I have a new job and a not-so-new car. The car is old, perhaps as old as Japan itself, and is approximately the size of an ice cube, but it is a car nonetheless and for this I am grateful. You don’t need a car to get around in Hamamatsu and the neighboring cities, but unless you have the money for a cab or love urban hiking, the places you can access are limited.
This week I am “training”, in which I accompany the current teacher to various classes, meet the students, and introduce myself. It is also my crash course in navigating the greater Hamamatsu area and driving on the other side of the road. Tuesday was my initiation day, during which my head almost exploded from repeating the mantra “left-side left-side left-side left-side” and trying to decipher stacked traffic lights, effectively interrupting my mantra with, “which one is the signal for this lane?!” every minute or so.
Other than the old lady I almost hit and getting brilliantly lost, I would classify my first day as successful.
The address system in Japan is quite different than in the States, where every street has a name, and each house or business has a number that, more often than not, follows a sequential order in any given direction. Japan has a more round-about way of categorizing locations and buildings but it’s a secret that only the postal workers are privy to. It’s more of a in-this-general-area hand-waving kind of scheme consisting of randomly grouped “neighborhoods” and insequential numbering, not to mention that few of the streets actually have names. In the States you can get into a taxi, give them an address, and off you go. In Japan you get into a taxi and initiate the direction giving process that will continue until you arrive at your destination. If you don’t know how to get there, the cabby certainly won’t. The driving notes I took look something like, “turn right at the blue bridge, turn left at the second McDonalds, turn right at the blinking yellow sign…”. Given how ubiquitous all these items are in Japan, I’m doomed to failure.
What surprises me the most is that, armed with only a ten dollar International Driving Permit issued by the AAA, I am allowed to roam freely on the roads of Japan for one year. Once the year is up I must apply for a Japanese license at which time I will have to take both a written and driving test, which kind of strikes me as backwards but I’m not complaining.
Another surprise was the trucker who parked in the middle of the lane to take a nap. True story. Let’s see what hilarity the coming weeks of driving bring…
hehe… that sounds terrifyingly fun!
Last night I had a dream that I was following links on a friends blog and every one resolved to protocol7.net regardless of the address. I was bemused, then amused. :)
Been there, done it. When you multiply a third-world road network by death-wish pedestrians, brain-dead cyclists and scooter riders, and short-armed, short attention span, impatient drivers with the reactions of a dead rat you realise that ultra low speed limits were the only way to keep the death and injury rate to something approaching acceptable levels. If Japan had the speed limits of Europe I’d be investing in a funeral parlour chain. Even in the countryside they all drive in the middle of the road…must be liberals. Sometimes I wonder if countries with a limited collective exposure to passenger car ownership are the most accident prone. Most of the traffic fatalities happen in the third world. Not that Japan is third world …