No trick photography here. The beer was really that small, and that was about a $9 beer. As I mention somewhere else, you really needed to stay away from anything imported if you wanted to keep the costs down.
Here is a picture of me waiting for an elevator at a hotel:
Japanese people are smaller than Americans in general. I’m about 5’6” without any shoes on, so figure that with shoes I’m about 5’7”. The fact that I’m flat-footed and able to touch the ceiling in there should give you an idea of how small some of the places are. Not all of them, but some of them.
The younger generations of Japanese are taller than their previous generations. I was a bit taller than the average young Japanese person, but there were definitely some that were taller than me. The older generation was so short that sometimes we thought they were kids until we could see their face. I’m not kidding. Some of the women didn’t even come up to my shoulders. We speculated that this had more to do with the introduction of more meat and protein in their diet over the last 30 years or so.
My g/f’s father is 6’5” and fairly broad shouldered. He stuck out a like a…well, like a Gaijin in a sea of Japanese. If we got separated in a market or subway, it wasn’t hard to pick him out and find him again.
They just aren’t a very large people – we didn’t see many fat bastards. A few, but not many. And there are a bunch of Japanese in a very small space (like Tokyo) so you just have to get used to being a little packed in (restaurants, trains, etc.). Surprisingly enough, while we say plenty of scooters there weren’t a lot of tiny little cars like you see in Europe. Not that the cars were huge, they just weren’t dinky little cars like I thought I’d see.
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