0: How I Got there
1: Culture Shock
2: Exploration as Recreation
3: A Cross-Country Drive
4: Combini and Vending Machines
5: Bicycling and Injury
6: Shopping Blind
7: The Elusive Asian Girlfriend
8: Nonverbal Communication
9: So You Want to be an Expatriate
10: All Good Things

Note that for nearly every picture included, if you right-click it and then click “View Image” in the popup menu, you will then see a significantly larger version of that image. I eventually intend to implement the proper measures so that you can click directly through–livejournal prevented that, but now that I’m self-hosting this, I now have the means to do so–but it’s a back burner thing.

[edit 20080717]

I have not only gone through and fixed all the images, this post is now its own page.

Around the end of January, seven months into my stay, I started thinking seriously about whether or not I should renew the contract. I wasn’t worried at all about whether corporate would decide to retain me; both the area head teacher and the parents who came in during open-house week had given me very positive reviews. I couldn’t complain about the compensation; I was paid a full time salary for less than 20 hours of work weekly, and it was enough that I was saving about a third of it in an average month. I got along well enough with my coworkers, liked my students, and loved living in Japan.

The only real problem was my job itself: teaching. I dated a woman for a year and a half who was training to be a teacher, but that was as close as I ever got to formal qualifications for the job. Over the course of my stay in Japan, I learned enough to perform adequately, but the the job just wasn’t fun. I don’t know if, with the proper training, I could have been a dynamic teacher investing a lot into creating unique lesson plans and working to truly develop my students; I do know that without that training, I was just teaching straight from the book and desperately inventing tactics on the fly to try to keep the students engaged. Despite the feedback from the parents and the area teacher, I felt underqualified; despite the assurances of my coworkers and my adult students that I was doing well, I couldn’t help but notice that every few months a student would leave, and it took a lot longer for new students to enroll. A decline in the customer base, no matter how gradual, is a bad thing for any business. It was hard to escape the conclusion that, as the only actual teacher in that school, I had something to do with that decline.

Once the time came to notify corporate, I had decided not to stay at that job another year. I would attempt to stay in Japan if possible–there aren’t very many options for people of limited Japanese ability there which aren’t teaching English–and I would also look into other options in the US. On 15 April, I sent an email to the Army on a whim asking if they had any options for a direct path to flying helicopters. Flying helicopters sounded like it might be cool; I actually expected them to say that no, I could enlist in the hopes of earning flight but there could be no guarantees. I was startled and pleased when, two days later, they told me that I could get a guaranteed pilot slot if I was willing to become a Warrant Officer.

Exactly one week after I sent that email, my immediate boss died. A month after that, I was informed that his heir was going to shut down the business at the end of July. Technically, my contract expired a month earlier, but I wasn’t going to stick the bereaved with the responsibility of finding a replacement teacher for a single month. All of a sudden, there was a definite end point in sight. I found myself scheduling a return flight, and making decisions as to how to dispose of my stuff. My experience moving to Japan taught me that the less I tried to bring back, the happier I would be. I ended up selling my bicycle to a tiny Japanese woman who could barely reach the pedals; one of my adult students volunteered to interpret at a pawn shop so I could sell those miscellaneous things I didn’t think worth the price of shipping home.

In the meantime, the only fruitful job leads were to be English-speaking tech support in Japan, or to go with the Army to fly. There was no question about which was the better deal; while I wanted to remain in Japan, it wasn’t a higher priority than the opportunity to become a pilot. The decision to leave, when it came, hardly felt like a decision at all. It was just the natural course of things; I follow interesting opportunities the way water follows the lowest path. I had about as much choice as the water does.

People react to endings in various ways. When my students found out that the business was closing, some of them quit immediately. Some, including all of the adults, decided to stick it out through the end. Some stayed exactly long enough to determine which other English school in the area they preferred, at which point they transferred without any duplication of service. For my own part, it was an intensely bittersweet feeling to realize that there would be nobody to train up as a replacement; that shortly after I left, there would be nothing left of the business but memories. Despite my lack of training, I was doing my best to teach well and improve the school in whatever ways I could think of; all of that effort, in the end, turned out not to mean very much at all.

With one chapter of my life closing, I turned almost instinctually to the next one. I counted down the days and hours to various final events in Japan. Even as I said any number of fond goodbyes, I was already thinking of the upcoming hellos. I’m not a real fan of the emotion of loss; perhaps that’s why I concentrated so very hard at that time on looking forward to upcoming adventures.

As it turns out, moving internationally is a lot easier the second time, despite all the TSA’s efforts to ensure that every year flying is more annoying than it was the year before. I shipped the majority of my luggage to the airport in advance, I took some final photos of the area where I lived, and I cleaned the place. The morning of my departure was beautiful: sunny, cool, scattered clouds. Somehow, 16 months after the fact, I can’t remember the bus ride, or the trains, or the flight. All I remember is locking up my apartment for the last time, checking carefully to ensure I hadn’t left anything behind. I adjusted my backpack, and then I moved out.

Assuming that you’ve got all four of those things, you can find yourself in Japan within weeks of deciding to go. You’re probably expecting certain differences from life elsewhere in the world–if you’re like me, odd surprises are one of the reasons you’re moving there–and if you’ve done your research you’re not going to run into any really difficult surprises. However, some aspects of life caught me by surprise; they aren’t well-documented in the guidebooks because they’re the sort of thing that few tourists will encounter.

There exist small concrete cul-de-sacs scattered through the local neighborhoods; these are trash collection points. In the interest of civic beauty, it is discouraged to put trash into these before sundown. Tax-supported garbagemen remove trash from these most mornings around sunrise; each day is for a particular type of trash. There is a day for burnable trash, and a day for non-burnable. There is a day for plastic recyclables, a day for metal recyclables, and a day for paper recyclables. Twice a month there is a day for trash containing toxic components, like most consumer electronics; once a month there is a day for large trash, meaning anything larger than a trash bag of maybe 15 gallons of capacity. Any trash of the wrong type on a given day is left there by the garbagemen, in the expectation that you will reclaim it and put it back on the correct day.

I suspect that the complexity of the garbage system is the reason that there are almost no public trash bins anywhere in Japan. Depending on where you are, there may or may not be a three-in-one sorted trash can on the platform of a train station, but elsewhere they just don’t exist. There may or may not be a can-recycle-bin at a vending-machine cluster, but if you buy a snack of any sort, expect to carry all the packaging home with you.

No matter what you buy in Japan, there will be packaging. Typical canned drinks come in steel cans which easily supported my weight; an American trying to crush one against his forehead would likely knock himself out. A boxed curry dinner from a convenience store will have the plastic container to eat it out of, an internal plastic strip to separate the curry from the rice before eating, and another plastic strip to separate the garnish. This entire thing is lidded and shrinkwrapped, and before you take it home the clerk will double-bag it. Even fruit in the grocery store have individual anti-bruising styrofoam pads wrapped around them.

When you purchase your items, the only plastic involved is in the packaging, as you will almost certainly be paying with paper money. Japan’s economy is heavily cash-based; outside the big cities, it’s rare to find a merchant who accepts credit cards. Those who do typically push the credit-card processing fee directly to the consumer. I am told that checks do exist in the Japanese banking system, but I never saw one. When I needed to pay a bill, I would take the bar-coded bill and the appropriate amount of money to a convenience store, where they would process the bill. When I was paid each month, it was with an envelope full of cash, which I then took to the post office to deposit in my account.

The post office runs the largest bank in Japan. My entire life in America, access to my bank account was mediated through a mag-striped plastic card. Not so in Japan! There, you’re given a paper book. To process a transaction at an ATM, you insert the entire book, opened to the current page. As you insert or withdraw cash, the machine prints out the transactions as they are processed; the means by which you access your money is also the statement of transactions. It’s a pretty clever system; I just wish there had been some sort of PIN required so that I might have had some protection had I ever lost that book.

It actually took me a few months before I ever established a bank account in Japan, though. This was partly because at first I didn’t really have enough cash on hand for it to matter, but also because it took a while for me to procure a means by which to authenticate myself. This went beyond having my passport handy; I also had to finalize my working visa. Once that was finished, only days before the 90-day tourist visa would have expired, I had to set about acquiring an inkan.

Handwritten signatures as a measure of personal authentication never took off in Japan. Instead, they use personal seals, or inkan. Foreigners can sometimes get away without them–I was permitted to sign for receipt of packages from the shipping company before I had mine–but for official and governmental documents, they are the only allowable means to document personal authentication. In other words, they’re necessary before you can get a bank account, before you can enter any sort of contract; I know they’re necessary for people to get married, and I suspect they’re required to acquire a lease. Fortunately, they’re not that difficult to acquire; all it took was a trip to the local photography shop, an order form, and a bit less than a hundred dollars, and two weeks later mine had come in.

Why do you go to the photography shop to get an inkan? I have no idea. Finding odd instances of misaligned expectations is the rule there instead of the exception. For some things, like this one, there’s no recourse to sort things out except to ask someone where on earth you get your seal made. Other things kind of fall into place in bits and pieces. Some things feel extremely natural: there was a small dry cleaner’s down the road from me, which cleaned and pressed all my work clothes for about $20 a week. The shopkeeper was one of the few people I met in Japan who seemed to have no comprehension English whatsoever, but the ritual was so familiar to both of us that it proceeded smoothly anyway: I would come in each Friday with that week’s used clothes, she would hand me the previous week’s clothing and ring it up, and I would pay and leave.

There’s no way I could run down all the little miscellaneous oddities that I encountered while I stayed there; I doubt I even remember the majority at this point. What I can say is that they made living there a wonderful experience. I liked Japan not only for the individual differences, but for the sheer fact that there were so many of them. Daily life was a matter of exploration, discovery, and adaptation. I suppose that with sufficient time in the country, that may have eventually ceased to be the case, but as things stand, that constant pressure to learn and evolve was exactly what I wanted and one of the reasons I look back at Japan with such fondness.

Despite that, it was very rare for me to speak in Japanese to anyone except my teacher or my students. Speaking Japanese with my teacher was natural. I didn’t speak much in Japanese with my students, but whenever I could illustrate a new concept or grammatical structure to one in their own language, I did. My students were paying for lessons in English, but I couldn’t really expect them to pick it up entirely by inference; it seemed only natural to communicate as effectively as possible when introducing a new idea.

With everyone else, though, it was rare for me to use the language. Probably the single biggest reason for that was embarrassment. The ability to express myself clearly and concisely is important to me; when my only option is to speak poorly, I would rather not speak at all. The only surprising thing was the extent to which that was possible.

Every Japanese person spends a minimum of six years learning English in school. The degree to which this study actually helps varies widely–it is far too common for them to simply memorize huge lists of vocabulary and phrases without any instruction of how to actually use the language to communicate–but it does mean that almost everyone in Japan has a certain baseline ability to understand simple sentences. Combining those with exaggerated hand motions and facial expressions gave me a means to communicate which covered pretty much everything that really needed to be said.

Sometimes I needed to express complex ideas; for that, I had to be inventive. I established my bank account by printing out pictures of the necessary forms that I found online. I shipped a package to America, from a convenience store, using stick figures and hasty sketches of what I wanted. People were very willing to accommodate me in this; nobody in Japan really expects anyone who doesn’t look Japanese to be able to speak the language.

Despite the fact that I shied away from speaking Japanese to most people, I made real efforts to understand what they were saying. It became second nature to attempt to think in Japanese as much as possible, and use English only when I didn’t have the vocabulary or grammar to express myself otherwise. The results of that attempt were rarely correct in a formal sense, but it felt like there was some good in constantly trying. If nothing else, it kept me thinking about the language, and it was more entertaining than studying properly.

Having a background in programming turned out to be a mixed blessing. Programmers by necessity have to have a certain facility with languages; a well-rounded programmer has at least two or three programming languages they’re comfortable with, plus maybe half a dozen technologies which aren’t properly programming languages but act kind of like them. The fact that Japanese is an immensely regular, well-structured language felt very good to me, as that is a trait shared by programming languages. It let me focus on really grokking the grammar and memorizing the vocabulary instead of having to worry all the time about exceptions and irregularities which plague European languages.

However, the single universal characteristic of computer languages is that they are all designed to be understandable to computers. Spelling and grammar aren’t refinements, they’re essential elements which must be used perfectly. The best possible result of a spelling or grammar error in a program is that the code won’t compile, and you have to go back and fix things to get your code to run at all. The worst result is that everything seems to work fine, but you’ve actually introduced a weird and difficult to debug error into your code which will come back to bite you months down the line. Programmers consequently get kind of fanatical about grammar, as it always requires less effort to express an idea properly the first time instead of having to go back and fix things later.

The most natural way for me to construct a valid grammatical construct, whether a sentence or a block of code, starts with semi-verbal intent. I then arrange the components I’ve assembled according to the appropriate grammar; if there is any doubt in my mind that I have done this in a valid manner, I look to online references to ensure that I have. This is efficient when programming, and I’ve completely internalized the rules of English, but it makes for a cumbersome process when attempting to express myself in Japanese.

Could I have worked to break that habit and simply speak uninhibitedly? I probably could have, but when programming, it’s actually a habit I want to maintain. It was far too easy to just accept that for me, grammatical perfection is mandatory, and therefore construct elaborate workarounds so that I could communicate in realtime without having to dive into a reference book every few seconds. Besides, there’s a certain amount of entertainment to be derived from using stick figures and handwaving to communicate; it was a contrarian impulse that required that whenever I couldn’t just blend in and act the way a Japanese person would, I’d at least be amusing at it. I think I generally succeeded; even though I couldn’t always know what the people who interacted with me were thinking, I was having fun.

Apparently, I was naieve in thinking so. For whatever reason, sex does seem to be one of the first things many people think of when I say that I’ve lived in Japan. One of my good friends had a lot of fun ribbing me before I went, saying that regardless of my intentions prior to arrival, I’d end up staying at least 10 years and coming back married. The comments from my coworkers in the military tend to be somewhat more lewd: “So, how many of them did you bang? I hear those Asian chicks are freaks!”

I don’t generally answer that question, even in the sense in which it was intended: as an invitation to tell some entertaining lies and bond. The truth is irrelevant, and I tend to get too nervous to properly tell a spontaneous story unless the listeners are all good enough friends that I don’t mind if it flops.

There are people who will tell you that the Tokyo nightlife is a continuous episode of wild debauchery. Perhaps they are correct; I don’t know. Given that work generally ran until around 8pm, the trains stopped at 2am, and it took almost two hours to get to or from any of the party districts in one direction, it never seemed worth my while to actually try it out. The few times I did end up in a Tokyo night, I was hanging out with Sarah.

The people who brag of their nocturnal conquests in the city somehow never speak of extending their reach into the surrounding towns and suburbs. There is a reason for this: even if there are wild nights in Tokyo, the nights in the outlying areas are quite tame. Businessmen make it home from their commutes no later than 10pm, and in Japan, that almost always means they actually were working in the office until 9. Those businessmen represent almost 100% of the evening traffic; even if office workers regularly stay late, retail businesses in the countryside (with the exception of combini) all close at 5.

There are, of course, exceptions. However, the countryside nightlife tended towards small izakaya or karaoke; places that you go to with a group of friends, not places you go to meet people. More to the point, I wasn’t really seeking a girlfriend; it was only a minor disappointment that fate didn’t see fit to provide one from the blue. Japan’s a wonderful place, but it’s not really a good one in which to seek true love–at least, not until you’re significantly more comfortable with the language and customs than I ever was.

I can’t give a full listing of the odd foods available simply because of the state of my vocabulary. Kanji are essentially heiroglyphics: they represent concepts instead of sounds, they were derived from simplified drawings of the item in question, and they can be combined to form more complex ideas. At my best, I knew less than 10% of the 2000 which the Japanese government considers the minimum standard of literacy. In most areas, I could make do without, but grocery shopping was the one area where illiteracy really hurt. Given the assortment of foods I knew were available, just buying things without knowing what exactly they were seemed a risky proposition. I spent hours in the grocery store the first time I went, just identifying what I could, and I tried to get something new each subsequent time I visited. Despite that, there were entire sections of the store I never bought anything from.

Foods from outside Japan tend to be either very easy to find, or nearly impossible. I had ready access to naan, which is an indian bread, but I had trouble getting green apples. Ham and cheese sandwiches were easy; reubens were impossible. It was very easy to order a pizza topped with onions, corn, octopus, peppers, and tofu, but I never did see one with nothing but cheese and pepperoni. Iced tea was trivial, particularly varieties made with a green-tea base, but lemonade was nowhere to be found.

Lemonade was something of a quest of mine, actually. The first time I wanted some, I just headed to the nearest convenience store, and was kind of startled when there wasn’t any. I checked at the convenience store across the street; they didn’t have any either. At that point, I bought something else, but my curiosity was piqued. I headed out to a grocery store the next day and systematically bought one of every type of container of fluid with a lemon on it. I carefully tested them: I took a teaspoonful, sniffed it, and then sipped it to figure out what I had. I had bought one soda, three beers, and two kinds of liqour, but no lemonade. There was another store in my town; I went there the day after. The results of that expedition brought back a similar-looking assortment of things. By the end of that night’s tests, the procedure had devolved into just pouring a large shot into a cup and downing it, and scribbling the results on the container with a sharpie. Naturally, the last container I tried turned out to be concentrated lemon juice.

How to make lemonade in a Nalgene bottle: Start with a dry bottle. Add granulated sugar to the 4oz line or just above. Add concentrated lemon juice until the 200ml line–as the sugar dissolves, its volume reduces, so the porportions are approximately equal. Fill the container to the 1000ml line with water. Shake until homogenous; chill if desired. It was a measure of desperation, but I had my lemonade; that recipe lasted me the rest of my time in Japan.

I also rode a lot while I was there. From my house to the nearest train station was about half an hour whether I rode my bicycle or took the bus, and the bicycle had the advantage that I controlled the schedule and didn’t have to pay anything. It worked out pretty well for me–my Japanese lesson was just opposite that train station, and enforcing a minimum of two hours of riding a week helped counterbalance my dietary habits and keep me fit.

However, things didn’t always work out perfectly. It was early November, and I had been making the same bicycle commute twice a week for months now. I had things pretty well figured out, and it was my habit at the time to ride for long stretches without touching the handlebars. It was pointless, but it helped keep me amused. That day, as I was riding along a relatively barren stretch of road with rice fields to each side, I accidentally swerved just a little, but it sent my front tire into the little unpaved area surrounding an ornamental tree. That, in turn, completely upset my equilibrium, and I couldn’t recover in time.

All in all, it was a rather spectacular wipeout. I was lunging forward to get positive control of the handlebars before the front wheel went into the depression, but the slight jump of the handles as they twisted when the wheel went in was enough to cause me to miss on the first attempt. It was kind of interesting that gyroscopic forces helped me stay upright for about 20 more feet before my oscillations passed a critical point and the front wheel snapped perpendicular to the direction of travel. I went over the handlebars and took most of the force of landing with my hands and elbows. My bicycle skidded to a stop next to me, paused a second with wheels still spinning, then gently fell over the edge of the road into the rice paddy a meter below.

I wasn’t much interested in moving for a while there, but it wasn’t too long before I tried to move even if only to find out which parts still worked. The interesting thing about trauma like a spill from a bicycle is that there is initially very little pain; you have to determine experimentally the extent of the damage. I was lucky; aside from some bruising and some missing skin on my hands and arms, I was uninjured.

Until I started trying to find out, though, I was terrified: if I had broken a limb, I would have been in big trouble. It went far beyond not having health insurance at the time: I was alone in a foreign country, without anyone who knew exactly where I was, and I was injured. If I had a broken arm, I would have had a rough time figuring out the hospital system, but things would be pretty much ok. Much scarier was the possibility that I had a broken leg. The road I was on had moderate vehicular traffic, but almost no pedestrians; any serious injury could have been very difficult to recover from. My only way out, even with such minor injuries as I actually had, was to limp home and patch myself up. The prospect of not having that option was horrifying. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that except resolve to fall less often when riding.

In the meantime, I actually had to deal with patching myself up. It’s a simple process, normally: buy some antibiotic cream and some bandaids, and apply as necessary. The only difficulty was that I owned none of those things, my dictionary didn’t even include the word ‘antibiotic’, and the one reliable thing about shopping in a nation whose language you aren’t fluent in is that you are highly likely to buy the wrong thing the first time or two you try. In this case, I was a lot less willing to tolerate amusing mistakes of that sort than I normally was. In the end, I just went to the pharmacy–it was the store with the logo which looked exactly like the powerup that lets Mario shoot fireballs–pointed at my injuries, and asked for help. It worked; they figured out almost immediately what I was looking for.

There is really nothing at all like the experience of standing at your kitchen sink, extracting gravel and trimming off dead skin from your hands, and realizing with absolute certainty that this was about the best possible outcome. Really, all I lost from that accident was the cost of one Japanese lesson that I had to skip and some hit points. It seems almost silly, remembering how shaken I was by the incident, but all I could think about at the time was how very far away from everybody I was. I was well enough to go to work that afternoon, but had I fallen just a bit harder or tangled a bit more awkwardly, I might have spent that time lying on the side of the road trying to attract someone’s attention. There’s normally a pretty wide spacing between an inconvenience and a catastrophe, but that day it felt like the two were nearly touching, and that I had escaped as well off as I had through sheer luck.

Actually, there was a hidden benefit to the whole episode: the kids absolutely loved the new vocabulary that day; Beginners learned words like ‘band-aid’ and ‘injury’ and ‘ouch!’; older ones get to tell stories about one time when they hurt themselves. If there’s one thing I know about teaching English to small children, it’s that you have to capitalize on absolutely everything that engages their attention. Somehow, making a game out of things helped with the pain a bit, too.

This has had all sorts of effects on Japanese culture, one of which is the fact that the woman of the family is expected to go shopping for food every day to prepare that day’s meal. This eliminates the need for a pantry or for a refrigerator larger than the one an average American might keep in their college dorm room. Though this means that food thus prepared is often wonderfully fresh, particularly as freshness of product becomes an evolutionary pressure in the stores themselves, it didn’t work well for me. It’s not just that I can make from scratch exactly one of each of the major meals (I can make omelettes, deli-style sandwiches, and steak tips with vegetables); my habit has always been to head over to a megastore and stock up on staples once a month. Thusly provisioned, I can spend my time doing things more important than worrying about what I eat.

Luckily for me, I could pretty much do away with the problem of cooking by going to the convenience store and buying a bento. Convenience stores in Japan are wonderful: they’re open 24/7, and they cram every imaginable service into a store the size of a US master bedroom. The fact that they’re open 24 hours is very odd for Japan, as no other type of business stays open then. Even the ATM machines shut down for nights and weekends. Add in the fact that they really are convenient, and combinis become almost magical. Want a hot, fresh meal? That runs about 4 dollars. Pay your bills? Ship a package? They can do that there. You can rent videos there, or stand by the magazine rack and just read. As winter approaches, they carry necessities like knit gloves and hats. If a sunny day suddenly turns to rain, the combini all suddenly have racks of umbrellas for sale. I have no idea how they achieve this level of efficiency, but it beats anything I’d ever seen in the US.

I probably ate more than three quarters of my meals directly from the convenience stores in my area. I had about an average concentration of them around me, meaning that one was 150 meters away from my front door, and there were two others available if I was willing to go as far as 500m. As common as they are, though, Japanese convenience stores don’t even approach vending machines in terms of ubiquity. If there is not a vending machine on every street corner, it is only because of the high local density of streets. There were three immediately adjacent to my house, and dozens in easy walking distance. You can buy anything from Japanese vending machines. Hot-coffee and cold soda machines are the most common ones, but there I saw vending machines which dispensed soup, beer, cigarettes, snacks, batteries, film–if a person were stranded in Japan and prohibited from ever entering a store of any sort, they could probably survive just fine on items from vending machines.

As nice as it was to live that way, I don’t think that I’ll have that kind of lifestyle again unless I return to Japan. I just don’t think that a Japanese-style convenience store and a Walmart can coexist in the same market; one or the other will inevitably be driven under. Does a society look more to price, or to value? Do people prefer that a store stock what’s necessary, updated rapidly, or do they want it to carry everything all the time? Are the employees paid minimum wage, or are they paid enough to be nice? These are all decisions made at a societal level, and I’m not positive it’s possible to make the choices which lead to Japanese style convenience stores without implying a whole lot of other choices which lead to, say, cooperation being a major graded subject in school.

I got lucky, though. In my Japanese class in college, there was a woman named Sarah. By lucky coincidence, she grew up maybe half an hour from my hometown, she attended the same Japanese class that I did, and most importantly, she was part of a student exchange program that put her in Tokyo the same year that I was in the next prefecture over. She was pretty. She was friendly. She was engaged. Actually seeing her took some effort, as we were about 100 minutes from each other by train, but the prospect of conversation unencumbered by inhibition made the journey worth my while.

Every few months, then, I would arrange to go do something with her. We went to an amusement park; we went to explore Yokohama; we celebrated an American-style Thanksgiving with her homestay parents; we did many things. Most of those events remain only as snapshot memories from which I derive the rest of the occasion, but one really stands out in my mind: the road trip.

It was early spring, and we both wanted to try something beyond typical tourist attractions, something that would get both of us to a part of Japan that neither had seen before. We decided to rent a car in Tokyo and drive north to a natural hot spring resort in the mountains of Nagano. The area gets few non-Japanese tourists, and it seemed a good way to get a bit more immersion than usual. Renting a car in Tokyo was easy to accomplish, and reserving a room in a ryokan, a Japanese-style small inn, was only slightly more difficult. Everything seemed like it was going to be easy.

Driving in Tokyo is crazy, but not really all that much more crazy than driving in Boston or New York. It turns out to be really easy to adapt to driving on the left side of the road; the only hard part to adapt to was the fact that the windshield wiper and blinker switches were on opposite sides from what I expect. The road signs were rare and usually incomprehensible, but it was for that reason that we had reserved a car with a built-in GPS unit. We hit a small snag when we realized that neither of us could understand the GPS interface well enough to actually program in our destination, but we did what anyone would: we pulled into a gas station, showed the address of our destination and the GPS unit, said “onegai” (please) and “wakarimasen” (we don’t understand) a lot, and gave our best puppy-dog eyes. The station attendant was friendly, as every service-industry employee in Japan is, and pushed a lot of buttons on the screen and then it was showing arrows and a colored line projecting from our current location. We thanked him, and drove.

I am skeptical of the notion that any two people together in a confined space will of necessity become friends. That trip, though, tested my skepticism. Sarah and I didn’t have a whole lot in common beyond a shared interest in Japan and Japanese, but we found that in that car, we could just talk. Somehow, hours of what would have been tedious cross-country driving alone became vibrant and enjoyable. We noted the scenery when it was remarkable–surprisingly often, it was–but other than that, time just seemed to vanish.

In retrospect, there were plenty of hints that the GPS wasn’t taking us where we expected to go. The gas-station man had said quite a bit, actually; we just couldn’t understand much of it. As we ascended the mountains of central Japan, there was quite a bit of snow, but we passed a point in the early afternoon when the snow started going away. There was the fact that, hours after we had expected to have arrived, we were still on the highway with quite a long strip of hilighted road showing on the GPS. Despite all that, both of us were surprised when we saw a rare English-translated road sign: “Welcome to Niigata City.” Shortly after that, we discovered a beach. We had driven clear across Japan en route to its center.

There really wasn’t a whole lot we could do about that except laugh. We played on the beach of the Sea of Japan; we ate dinner, and then we went off to find a more competent gas-station man. Accomplishing that, we set out and drove again.

By the time we arrived and checked into the ryokan, it was well after dark and there was no hope of catching any of the attractions we had planned originally to see that day. There was no time to waste on a weekend trip though, so we asked the owner if there was anything interesting still open. He shrugged, and pointed us to an izakaya, which is more or less a Traditional Japanese Pub.

Imagine a Pub in the romantic sense: it is the relaxation area of the common man, where the locals of a town will gather each night to unwind. It is a place of joviality and games, and the friendly atmosphere of the working folk of a small town who have all known each other forever. Now, make it Japanese: beer is beer the world around, but instead of darts, there is karaoke. Instead of wood paneling and hunting trophies on the wall, there are tatami mats on the floor and calligraphy on the walls. Best of all, instead of hostile locals suspicious of any outsider, the people there were delighted to talk to foreigners, to buy us drinks, to compete with us in karaoke. It was a fascinating night.

The next day, we visited a natural hot spring in the area, known for having been discovered and first used by monkeys. The thing about monkeys is that no matter how often they bathe in a hot spring, they still make the whole area smell like monkey residue. We visited and touristed around for a while, and then we headed back for the long drive back to Tokyo.

The overwhelming majority of the time that weekend was spent in the car. We spent more driving time to vacation time on that trip than on perhaps any other trip of my life. Despite all that, despite the unanticipated addition of hours of driving, I can’t say that that time was wasted. Quite the contrary: it is rare to spend so much time in one go in a state of perfect companionship. Those hours of driving are a treasure in my memory.