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Several years, as in many, many, years ago, my husband and I were planning a trip to Japan. Now, we’re the sort of people who like to rent a car and drive around a new country to get the full experience. We camp if we can too, lugging along our tent and gear if the opportunity presents itself. You get to see parts of a country most tourists don’t, and you have wonderful opportunities to interact with locals.
Anyone we spoke to who knew anything about visiting Japan looked at us aghast when we mentioned our plan. Driving? Did you say Japan? Seriously? accompanied by wide-eyed disbelief, was the usual response. Followed by the vehement retort: Take the trains! DON’T rent a car and drive around on your own. That’s just crazy.
The reasons were counted off on their fingers. 1) You’ll never get anywhere faster than 10 mph on local byways. Sure, the tollways are super-fast, but they’re super expensive too, as in prohibitively. 2) Japan’s address system is the opposite of intuitive. Locales and house numbers are totally random, as if designed to confound and befuddle. It’s impossible to locate an address without asking for directions. 3) And you can’t do that unless you know Japanese. No one speaks English.
[Why not just use GPS? you might ask. And I would gently remind you that this was way back in that long-forgotten Time Before GPS Was a Thing.]
So, we rented a car.
Hah, we thought. Those concerns sounded super overblown. How bad can it be, we mused. When I was a child, my family had driven the length and breadth of India.
I was supremely familiar with seemingly non-rational house numbering systems. My father would mark out our routes on beautiful maps printed by the then Burmah Shell Petroleum Company. With his can-do attitude, and enthusiasm for conversing with locals in whatever language/dialect he could muster, even sign-language if necessary, we did remarkably well. Modern Japan couldn’t possibly be nearly as difficult.
I did take the precaution of learning basic tourist Japanese and how to read the two scripts. I also memorized some of the Chinese characters necessary for road signs, etc. This was going to be an adventure!
It was. All the warnings had been spot on. The toll roads cost over a hundred dollars for a very modest stretch. Three weeks on such roads was outside our budget.
We were stuck with the local byways. For our first day out of Tokyo, it took us four hours to complete what should have been a one-hour drive into the mountains.
And yes, pretty much no one, even in Tokyo, spoke English, at that time. Thank goodness, I’d learned that smattering of Japanese and could read signs even if I didn’t know what they meant for the most part.
Our first challenge came with our very first stop. We’d used the English-speaking concierge at our hotel in Tokyo to help us book a couple of nights. We were going to wing it the rest of the time, choosing destinations and hotels on the fly. After all, that’s the joy of driving—the freedom from schedules and restrictions.
So, here we were, driving in circles, trying to locate our first hotel. How bad can it be? Super rotten… Suddenly, just when we needed them, there was pretty much nobody on the road to ask for directions.
Turned out, we were in a tourist town for locals and locals only touristed on weekends. This was NOT a weekend.
Finally, we stopped in front of a what looked like a clinic. Brave on the outside, quaking on the inside, I stepped into the foyer, took off my shoes, and placed them in the pigeon-hole shelving meant for them. There was a woman sitting in the waiting room with two little girls, and a nurse behind a counter. In my broken bits of Japanese, I asked the nurse if she knew of our hotel and could give me directions.
There was an exclamation from the lady in the waiting room. She jumped up, her little daughters’ hands clamped in her own. Telling the nurse to apologize to the doctor that she’d be a little late, she motioned to me where I stood, my jaw brushing my collar. I watched in amazement as she put the shoes on first one daughter, then the other. Her own came last.
Come on, she said, don’t you want to know how to get there? At least, that’s kind of what I assumed she said.
I tripped over my own feet to get my shoes back on. By the time I stumbled out of the place, she’d strapped her kids into the backseat of her tiny car and was waving at us to follow.
Now, I’m the sort of person who flushes with a glow of goodwill and joy when a stranger so much as flashes me a random but genuine smile on the sidewalk. And this… this was beyond… well, words. Even if I’d had enough Japanese ones to express myself.
But it turned out, in Japan, she was not the anomaly. We were.
It surprised us less and less as we brazenly stopped any time we needed to ask for directions. The Japanese seem intimately aware of the difficulty to locate an address and not at all content to give verbal directions or draw a map. When we asked, it tended to become their responsibility to ensure our safe arrival at our destination. There was the lady who left a birthday barbecue party to climb into her car and show us to our hotel. The proprietor of a Seven Eleven store who locked up shop, hopped on his motorcycle, and drove us across town…
I recall the lyrics to a Doors song I listened to ad nauseum when, as a teenager, I left India for the first time ever. “People are strange when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly… women seem wicked…” I somehow doubt that Jim Morrison ever rented a car and drove the length and breadth of Japan. Or, so many of the other places where we have experienced the incredible kindness of strangers. There’s nothing quite like it.
If you find yourself faced with a stranger, I highly recommend you perform some random act of kindness too, no matter how small. Take it from someone who’s been on the receiving end countless times, it will mean the world to them.
That was lovely to read. Felt like I was there with you. 🙏🏼
ps: and the few that I have read, are all fun reading. I just don’t get to read them regularly. I told myself just now, I will. Love the photos and childhood anecdotes all woven into the narrative.
So love this. Have you ever considered travel writing? Besides magazines and newspapers, there are literary journals that specialize in this type of story.