bowing; Salaryman and Visor Woman; ’washlet’ space-age toilets with built-in bidets and fart-disguising fake flush sounds; not even Blueberry yoghurt drink.

And in China I hope not to encounter some of Japan’s other excesses: the emphasis on ’saving face’ which compels hotel receptionists to hang up on me rather than risk embarrassing themselves by attempting to speak English; the ridiculously over-packaging of food; the frankly-annoying and pointless us of multiple slippers; the utterly irritating emphasis on the supposedly ‘cute’ and kitsch.

I will miss this - the wonderful, whacky, eccentric Japan, seedbed for a million mad inventions, home to a million crazes.

It is a country you enjoy on the surface, but one that takes years to fathom its depths. Still insular, comfortable being isolated Japan does not seem to absorb its immigrants like Britain has - as Will Ferguson notes in his excellent book ‘Hokkaido Highway Blues, like it or not, in Japan you will always be a gaijin - a ‘foreigner’.

I can’t imagine we’ll blend in that well upon making landfall in Shanghai either. Another country, another language to decode, another whole set of cultural mores to understand.

We’re entering a world of superlatives: the largest population on earth; one of the largest countries on earth; a booming economy; an emerging superpower that is making the rest of the world a little nervous.

A Japanese friend told me that the US is seen as ten years ahead of Japan, Japan as ten years ahead of Korea and Korea ten years ahead of China.

Does this mean that two days on a boat will take us back to the 1980s? Or was Japan a vision of the future?

I thought that China was now being looked to as a vision of the future.

I’m sure we’ll find out. But first we’ve got to dodge this typhoon, brooding somewhat uncomfortably close on the horizon…