The Lobster Dance

Exactly a week ago, I paid for my car insurance, and the open road was mine. “Driving? IN JAPAN?!” you ask. A-yup. Welcome to Country-Living Lesson 3678: A Car is Necessary.

I had never intended to have a car in Japan, though. I was actually really excited when I got a job in Japan, because I thought it meant that I wouldn’t have to invest in or borrow a car to get to work. Now, in Osaka, of course you can get by without a car. My friends and I traveled around Kyoto and Osaka with relative ease by train and subway, and I only went in a car about four times total in one semester.

Those four times, though, gave me a horrible impression of driving in Japan. It’s not that the Japanese are bad drivers, but I constantly got the impression that all of them were picking up some radio signal telling them “You can totally back up now! That guy will stop!” or “Well, of course you can turn right here even though you can’t see at all!” and I, having my internal radio set to Channel Foreign, couldn’t hear it.

However, I got placed out in the country, and because of my job, I actually have to drive sometimes. I can walk or bike to two locations, but the third location is far away, so I borrow the company car to get there. Furthermore, unless I want to go to the capital and stay overnight, the buses and trains are few and far between or expensive. We don’t really have a lot of public transit here because the town is so small and so far from other towns.

Of course, I prefer public transit in Japan–and in general. Good the for environment, cheaper than fuel, and so on. However, living all the way up where I do, a car is your ticket to freedom. The freedom to buy futon at the store; the freedom to actually get to the store that will sell you a futon; and, most importantly, the freedom to leave the town.

And leave the town I did. After a driving lesson with my supervisor and one with my Australian friend, I ventured out to a neighboring town on my day off. The route is pretty simple: follow the signs toward W-shi. Get on road that takes you to W-shi. Observe morning market, lacquerware museum, source of hot springs. Return.

I had another day off, so I decided I would have an adventure and go to some famous cliffs and craggy rocks for sight-seeing. This trip would take me off the “major road” that hits a bunch of the towns in the area and onto some smaller ones toward the western side of the peninsula. It was here that I got to experience the horrors of the roads in my prefecture.

During the war, American forces fire-bombed a lot of places in Japan, and since, traditionally, Japanese houses and buildings were made of primarily paper and wood (and many still are), the destruction the fires caused was catastrophic. However, when these areas were rebuilt, the buildings were more modernized–as were the roads. My prefecture, on the other hand, while on the main island, is rather remote from, well, everything. As a result, it was never bombed during the war, preserving both our cultural artifacts and also our tiny, narrow, completely ridiculous roads.

View of a typical road from The Tank.

To get to the cliffs, I had to drive along the coast, through several towns, and through countless rice paddies. Not all of the roads along the paddies have guard rails, so for a while, my mantra became “I will not fall into the rice paddy. I will not hit the old lady burning the rice. I will not fall into that rice paddy.”

Honestly, that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was when I got lost and ended up driving into a village. Blind curves! Arthritic old ladies with push-carts walking in the middle of the street! Mini-vans and trucks parked on roads so narrow I wasn’t actually sure if my car would have fit down them anyway! My town is exactly the same way (with the additional obstacle of rivers that run through the town). I refuse to drive to run errands like going to the bank or picking up my dry cleaning because the roads are so tiny that my car, a two-door Toyota that is quite small by American standards, feels like a tank.

The roads here may be horrifyingly narrow, and the other drivers may have no problem passing you in a no-pass zone while going 70 mph around a blind curve at night, but once you look away from all that, you see the countryside. This part of the prefecture is absolutely gorgeous. I was reminded of the landscapes of northern Michigan, Sorrento, and (the fictional landscape of) Mononoke-hime all in the same one-hour drive. I was moved. I felt free. I felt like this was my Great American Road-Trip–in Japan.