September 5, 2002 - 7:08PM
Wes Ehrlichman

By popular demand: Transportation Explained!

People seem to be interested in how I get around in Kedoin. Well here are some pictures of my new car.

  
(note the "SUNNY" running across the rear of the car)

My car has a white plate, which means that it's a full size car. The other option in Japan is a yellow plate. If your car is basically half the size of a normal car you get a yellow license plate and you don't have to pay as much insurance or as much road tax. You also don't have to get nearly as much gas. This works because your car runs on basically a riding lawn mower engine. It should also be noted that my car most likely should have yellow plates. When they first showed it to me they opened up the hood and there was NOTHING INSIDE! Seriously, the engine's got to be less than 1 foot big.

In Japan people drive on the left hand side of the road. Switching the side of the road that I drive on is made a little easier by the fact that the steering wheel is also on the reverse side of the car. It just reverses the whole driving process.

This took me a little while to get used to, but not as long as it took me to get used to having to switch gears with my left hand instead of my right. In Japan they got a manual car, and I drive a manual at home so my right hand naturally wants to do something while I'm driving. Wait, that didn't come out right. You get the picture though. Now I have to keep my right hand on the steering wheel and my left hand on the stick shift. At least it still operates in the same way. Up-left is first gear, and down-right is reverse.

My friend and I figured out the conversion rates from km/h to MPH and came up with some surprising results. First of all, the roads here are marked very similarly to the way they're marked in America. In residential zones it's around 30 km/h, on country roads it's about 40 km/h, and when you're driving through the long expanses of rice fields the speed limit is 50 km/h, and when you're on the freeway it's marked around 60 Km/h When you're driving it feels very much like you're going the same speeds as American speeds, but because the cars are so small and weak they feel like they're going to fly off of the road if you get it up to 60 Km/h Now here's the conversion rates.

30 Km/h = 18.6 MPH
40 Km/h = 24.9 MPH
50 Km/h = 31.1 MPH
60 Km/h = 37.0 MPH

So basically on the freeway everyone's going around 40 MPH.

I never have to shift my car into fifth gear. My friend's car doesn't even HAVE a fifth gear.

And finally, gas costs around 3.5 times as much here as it is in the US.

A couple of people also asked about my bike, which isn't nearly as interesting other than the wheel motion powered light above the front wheel, the lock on the back that keeps the tire from moving when the key is removed, and the rather beat up basket in the front. It was given to me by my board of education as one of the things they bought when when the program was started for all future ALTs to use. By now it's pretty beat up. My predecessor also used this bike but apparently after he was here for a few months the bike was stolen from the school while he was in class. Strangely enough, it was returned to the same place he lost it about a year after its disappearance with no explanation given. Hmm.

The wheels of the bike always feel like they're becoming flat, but I took it to a shop where someone refilled them with air and they still feel the same, so I guess I just don't know what a bike feels like anymore.

So now that I've got all of this transportation, where do I go? Well, I haven't actually driven much. First of all I've been too busy, which explains the lack up updates to the site, and second of all I want to do make friends in my town more than I do in other towns. I have driven to Miyanojo three times though, and I plan to go again tomorrow. Miyanojo is where I danced in the summer festival when I first arrived. It's also a pretty small town, with about twice the population of Kedouin, putting it at around 10,000 people (I could be wrong of course).

Despite its size, Miyanojo has at least two 24 hour convenience stores, a huge supermarket/redemption arcade/department store/dollar store, a second huge grocery store, a very nice electronics store that deals in used games, a couple of restaurants, a bus terminal, and last but not least, several Pachinko parlors. Kedouin has half the amount of people, but 1/1000th the amount of commerce. This I can't explain. All I know is, I like it.

Last night I went to Miyanojo with Satsuma Sue, a British ALT, to get some Pizza. She really knows the roads a lot better than I do, so it was nice to not have to worry as much about navigation when I was driving. The Pizza place was actually amazingly good. I was expecting a lot of strange pizzas like the squid special, and I was right, they did have that, but they also had the tomato garlic pizza, which was not only vegetarian, but also the most normal looking thing on the menu. There was one pizza that just had pieces of sausage lying across it with something that looked like white icing layered over that. I didn't even read the ingredients on that one.

The Pizzas came in three sizes. Small for 1000 yen ($8.50), medium for 1600 yen ($14)and large for 2200 yen ($19). The small apparently feeds one or two people, the medium 2 or 3, and the large 4 or 5. We got a large and finished the whole thing in one sitting.

When we left the pizza parlor we headed home, but we kept seeing places that were open. Most stores in the country part of Japan seem to close at around 7, but we saw a store that looked like fun and happened to have lights on so we stopped in to check it out. It was just a convenience store though, and a really small one at that, so we really weren't that excited. It seems like we stayed in there forever though. I ended up buying about 50 cents worth of candy and Sue bought some flour. No one has an oven in Japan though, so it must have been a British thing :-)

So we left the convenience store and continued down the road about a block before we ran into another interesting spot that was open. A Pachinko Parlor!

Pachinko is the popular gambling game in Japan. How it works is you put your money into the machine and a ton of metal balls come out that quickly shoot up onto the playing field. There is a dial in the lower right that you can turn left or right to control the speed at which they shoot out, allowing you to aim the balls at certain spots on the playfield which trigger a slot machine wheel to spin, allowing higher winning areas of the machine to open up. At least, that's how I think it works. We never did figure out for sure.

We each put in 500 yen ($4.50) and got maybe one hundred balls. The game ended around a minute after it started since neither of us won a single ball back. We sat around the machines talking for a few seconds and a dirty old Japanese man sat down next to us. He started telling us to play and we both said, "we have no money!" The dirty old man put a 500 yen coin into my machine and showed me exactly where to aim the balls. This was good advice apparently and I ended up winning several spins of the slot machine wheel. None of them won though, so the 500 yen he gave me also only lasted about a minute. The dirty old man kept popping coins into the machine he was on, but I never saw him win a single ball either. Here he is:

I call him a dirty old man because of something he said to me about a certain part of Sue's anatomy. He couldn't speak any other words in English at all, but he knew the slang for this word. The word starts with the letter "P." How would a Japanese guy know that of all words?

On our way out we looked at all of the different machines and all of the people playing. It is insane how much money these people spend on Pachinko. Look at this picture:

Ok, you see those three buckets at that man's feet? We spent the Japanese equivalent of around $5 and we didn't even need to use a single bucket. That's got to be at least $100 per bucket. And I think most of the people there are regular customers!

On the way out I also noticed some slot machines in the other section of the building. The slot machines seemed to be much more popular than the Pachinko. Unlike the slot machines in America where you pull a lever and get a random three icons the ones here were actually skill. There were buttons underneith each of the spinning wheels that you could press to stop the wheels at exactly the moment you wanted to. I like this idea a lot more than the randomness of American slot machines.

After each of us gambled away our 500 yen, we continued home and I happened to make a wrong turn one light past where I was supposed to. We decided to try to take this road home instead and I can't explain it at all, but we ended up in Satsuma at Sue's house. We just ended up hanging out there for a while and talking about the differences between American and British television, and how funny some of the homework we have to grade is.

(why are middle school kids writing about drinking beer now?)

We then continued back to my house where her car was and she headed home. The original plan was to watch Harry Potter, but it got so late so fast, something that seems to happen every night here, so we'll have to do it another time.

So there you go. That's an average trip to Miyanojo. Most of them will probably be spent hanging out with the Miyanojo ALT, Brad. We tried to call him from the pizza place but he wasn't home.

Tomorrow I have to go there anyways to pick up a game I preordered, Ikaruga for Dreamcast. I can't even play it until I get back to America since I didn't bring my system with me but the store's only getting one copy in and I gotta have it! Speaking of "gotta have it," there are 20 shopping days left until my birthday... (aren't I a brat)