Saturday night was Halloween Party Blowout night in Japan, just as it surely was in the United States. Apropos of my post last week, Reuters News Service today runs a story about the Japanese obsession with American holidays like Halloween.

“Japanese people like festivals very much, you see. We even celebrate Christmas, but we don’t celebrate Christ, we just enjoy,” says Yoshiaki Ei, an affable entrepreneur wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeve T-shirt. Mainstream clubs advertise “Fetish Halloween” and “Erotica Halloween” parties. Fashion retailers decorate their windows with slogans such as “Play! Party! With cute trick!” Japan’s passion for Halloween extends a long tradition of festivals that liberate ordinary Japanese from the extreme control they face in everyday life, according to Patrick William Galbraith, a researcher at Sophia University’s Japanese Studies faculty.

There was no shortage of said liberating going on among the raucous crowd of Japanese and Westerners aboard the Fukui International Club’s Halloween Party Train Saturday night. We all climbed onto a local train the club had tricked out with a sound system and party decorations – even a disco ball – and spent two and a half hours riding the local railways to throbbing dance music, chugging sake and Asahi beer, and communicating in the international language of costume-wearing intoxicated people everywhere. Lessons learned during the evening: 1) it’s basically impossible to take a picture with no flash in a rocking train filled with jostling, dancing revelers, 2) in the future, stay far, far away from Japanese tequila.

So you think Christmas comes earlier every year in the U.S.? At least retailers there have the decency – if that’s the right word – to wait until the Halloween orgy is out of the way to start beating us over the head with Holiday shtick. Yesterday I walked into a home supplies store in Sabai and what do you think I got? A face full of Merry Christmas, that’s what, complete with Santa Claus, fake trees, and blinking yard reindeer. Yesterday, I should mention, was October 25.

Meanwhile, the word on everybody’s lips in Fukui is about Halloween this weekend. The place is awash in standard décor – fake cobwebs, rubber skeletons, jack-o-lantern cut-outs, black cats, and the rest – and there’s an outbreak of Halloween parties planned Saturday night, all with the obligatory cover charge and costume contest. The kids are all in danger of wetting themselves with excitement over next week’s trick-or-treating revenues.

I arrived in Japan in the middle of a week-long national holiday called Obon, during which everyone returns to their family homes to honor the souls of their ancestors. Obon involves a lot of Buddhist-style ceremonial stuff, and everyone has to spend a bunch of time hanging out in graveyards. And that’s actually a high point on the official Japanese holiday calendar, which includes such other red-letter dates as Respect for the Aged Day, Constitution Day, Culture Day, and Ōmisoka on December 31, when everyone in the country undertakes a vigorous house cleaning in preparation for the new year.

So you can hardly blame the Japanese for adopting a foreign holiday or two, especially if they’re retail-friendly and involve a lot of parties. National Foundation Day is great and all, but I imagine it’s severely underrepresented in the young-girls-dressed-up-as-sexy-nurses department.

Today’s Bad English T-shirt O’ the Week. Were truer words ever spoken? Frankly, your guess is as good as mine.

It’s an unwritten rule of life and the universe that when things go wrong or plans fall apart, very often the outcome is an improvement on what would have happened had everything gone exactly as expected. If we’d all just get comfortable with this fact, we’d probably save ourselves a lot of shouting.

This is not breaking news, of course. But it bears repeating, because in the case of travel the chance of something going wrong increases in direct proportion to the amount of money one is spending on the trip – much like the way that, as the value of the carpet increases, so do the chances of the dropped toast landing peanut butter-side down. There’s possibly a unifying law of physics and philosophy in there somewhere, just waiting for a future Nobel Prize winner to untangle it – perhaps a corollary clause to Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will – and at the worst possible moment. But that’s not always such a terrible thing.” Except in the case of the toast.

A case in point: Friday’s trip to Takayama. Leg one, as with all my out of town trips, was a 15-minute local train ride from my neighborhood to Fukui Station downtown. Leg two: an express train from Fukui 70 minutes north along the coast to Toyama, where I had exactly six minutes to detrain (as far as you know, it’s a word) and find Platform 3, where leg three of my journey would begin on a new train bound inland and up for Takayama. (Incidentally, this whole trip costs about $45 U.S.) Though I’d left the crutches at home, I was still limping, a condition that does not lend itself to racing the clock through unfamiliar foreign train stations filled with stairways in the freezing rain (did I mention that part yet?) in search of a departure track that’s hidden at least as well as Harry Potter’s Platform 9 and Three-Quarters.

When I finally found Platform 3 – it exists not between Platforms 2 and 4, naturally, but is rather an extension of Platform 5 – my train, as the saying goes, had left without me. I’d have to make do with a slow, local train to Takayama, making many stops along the way, rather than enjoying the express trip I’d planned.

See paragraph 1.

I now have a new rule of travel, one which I’m sure countless travelers before me have discovered on their own: “When traveling through especially scenic countryside in which there’s a heartstoppingly beautiful vista around every corner, slow trains are better than fast trains.”

[Bonus cultural observation: Japanese railway workers bow whenever they enter or leave a train car. Nobody bows back.]

One of my favorite things about Japan is that despite the fact that almost nobody speaks English (I don’t care what you’ve heard – but more on that later), they’re obsessed with clothing that’s got English words and phrases on it. Most of the time, the words are just gibberish, a random string of nouns, verbs, adjectives and particles that give the illusion of syntax. They have no idea what it says, and they couldn’t care less. But sometimes … it’s not gibberish. I give you Exhibit A: a kid I spotted with his father in Starbucks this morning. Cute, huh?

It’s almost too easy to get photos like this. In fact, I may make this a regular feature: English T-shirt O’ the Week.

Speaking of Starbucks, it’s actually only the second time I’ve been to the one here; it’s a long way away from where I live. Like so much of Japan, it looks familiar on the surface, but that’s where the similarities end. Example: they had bagels in the pastry cabinet next to the register – the first I’ve seen in Japan. A bagel sounded great this morning, until I learned they couldn’t toast it and had no cream cheese. “There’s no need for cheese,” the clerk explained to my Japanese-speaking friend, as if I’d asked for a shrunken head. “Flavor is already in it.”

Okay. It’s been almost a week now, and my foot is not improving. In fact, it’s doing just the opposite of improving. This is unsettling, because bruises, in my experience, do not get worse over time, they get better – usually accompanied by colorful special effects and lots of changes in the shape and size of the afflicted body part, which makes them great for surprising girls in the lunchline with. (Or am I thinking of elementary school? No matter. Everything important that I know, I learned in kindergarten; the rest is just execution.) This injury is not discolored, though, and is hardly swollen at all. It seems to be putting all of its available resources into just one thing: hurting. If my foot were only a little less necessary to the rest of my adult life, I’d be thinking very hard about shotgunning a gallon of sake and getting busy with a tourniquet and that bread knife downstairs in the kitchen sink. As it is, I’ll probably drag myself to the doctor’s office tomorrow. And me without health insurance in Japan.  This should be interesting.

I’ve been limping around like a guy with a broken foot all day, which isn’t really ironic or anything, since I may in fact be a guy with a broken foot. We’ll see tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve been doing my best to dull the constant pain by soaking my foot in hot water – at 4 am this morning, for example. Since I don’t have a foot-sized bucket handy in the house, this means drawing a bath. I should mention here that in Japan, “bath” has an entirely different meaning from the one Americans – or even those few Europeans familiar with the expression – know. In Japan, a bath is a body of hot water in which you submerge yourself once you’re already clean. If you’re in a bath in Japan, the hard part is already behind you. You’ve already scrubbed and shaved and shampooed and all the rest, and your only reason for being where you are at that moment is to relax and shed your concerns and let your mind empty out – except that this can be challenging because of the excruciatingly hot water you’re sitting in, which tends to focus your thoughts very narrowly upon it and nothing but it. To the point where you hardly notice the fact that you’re surrounded by throngs of completely naked Japanese men doing the same thing.

I’m speaking here of the Japanese onsen, of course. Technically, an onsen is a natural hot spring spa, which Japan has roughly as many of as the South has boiled peanut stands. After all, the whole country’s basically just a long string of volcanoes that happen to be poking out of the water. But the Japanese love the idea of the onsen so much that they’ve built fake ones all over the place. In America, we’d call them “hot tubs,” but that’s not really what an onsen is. First of all, each tub is the size of a four-car garage, and it’s surrounded by individual scrub stations, with removable shower heads, soap, etc., where you sit on a little bucket and get yourself clean before stepping into the onsen. Secondly – did I mention already? – the room’s heaving with naked Japanese guys. Usually the ladies have a separate (but equal) onsen on the other side of the facility, though I’m told that in many of the smaller old resort towns in the mountainous regions, that’s a distinction that residents feel is more trouble than it’s worth.

An earlier soak in the downstairs tub tonight was helpful, but hardly a cure-all. To take my mind off the stubborn residuum of pain, therefore, I’ve downloaded Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. (I ponied up $7 for it, so go roll your eyes at someone else.) Looking forward to sublimating myself and all thoughts of my left foot to ten tracks of semi-surrealist bliss, I cue up the first track, “15 Steps”:

“You used to be alright
What happened?
Etcetera, etcetera
Facts for whatever
Fifteen steps
Then a sheer drop.”