I recently visited Japan for the first time. When I got back, and people asked me what I had found most interesting or surprising, I found myself talking about small things rather than big ones: public toilets rather than temples; side streets rather than castles; vending machines rather than bullet trains. The temples and the cherry blossom were wonderful, of course. But I already had some sense of what widely-photographed world heritage sites would look like. What I hadn’t anticipated was th...