"As the train came out of the tunnel, I noticed flowers along the tracks. The graceful Tohoku Mountains that I knew so well were stretched out before me. I took a sip of beer, turned to look at you and realized this moment would be something to remember."

If you ever find yourself holding a baby-blue beer can delicately etched with those words, you’re: a) going crazy or b) in Japan.

Beer is not macho in Japan. In the land of sake and sushimi, it’s hard to figure out what macho is. In fact, it’s hard to figure many things in Japan.

Take Tokyo, for instance: a modern city of 12 million people, none of whom have addresses that actually indicate where they live.

You’ll get lost -- even the cab drivers do -- but you couldn't get mugged if you taped your money to your forehead and laid down for a nap in a dark alley. Bicycles lean against streetlamps, unlocked and perfectly safe. When it rains, shop owners loan umbrellas to unprepared passersby. And the one sound you won't hear in the jangling tumult of Tokyo’s streets is a police siren.

In nearby Osaka, a village of six million, the main Shinjuku subway station sees equivalent to the entire population of Idaho pass through its turnstiles daily. During rush hour, conductors must shove commuters further into tightly packed cars so that the automatic doors can close. You'd expect conflict and chaos, but Shinjuku station is clean and somehow quiet-seeming, even when there's not enough room on the subway car to scratch your head in amazement.

Yes, there's a lot not to understand about Japan.

Even the beer. Especially the beer.

A deceivingly varied display greets beer shoppers at local liquor and department stores: seasonal beers, lagers, “draft” beers, and “dry” beers. But to American taste buds accustomed to the dramatic variations between say, a porter and an India pale, they all taste like each other -- and Budweiser. The characteristic Japanese beer, no matter what the label promises, has light color and body, a head that melts away so fast you might think you imagined it, and a crisp, unassuming taste.

But the American beer drinker willing to pay Guinness prices for a Budweiser taste can find enjoyable surprises in Japan.

One entertaining beer activity is label reading. Much of the text will be kanji, Chinese-derived ideographic characters. The average literate Japanese knows more than four thousand kanji symbols, each representing a word or idea. You probably don't know any but no matter: There's usually some English on Japanese beer cans, because English is "cool” and therefor good advertising.

For instance, Asahi Z’s label features an English caption that sounds like it was borrowed from a box of children's breakfast cereal. It touts the contents as "The new beer to make mealtimes fun."

One Sapporo regional offering says, "Blessed with the same crisp climate that characterizes so many other great beer brewing regions, Hokkaido has all the natural goodness you deserve. That good Hokkaido taste."

The inscription seems to imply that the island of Hokkaido produces beer ingredients like malt and hops. It doesn’t. Japan’s wet climate is not suited to these crops. Brewers import all but a token, government-mandated percentage of their hops from Germany, Czechoslovakia and America. The bulk of their malting barley comes from Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Another entertaining beer activity is purchasing a cold frosty one from a vending machine. Stationed at street corners and train stations, these machines dispense cans ranging in size from 135 milliliters (about 4 oz) to 2 liters (half a gallon). Your first vending machine beer tastes surprising simply because habit tells you it should be a soft drink.

One interesting beer activity you won't have is watching passersby guzzle those huge vending machine brews. One day as I waited for a train, sipping a Peccary Sweat (picture Gatorade with an attitude) and munching a deep fried thing with small rubbery things inside, a helpful, apologetic man explained: in Japan, it's rude to eat or drink in public.

Also interesting are strange beer combinations like half and halves and beer cocktails. A half and half is a Japanese black and tan in a can. All the national brewers make one. Don't expect a flavor surprise, though. The half and halves I tried uniformly exhibited a faint roasted flavor, deceptively dark color but very light body, topped with that by now familiar disappearing head. They tasted like what they were: thinned versions of already mild-mannered Japanese black beers.

Beer cocktails, however, are surprising. Popular combinations include beer with lemon and beer with ginger. The beer taste is masked by the sharp fruitiness of the other ingredients, so the flavor is that of a strange but pleasant soft drink.

These efforts to tone down or mask the taste of beer make it tempting to guess that Japanese don’t much like beer. Not true. Although the history of beer in Japan is only a century old, the beverage is everywhere in this island country. Beer is second in favor only to the ubiquitous sake. But like other concepts the Japanese have imported, beer has been Japanized.

This guarantees that, while buying a can of beer from a vending machine is fun, visiting a Japanese drinking establishment is a wonderful and exotic experience.

The two classic Japanese beer drinking establishments are summer beer halls, and izakaya or drinking houses.

Beer halls are summer enterprises that bloom upon department store roofs like hoppy flowers. The concept of the beer hall dates back, according to one Asahi Brewing Company representative, to the days when preserving the then mostly unpasteurized "draft" beers into winter was problematic. Beer was therefor a summer drink. Space in this small island nation being a high-priced commodity, beer halls had to appear and disappear with the seasons.

Izakaya are Japanese pubs, working stiffs’ beer joints. Izakaya serve a full menu of Japanese style food to complement their beer and sake.

Beer variety is not the spice of life at an izakaya -- the one I went to served only Asahi Draft. The food, however, was fascinating. The bar curved around the grill man’s area, making his raised platform the focus of attention, like the deejay at a disco. In front of him were displayed an arc of raw seafood tidbits, for customers who wanted to ascertain their freshness.

As I sipped my draft, I watched him perform: with a long hook he’d harpoon a bit of raw fish and, in one smooth motion, drape it across his grill where it would instantly begin to pop and sizzle with the other bits a customer had ordered. Moments later he had arranged the lightly cooked tidbits on a small plate and, laying the plate on a wooden paddle, shuttled it to the customer by means of the paddle's ten foot long pole.

Among the more intimidating options on the menu were atsuage (fried tofu), ikakushiyaki (squid shish-kabob) and tarako (cod ovaries).

In Japan, food and beer go together. In fact, if you go to a bar that doesn’t serve meals, you’ll be served a chaamu (literally, charm), a tidbit to go with your beer. You can’t refuse it and you must pay for it, so you might as well enjoy it. A chaamu I saw regularly consisted of oysters and mushrooms sautéed in soy sauce.

Perhaps the unfailingly mild-mannered nature of Japanese beer is not hard to understand at all. If a Japanese person is loud or flamboyant, he disturbs the all-important harmony of the group; if beer is, it overwhelms the delicate flavors of food.

Of course, I’m not Japanese. Once or twice during my visit, while eating shushimi or udon (noodles), I wished for a hoppy brown ale or a spicy Belgian white, delicate flavors be damned. Such things are available -- at a price. In cosmopolitan Tokyo everything is available, from Toblerone to Chef Boy-ar-dee to Guinness. But the only way to get ripped off in Japan is to buy imported luxuries, and a few brushes with Japanized versions of calzone, doughnuts and hot dogs taught me that if you want to have fun in Japan, you eat -- and drink -- Japanese.

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