
It’s not often one has to make a decision regarding the purchase of a new pair of shoes in terms of how easy it will be to remove and put them on again where I come from, but not doing so, and not doing so at length, is something that must not be easy to do the fiftieth or even hundredth time in this, the Land of the Shoes.
Because you’re going to have to take them off and put them on again if not five, but fifty times a day in Japan. And the rules seem to be muddy. Private houses are a no-no for shoes, but that’s easy to enforce. However, even within private houses, there are yet more rules. If you wear the “knock-around-the-house” slippers into the bathroom (well, there aren’t bathrooms here—there’s a toilet but it’s always separate from the bath area) your hosts will blanch, aghast at this violation of sanitation rules and the slippers will be thrown away, pretty much along with your hitherto stellar reputation.
Public spaces seem to be a free-for-all. In an elementary school, for example, you seem to be prohibited from wearing shoes anywhere that the dirt becomes concrete. The kids are indoctrinated from birth to wear this set of shoes for this purpose, then carry around another set of shoes, or maybe two, for various other purposes. Shoe lockers abound; hundreds upon hundreds of them, with the kids’ names dutifully inscribed above.
Restaurants are a crapshoot. More traditional ones have a genkan, or foyer, where all the guests have to remove their shoes and replace them with nasty, ill-fitting rubber replacements, and more modern places don’t have any shoe rules at all, thank God.
Hospitals? Lose the shoes. The typical ante-room in a large institution will harbor hundreds of pairs of shoes. There even seems to be a shoe-master who carefully vets every “guest” to make sure they’ve properly doffed their pair and have successfully mated with a replacement.
Needless to say, this shoe-centric society’s rules and regulations makes for some honest tooth-gnashing. How can the bathroom slippers be somehow cleaner than the living room slippers? Are we somehow implying that most people urinate on the floor? And the well-trodden halls of primary schools and hospitals are hardly modicums of hygiene. What’s next, remove your shoes before boarding the train?
One thing’s for sure: the slipper industry is undoubtedly concocting new rules as I type.
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