Reasons to love Japan, to be going on with

©  2006  Rose George

1. When I came back to the flat after several hours walking in chilly temperatures, there was a heated toilet seat waiting for me. Until you have tried it, you won't know how good that feels.
2. The bath in the flat has a remote control panel that controls temperature and can automatically fill the bath to a pre-selected level. Once I figured out the panel, a world without electronic bath-fillers no longer made sense.
3. There is sumo wrestling on TV and they do sumo locker room interviews. The Japanese equivalent of “well, at the end of the day…” is delivered by men with exposed fat buttocks.
4. I thought the hair dye I bought was mean because it didn't include gloves. (As dyeing one's hair requires applying toxic chemicals to the part of the body where they can be most easily absorbed by the skin and bloodstream, gloves are a token safety precaution.) Then I noticed they formed an almost invisible layer of the paper, to be peeled off. Japanese packaging rocks.
5. Here, I am tall.