We are back from Japan, where I did not use my six months of Duolingo—“My younger brother is fashionable!”— and the pop tops on beer cans are flat on the top, so they didn’t break my nails.

In Japan, every time we looked or even felt confused, someone popped up immediately and helped, whether it was at the subway station or the pachinko parlor.

But those are just a couple of the little differences that made Japan such a wonder to me. Wondrous and magical and sort of like a fairy tale. 

Ninety-nine percent of our trip to Japan was handled by my son. I still managed to muck up the remaining one percent when he couldn’t help me: the ladies’ rooms. 

My encounter with a squat toilet went surprisingly well, even after a couple of drinks in the little bar-lets in the Golden Gai section of Tokyo, where tourists experience the ancient bar traditions of tiny crowded dives with attendant rude hosts. Unfortunately, I was much less adept at the extremely up-to-date public bathrooms. Japan has few public garbage cans but multitudes of available bathrooms. 

 In the stalls, which had doors all the way to the floor, I was alone. Most of the icons of the bidet instructions were clear. But there was one instruction I would have loved to find and understand but wasn’t intuitive to me: how to flush. I did have a translation app on my phone, installed by my son. But after an unfortunate incident we shall not go into here, I don’t use my phone in the bathroom. I’m not sure it would have translated the symbols anyway. So a couple of times I, hontou ni gomennasai, failed to flush. It turns out the icon was telling me to hold a hand still in front of the IR sensor, not to wave the hand back and forth. At least it was the lesser disposal. 

I’m hoping anyone I offended will just shrug me off as a sole barbarian, not representative of all tourists. 

The last Japanese bathroom I used was in the Tokyo train station just before we got on the express train to the airport, and it was a marvel, with an active digital display of which stalls were full or available and painted footprints on the floor to follow. But the digital displays did not seem to have any real purpose. Just as in any bathroom, those in line waited for an open stall as we would have without any display. 

Then I got lost. Signs, courteously written in English, directed “Exit through the Powder Room,” which I found easily but couldn’t find any way out of. (The painted footsteps only led to the toilets.) A very kindly looking woman gestured to me, but I didn’t quite understand. I ended up exiting through the entrance and going the wrong way against the line of people waiting to go in, the painted footprints pointedly pointing disapprovingly in my direction. 

 Also: Shrines, temples, the castle where the Shogun era began and ended 350 years later, imperial palaces and gardens, a samurai museum, a theme park/real movie set where I was a ninja. I wished I’d known there were stairs in the back of the slippery, wet pretend roof before I crawled up it, but a ninja’s gotta do what a ninja’s gotta do. 

Tiny space museum displaying giant transformer robot-to-spaceship and a sword made from a meteorite, a sword museum next to another beautiful garden, cheek to jowl with the national sumo ring, cherry blossoms, wagyu beef with real gold sprinkles, stores filled with glass aquarium dioramas of manga and anime, Godzilla head, Godzilla shop (I got folders, a stamp set of assorted Godzillas, and Godzilla chopsticks). An ancient ryokan in the mountains with a traditional kaiseki meal—I ate a piece of fish!—and a private hot spring tub, as well as a beer vending machine, as always found in ryokans in the Meiji empire restoration period. The very beautiful lake in the very beautiful mountains where an armed, guarded, Shogun checkpoint was set up to prevent women from escaping Edo. A tea ceremony, bullet trains, Mount Fuji in a cloud, a kaleidoscope museum, Kyoto Tower and a Taiko drum performance. The shrine with infinite orange gates. And a pachinko parlor where my husband managed to set off three alarms in a couple of minutes.

Unbelievable scenery. 

All planned and organized and escorted to by the best guide ever, my son. It was unbelievably cool.