Japan has to win the prize for the most advanced toilets in the world. After hearing so much about them, we were pleased that we had the chance to experience them during our tour of Japan as they were present in all but one of the hotel rooms we stayed in.

They have a control panel on the side of the bowl which controls a jet of warm water. We were quite surprised to find that the toilet in our supposedly traditional ryokan was by far the most advanced one that we came across in Japan. It had a heated seat, considerably more control over the water jet including controlling the temperature, and when you had finished, it even had a warm air drier for down below.

The public toilets sometimes had automatic taps which switched on when you put your hand under them and similar soap dispensers. With such advanced toilets and sinks, it was therefore a surprise to find that they never had anywhere you could dry your hands. Various companies have spotted this deficiency as an advertising opportunity - they hire people to hand out small packs of tissues which contain adverts on their wrappers.

Another area that the Ryokan was far from traditional in was in its mini-bar. This was filled, as usual, with various beverages and snacks. However, unlike in the other hotels, this one was linked electronically to your bill. As soon as you removed an item, its absence was detected and the price of the item was immediately added to your bill!

Almost everybody in Japan carries a mobile phone - particularly the teenagers which are more noticeable because they are always either talking on them or staring at the display. Many of the electronics shops, particularly in Shinjuku, are now dominated by mobile phone accessories. With phones playing such an important role in Japanese life, we were really surprised at how thin the yellow pages telephone directory was in Tokyo and even more surprised when we saw that it covered the whole of Japan and not just Tokyo.

We had heard that car parking was a problem in Japan and that they were developing ever smaller cars with clever steering to cram more into tighter spaces. We didn't see any evidence of this during our tour. The cars were the same range of sizes as back home except for the occasional odd looking tiny car. The Japanese have however been quite inventive about parking. We saw quite a few novel car parking schemes in use. Many of their car parks are tall and narrow and they don't waste space on ramps. They use lifts to get the cars to the various floors and sometimes the lifts themselves were continuous parking slots that rotated. They also used turntables so that they didn't need to provide enough room for the car to turn in. On a more modest scale, peoples houses and some car parks had small elevators which would raise one car so that you could park another one underneath.

We took a look around some of the many amusement arcades in Japan to see what the latest crazes were. The most popular game seems to be pachinko which is like an old fashioned bagatelle. People buy a basket of ball bearings and feed them into a machine where they bounce around on nails and hopefully fall into a slot which will provide the player with some more balls. It wasn't a good spectator sport particularly as the parlours were very smoky.

There was another style of game that was very popular where the player performs some actions like dance movements for example according to a ‘score’ that scrolls past on a screen. These were fun to watch as the participants were usually very good.

We came across a couple of places that offered free internet access. We have surfed the net in quite a few countries now but it was quite hard in Japan as the keyboard generated Japanese characters. It took us a while to work out how to get the normal alphabet out of it. We were quite familiar with the browsers that they used but we still had problems using them because the pull down menus and any error messages were in Japanese. We were very impressed with the high access speed that they had - particularly as it was free.