When I walked into the hospital, I thought I had by mistake walked into a skating rink. The first thing I saw was the skate check. Women stood behind a long counter taking people's shoes and exchanging them for plastic slippers with large numbers painted on them. Rental slippers? Not exactly. The people coming out of the hospital were giving their slippers back and exchanging them for their shoes. This was a huge hospital, and the biggest shoe exchange in the world was going on right here. Or the biggest foot fetish in the world. Someone call the Guinness Book of Records!
I reluctantly handed over my shoes. This is the thing about Japan -- you go to the trouble to buy nice shoes, and you never really get to wear them. Your nice shoes spend most of their lives in the "genkan," in a shoe cupboard or behind a counter while your feet are forced to don cheap plastic slippers. The woman handed me a pair of green plastic slippers with the number 543 painted in large yellow numbers on the top. They better not lose my shoes, I thought, or I'll have to wear these damn slippers home on the train.
It makes you wonder, why would such a large hospital go through all this trouble of the Great Shoe Exchange? Perhaps it's a new safety precaution against shoe bombers. Airlines take heed -- we may soon be flying barefoot. Japanese people say using slippers is more hygienic than walking around the hospital in your dirty shoes. But wearing communal plastic slippers doesn't seem very hygienic to me. Think of all the kinds of foot terrorism people could engage in by spreading such maladies as athlete's foot, warts and sock lint. People who walk to the hospital may have blisters, which contain blister water, which may burst inside the slipper. Yuck. Face it, the feet are a place of smelly toes and ingrown toenails. They are a breeding ground for creeping crud and the itchies.