Overall, we found that the Japanese people were very friendly and helpful to us and we certainly didn't find them at all hostile towards us. We had heard that they are supposed to consider themselves superior but we saw absolutely no evidence of this. Ignoring the ever present danger of earthquakes, Japan is one of the safest places in the world. They have an extremely low crime rate and a very high capture rate. It is also a very clean country with no sign of litter or graffiti anywhere.

The Japanese must work very long hours and get very little sleep at home because they seemed to be forever falling asleep whenever they sat down. It didn't matter whether it was on a train or on a seat watching a demo of the latest high-definition flat screen TV, they were always nodding off. The worst offenders were the businessmen going home in the evening after having a drink. It was hard to find a place to sit in a train in the evening without the risk of somebody falling asleep onto you.

In fact most of the businessmen we saw in the evenings smelt of alcohol and quite a few of them were staggering around the streets. However, unlike just about all other countries we have visited, these drunken people were never any trouble at all. The only evidence that they had been drinking was their instability and their smell. They were never loud, abusive or even boisterous.

As we expected, English wasn't very widely spoken in Japan. The Japanese are actually quite like the British in the way that they continue to jabber away at you anyway despite the fact that you can't understand a word they are saying. People would usually concentrate on Lina, probably because of her Chinese descent, and totally ignore me when they were talking to us. They seemed to get quite exasperated by her inability to understand them whereas it was expected that I wouldn't understand.

Foreign visitors could be forgiven for thinking that Japan is overrun with school children as they seemed to be almost everywhere that we went. It didn't matter what day of the week it was, or even what time of day, there always seemed to be school children around. We came to the conclusion that they must like wearing their school uniforms as they were wearing them even in the evenings when they were hanging out around the shopping centres. These uniforms really were uniform too as there seemed to be no variation at all in the clothes that were worn by children attending the same school (although different schools had different uniforms which included the classic Japanese sailor suits).

School children were particularly prevalent at the temples and shrines that we visited as they were also visiting these sights with their school. We couldn't even escape them during the weekends as there seemed to be even more of them out on school trips.

We would often get approached by small groups of these school children and they would ask us some simple questions in English as part of their English homework assignment. They actually always spoke to me, rather than to Lina, as I suppose I look more foreign to them. They were always very polite and first asked us if we had the time. Unfortunately I initially misinterpreted this polite intrusion as a request for the actual time of day - which must have confused them! We were asked a variety of questions like: where we were from, how old we were, if we liked Japan, what our favourite Japanese food was, etc. They always finished by asking if they could take a picture of us with them. We always gave them one of our business cards which absolutely delighted them. Foreign tourists were in short supply in Japan so in some places we were questioned by quite a few of these groups.

On a more serious note, we had heard that there was a problem with schoolgirls being indecently assaulted while travelling on trains and buses. A series of adverts were being shown on the TV during our stay which encouraged the victims to say no. I'm sad to say that I actually witnessed one of these offences taking place while we rode on a particularly cramped bus in Kyoto. It was quite a disturbing experience for me when I saw a fat business man openly groping a fairly young schoolgirl. What made it worse was that she didn't even push his hand away, she just tried to (politely) move away from him but failed because the bus was so cramped. I knew that I was a stranger in a foreign country which had different principles but I couldn't stand by and watch this happen so I pushed this man away from her. This, thankfully, stopped him and he didn't even make eye contact with me when I did this.