Rambling Rhodes

Japanese Driving Lessons

For those of you who don't already know, I spent my senior year of high school living and getting edumacated in Tokyo, Japan, which at that time consisted of, if you were to count suburbs, 24 million people or so. If you consider that I grew up in a community consisting of a population of just over 1,000, you can kind of, sort of, appreciate the sheer culture shock I experienced early on.

Today's culture shock anecdote is brought to you courtesy of this post by new ex-pat, Joshua.

As many of you are probably aware, Japan is, in fact, a country other than the United States, with its own history and culture and everything, if you can imagine such a thing. Well, one of its cultural oddities is that, for whatever reason during the evolution of the automobile, the Japanese decided to adopt the European model of driving on the left side of the road rather than the absolutely correct model of driving on the right side, as practiced by the rest of the world, the rest of the world being the United States.

Upon arriving in Japan, via the method of a 20 hour airplane commute, my family and I were ushered into a van by one of the high school administrators, Haku-san. I noticed quite quickly that the steering wheel was on the right side of the vehicle, which struck me as particularly amazing.

Haku-san, it became immediately obvious, wasn't so much interested in getting us safely to our destination as he was in getting us there as quickly as possible. If he could have used a blow torch to carve a hole below the accelerator, so as to circumvent the maddening limitations of simply "flooring it," I'm fairly certain he would have tried. And, judging by the traffic outside buzzing past us as if we were standing still, many motorists apparently opted to do just that.

Interesting factual tidbit that I'm not sure still applies in Japan, but when I was there, new vehicles coming off the lot were equipped with a device that beeped annoyingly whenever the vehicle exceeded a certain speed. Many, if not most, Japanese car owners--in violation of the law, I believe--simply hacked their way into the automotive innards and deactivated the annoying beeper.

Others, like Haku-san in his high school-owned high-speed jet van, just opted to ignore the perpetual beeping as he exceeded the law-abiding speed by about a factor of 10 or more. The endless beeping caused much in the way of consternation within the ranks of the jet-lagged van inhabitants. Eventually, however, the jet lag started to outweigh my fear of death in a high speed car accident, and I started to drift asleep, where I dreamt of a fantastic world full of alien creatures who communicated with one another by beeping continually.

As is the case with jet lag sleep, and vehicle sleep in general, it wasn't a very deep slumber, but it was disorienting enough to kind of make me forget where I was at, where I was going, what my name was, that sort of thing.

Therefore, when I woke up on the left side of the vehicle, directly behind my father's seat, I was quite unaware of what was going on, so I naturally fell back on that with which I was most familiar: namely, that the steering wheel was supposed to be on the left side.

Which meant, in my mind, that my father was. . . ASLEEP BEHIND THE fuckING WHEEL!

"DAAAAAAAAD!" I screamed, kicking the back of his seat with enough force to make a mule proud, and prompting pretty much everyone in the van to briefly panic.

"What?! What?! What?!" responded Dad, who I swear fumbled for an invisible steering wheel in front of him.

"Um, uh, no-no-nothing," I said. "I just thought you, uh, well, you know. . . the driver's side and. . ."

"You almost gave me a heart attack!"

And the moral of this story is: Japanese should start driving on the right side of the road to prevent American heart attacks.

Posted by Ryan at September 20, 2005 12:15 AM | TrackBack