Ways not to lock your bike

It was over a week until I even saw any police in Japan, but that first week was in Sapporo in the middle of winter. Still, their society is so peaceful and honourable. What a great place to live!

I think it can be rather more fun to live there as a tourist or student than as a working citizen. Nobody's mentioned the Yakuza, the still very rigid and emotionally repressed society, the suffocatingly hierarchical workplace and back-breaking work ethic (at least as much about being seen to be working longer and harder - and more obediently - as about the work itself). Many of the things that are most eye-poppingly amazing to us in Japanese society are actually repressed energy venting through the few available outlets.

I've had to work with Japanese businesses and that was hard enough. I'd hate to work for one.

Edit: Oh, and if you know a woman who's travelled in or lived in Japan on her own, why don't you ask her how idyllic it was? Japan is, in it's own special way, very repressed and fucked up wrt to gender. Western women get all that plus the assumption that they are whores.