Useless Japanese Services

What Japanese services may be of no service to Westerners? The following 60 services may of of little use to Western customers.

1. Sales staff talking one octave higher than they would otherwise.
   I don't want people to demean themselves to the extent of talking in a falsetto voice.
   
2. Petrol Station (Gas stand) attendants,
   
3. Fortunately these are now seen less and less, due to changes in the law which now allow drivers to fill their own tanks. Having someone do it for you, while you wait in the car watching them do it, adds necessarily to the cost of petrol.
   
4. Sales staff putting out their hand to allow you to deposit refuse into it (pass me a bin please)
   
5. The cries of "someone has ordered XYZ" (XYZ Icchou), or "someone wants an extra serving ("OKaidama") in Japanese restaurants and otherwise announcing what you have ordered to the rest of the restaurant),
   
6. Snack hostesses and other providers of conversation that one must pay for.
   
7. Photo-me machine booths (Purikura) everywhere with the ability to add annotations and to make ones eyes bigger (more Caucasian?).
   
8. Surgery to add a crease to upper eyelids or make ones nose longer.
   
9. Traditional Japanese hotel (Ryokan) waitresses (nakaisan) that tell me how, and in what order, and which sauce to eat my food
   
10. Supermarket workers that escort you to produce you ask for rather than tell you what isle it is in,
    
11. All the till receipts even when your hands are full of shopping and change (which is generally used as a paper weight)
    
12. Wrapping and more wrapping (some convenience store workers seem to find it difficult to put a niku-man on my hand, perhaps they fear I will be burned),
    
13. The attempts at English even when I am speaking in Japanese,
    
14. Offers of disposable chopsticks (which are supposed to be easier to use than regular ones)
    
15. The instance upon providing (and requiring me to bring) a card particular to each hospital or clinic
    
16. New years cards from various service industries
    
17. Taxi doors (I have to remember not to annoy drivers by shutting my door and hitting them with their handle)
    
18. Tiny indoor slippers that I can't get my feet into
    
19. A little bit of food that I have to eat and pay for to drink a beer
    
20. Phones that don't accept or allow me to change SIM Cards
    
21. Banks and post offices that insist upon providing receipts (if you try to do a runner, they run after you)
    
22. All the advertisements inside my newspaper
    
23. The wrapping for the newspaper on rainy days though our postbox is a box and under our porch
    
24. Book covers
    
25. Book "belts"
    
26. Being thanked by vending machines,
    
27. Ice in bar urinals,
    
28. Purposefully adding extra froth on my beer,
    
29. Bits of plastic fairing around the windows of cars,
    
30. Mammoth exhaust pipes on cars, the whole car "meiku" (in the sense of make up, or cosmetics) after-parts industry,
    
31. Umbrella condoms when an umbrella rack would do fine since umbrellas are so cheap they are almost free and the Japanese do not steal things anyway
    
32. Surprise packs of things I do not need sold on New Years day by department stores,
    
33. Department stores or shops that are able to sell things at inflated prices due to the fact that they are prestigious shoppers and can provide wrapping that indicates their prestigiousness.
    
34. Being greeted with a bow if I am one of the first customers arriving in the morning.
    
35. The ceaseless announcements of things that are utterly obvious ("do not bring dangerous things onto the train"),
    
36. Car park attendants that wave me in directions that I already knew I wanted to go in,
    
37. Public service sirens to call me home to lunch and dinner,
    
38. Cardboard toilet paper tubes with printing thanking me for having finished the toilet paper,
    
39. Toilet seats that blow dry my posterior,
    
40. Free muck brown tea in canteens that tastes like it was produced by a goat,
    
41. Politicians with no policy just a loud tannoys.
    
42. Individually wrapped fruit,
    
43. Square water melon,
    
44. The opportunity to taste sausages in supermarkets (unless this is an opportunity for free food, which it is not. It is an attempt to make customers to feel obligation or giri to return the favour).
    
45. Horrible looping background music in shops such Yamada Denki and Mr Max
    
46. Sales staff that ask me to sit down. I would often rather stand and when I want to sit down, since I am not a dog, I do not need to be asked.
    
47. Noise producing devices to hide the sound of my excrement falling into toilet bowls. Admittedly these are only provided only to women.
    
48. Supermarket cash register staff that repack shopping into baskets as opposed to into bags to take home as in the UK. They carefully position the heaviest items at the bottom of the basket making putting the same items at the bottom of ones bag difficult.
    
49. Being asked to confirm the brand of cigarettes that I order from behind the counter in convenience stores two or three times.
    
50. The little piece of plastic grass in bento lunch boxes.
    
51. Theme parks replicating areas of foreign countries such as Huis Ten Bosch, Parke Espana, and Shakespeare Country Park.
    
52. Restaurants and hotels which could easily provide a view but do not, such as Sea Mart in Hagi which is almost beside the sea but provides a view of the back of some warehouses on the sea front.
    
    
53. Tourist attractions which are places where something once happened, but are now only an empty field with a commemorative stone to mark the spot.
    
54. Being able to see the car and person I am controlling in Japanese video games such as MarioKart.
    
55. Female staff who clean the gents while I am using them.
    
56. Sales staff, such as at DVD rental stores that pass things to me in their scripted order, rather than putting them on the counter requiring me to keep standing their proffering a bag of DVDs or to accept all the things the are passing before I have put the other things away.
    
57. Telephone service staff that use all sorts of polite padding and take ages to get to the point.
    
58. Telephone service staff that insist upon putting me through to the appropriate staff member when my question is so simple as to be answerable by anyone and therefore forcing me to ask my question again.
    
59. In spite of, or as exemplified by performing various demeaning services that I do not ask for, the general patronising superciliousness of service staff who stick to their scripts and praxes rather than submitting to being my willing servant.
    
60. The general tendency of service staff to attempt to provide what is required as indicated by non verbal communication rather than listening to my commands, which I find myself repeating, like the brand of my cigarettes, two or three times.