I'm currently on another planet, namely Japan, which for the average westerner is an experience tantamount to recovering from a serious head injury, in that while the world around you is largely recognisable, it somehow makes little sense. Incredibly minor example: they sell green Kit Kats here (not the wrapper – I'm not that easily impressed – I mean the chocolate itself is green).

Furthermore, just like someone struggling to reacquaint themselves with everyday life, you have to continually re-learn how to perform previously straightforward tasks such as going to the toilet. In Japan you either crap into a bluntly utilitarian hole in the ground (reverse squat-toilet style) or, increasingly, into one of their famous hi-tech Toto superbogs with a heated seat and a remote-controlled bum-washing jet.

The first toilet I encountered in Japan was so advanced it automatically lifted the seat itself the moment it sensed my approach, like it just couldn't wait for me to crap down its throat. It's disconcerting, defecating into a robot's mouth. In five years' time that toilet won't merely cock its lid when you enter the room, it'll be programmed to hum lullabies as it swallows your droppings. If the machines ever rise up and kill us, we'll only have our own smug sense of mastery to blame.

But I'm not in Japan to sit on toilets. I'm here to write some travel pieces for this newspaper, which will appear later in the year. As a result I've been zipping all over the place. But every now and then when, the sheer sensory overload gets too much, I retire to the hotel room to stare at the television.

Westerners have been confounded by Japanese TV for decades, ever since Clive James amused millions in the 80s with clips from a gameshow called Endurance, in which contestants had to undergo a series of increasingly painful and humiliating ordeals. For British viewers, much of the fun came from sheer outraged disbelief that watching people being physically tormented and degraded was considered entertainment.

But of course that was 100 years ago, before I'm a Celebrity transformed low-level torture into mainstream British fare. Nonetheless, you don't have to watch Japanese TV for long until you see something shocking. The other evening I watched a programme in which a man was shown spooning boiling molten metal into his mouth. This was followed by footage of a man being mauled by a tiger and a rib-tickling sequence in which a studio guest was deliberately poisoned by some kind of sea creature.

Generally though, the TV here is surprisingly dull. The vast majority of programmes consist of several seriously overexcited people sitting in an overlit studio decorated like a novelty grotto made from regurgitated Dolly Mixture, endlessly babbling about food.

Seriously, it's all food, food, food. People eating food, answering questions about food, sometimes even just pointing at food and laughing. It's as they've only just discovered food and are perpetually astonished by its very existence. Imagine watching an endless episode of The One Show with the colour and brightness turned up to 11, where all the guests have been given amphetamines, the screen is peppered with random subtitles, and every 10 seconds it cuts to a close-up shot of a bowl of noodles for no apparent reason. That's 90% of Japanese TV right there.

For a nation so preposterously hi-tech, it's a curiously old-fashioned approach to television. People talking in studios. Forever. Like it's the 50s. And yet it's insanely agitated: as though the participants are simply too wired to make a proper TV show, and have subsequently just switched the cameras on and started yelping.

The adverts continue this vaguely old-school theme. There are plenty of super-sophisticated ones starring giant CGI cats and the like, but there's also a rather charming emphasis on dancing: people unpretentiously dancing and singing about the product on offer (generally a foodstuff, which presumably explains their terrifying level of excitement). It makes the Go Compare tenor seem subtle. Sedate, even.

But while onscreen Japan offers up old-fashioned fodder with an unhinged, frantic glee bordering on malevolence, the moment you step outside, the population itself seems incredibly calm, as though faintly mesmerised by the screaming technology surrounding them. The cliche about the Japanese being unbelievably polite also holds true. At times they're so helpful it's almost a pain in the arse. Ask a passing stranger if they know where the nearest branch of Mos Burger is and if they don't immediately know the answer, they'll often start researching the subject on your behalf, whipping out their smartphones to locate it using Google maps or calling up their friends for advice. And if after several minutes of peering at maps, placing phone calls, and umming and ahhing and apologising, they still can't provide a detailed set of directions, they appear to take it as a personal blow. In London, you'd get a smile and a shrug. Here they almost run away in disgrace. You actually feel guilty having inflicted that level of shame on them.

Like I say: another planet.