I love the Japanese... I just don't like hospitals.

I have now had the chance to visit two different Japanese hospitals within less than a month's time... lucky me. This time, however, I was the patient. Don't worry I'm ok, it was nothing too serious. Normally, I would just go to a doctor's office, but in Japan they don't really have doctor's offices, or at least not many of them. Basically, if there's anything wrong with you at all then you just head straight to the hospital. I'm not really a huge fan of this auto-hospital system, but I didn't really have a choice in the matter. There's also a hospital about a five minute walk from where I live, so it would have been ridiculous to try and track down a doctor farther away and then have to make an appointment and pay for the train ride to get there. Still, there was the tricky issue of communication, and that was pretty tough, since I know absolutely no Japanese beyond greetings and "what's this/what's that?". So before I left for the hospital I stopped by work and did some "googling", which was extremely helpful. I found a website with all sorts of medical information and charts in English and the exact same charts and information in Japanese (you could choose the language that you wanted). The site had 2 pages of information on my specific problem, so I printed them out and circled my symptoms. When I arrived at the hospital I took out the papers and pointed at the key words. I knew exactly what was wrong with me from the start and I just needed to go to the doctor in order to get the appropriate antibiotics, so that also made things slightly easier. What really kept me from becoming completely overwhelmed, however, was how incredibly friendly and helpful the Japanese people are. I had noticed it to some extent before, but my belief that they are seriously some of the nicest people in the world was confirmed today. The staff went completely out of their way to make sure I got treated properly, in fact I think they may have fast tracked me so that I got through before some other people did. Rather than pointing to where I needed to go and just hoping I'd end up there, someone walked with me to each section of the hospital and they tried so hard to use the extremely broken English that they knew in order to talk to me. After I got through and paid, they gave me my prescription and one of the hospital attendants walked outside with me. I thought she was just going to point me in the direction of a pharmacy, but she actually walked me all the way there. It wasn't really that far, but it was down the street and around the corner and she was just wearing a flimsy sweater so I'm sure she was freezing. I was dumbstruck because no hospital staff, no matter how nice they are, would ever do that in America. Not because Americans are rude, just because it would never even occur to us to do such a thing in the first place. When I arrived at the pharmacy the attendant left and a minute later I was handed a form to fill out. The form was completely in Japanese. I sat for a moment and tried to figure out some of the basics, like my name. I managed to get that down in katakana (one of the 3 Japanese character sets) and circle the kanji for "female" which I recognized from other forms that I'd filled out with my manager's assistance, but then I got stuck from there. The woman sitting next to me noticed that I was staring intensely at the blank form in front of me and immediately offered to assist me. She helped me calculate my Japanese birth year (it goes by what emperor was reigning at the time of my birth) and wrote my address for me, because I had it with me but there was no way I could write out all the kanji. She tried to help me answer some of the questions, but her English wasn't good enough to translate, so then she went and found a pharmacist who actually spoke a little English. It was seriously mind blowing how helpful everyone was today and I am still so incredibly grateful.