The cleanliness is impressive, but what impressed me even more was the efficiency.

One morning in Tokyo, I saw construction workers starting to dig up a street. It was a large operation, they were exposing some massive pipes, and there were a few policemen, politely pointing pedestrians to a way around the site.

In the evening I went the same way again, to see how far they had gotten with the digging. However, there was no hole anymore. They were already done, and the street looked like new, with hardly a trace of what had happened.

I felt kinda bad about my place (Germany), where this would have taken at least a week.