If you are planning to buy an elevator, make sure it is made in Japan.

• Japanese elevators are fast. Especially in buildings with more than thirty floors they are approaching speeds of theme park rides. Toshiba has just installed the fastest of them all (in Taipei). It ascends at 60 km/h, and has systems to adjust atmospheric pressure and vibrations.
• Japanese elevators can talk. At least some of them.
• Japanese elevators are clever. When they are overloaded, they sound alarms and refuse to move. When they go up and you want to go down, they do not stop at your floor. When they are close to their capacity, and no one wants to get off at your floor, they do not stop at your floor. When they do stop at your floor, they announce if they are currently on the way up or down and prevent you from pushing buttons for floors in opposite direction.
• You can cancel your floor selection by pressing the already lighted floor button repeatedly in rapid succession.
• There are also elevators for cars. Since parking space is limited in Tokyo, elevators are often used to pack cars on top of each other. Five cars piled up are not unusual.
• Sometimes the elevator itself is old and unimpressive, but comes with an operator. A uniformed girl that greets passengers with a bow, pushes the buttons, announces the floors and what they hold in store. Not a very attractive job, especially since elevators are often crowded and the operators face the wall all the time, but quite common in department stores.
• You are not supposed to use elevators during an earthquake, but a Japanese elevator probably knows how to handle them (this is pure conjecture on my part, do not take my word here).

Interestingly enough, the particular elevator that made me write this article is an American model (but installed as a world-first in Tokyo): A self-adjusting double-deck elevator, whose two cars can move away from each other to accommodate unevenly sized floors. When this happens, the elevator would stop for a moment and announce that the lower car is moving, which is just a very cool thing for an elevator to say.