If you laid all the noodles eaten by the Japanese in a single month end to end they’d reach from Yokohama to Chicago and back 45 times. Fourteen people a year are killed bowing to each other on Tokyo metro platforms (they knock each other on to the lines). That’s more people than die of leprosy in all of Asia every decade. If you scraped all the snow off the top of Mount Fuji in the winter you’d have enough water to supply Africa for 50 years. There’s enough concrete lining greater Tokyo’s once picturesque rivers to pave an area the size of Wales.