Driving in Japan is really nothing like driving in America.
The first difference is that people drive on the left side and the driver’s seat is on the right. This carries over into everyday life for things like walk ways or stairs. Are you about to bump into someone coming from the opposite direction? Simply move to your left like a car and pass by. Americans do this subconsciously as well, but to the right, so that if a Japanese person and an American person are about to bump into one another, they will since they will both slide to the same side.
Next, traffic signals work on timers not underground sensors like in America. This is very frustrating since lights turn even when there are no cars waiting.
Another frustrating difference is that smaller intersections lack turn lanes. This means if a car is waiting to turn, all the cars behind it are stuck. The result being that you miss the green light you would have made easily if there had been a turn lane.
A more dangerous difference has to do with street widths. In America you have wide, wide streets with bike lanes gutters, curbs, and sidewalks. In the Japanese countryside or even suburbs, you often have narrow, narrow roads where a street hardly any wider than a car pretends to be a two-way road. To make matters worse, outside of cities, rather than a curb or sidewalk, you have a steep drop off on one side where you can slide down into a rice field, while the other side is a right-angle drop off into a gutter a few feet deep.
Japanese cars are built with retractable side mirrors. Why? Because driving in Japan is often a game of inches. When two cars meet on one of the two lane roads that are really only one lane wide, they squeeze into someone’s driveway or vegetable field and retract their mirrors to get by. Many people retract their mirrors when they park as well since parking spaces can be quite narrow too.
And then there are the people over 80 years old who are seemingly unaware of the existence of motor vehicles and blithely cross the street wherever and whenever they damn well please, often while riding a bicycle only slight younger than they are. And please excuse them while they stop to pee alongside the road. We wouldn’t want to deprive them of that special au naturale response to nature’s calling.
Japanese often view their cars as mini-homes. They take off their shoes when getting into their car. They decorate them like a teenage girl’s bedroom. There are air fresheners, GPS/TV screens, and nap-friendly reclining seats for those workers who like to catch a few winks in a convenience store parking lot in the afternoons.
There a lot of people who don’t need or drive cars in Japan if they are close to public transportation like in cities, but for those who do, caution is advised.
Japanese calligraphy is an art form. Unfortunately, it’s all too often taught as mimicry of kanji characters. Children are encouraged to copy the artistically written character as closely as possible, thus expunging much of the artistic joy in calligraphy.
Later, as one skill develops, longer words and sentences can be written with more artistic expression. It is still a popular
cram school hobby of sorts.
All school children buy a calligraphy set and learn calligraphy in school. A set consists of and inkstick that is ground by a stone and mixed with water. (Liquid in bottles is also available.) Special paper, called washi, is set on a thin cloth or newspaper to absorb excess moisture. Finally, a brush is used for the writing. There are also brush pens to capture the calligraphy fell while writing on more normal paper.
Japanese is written from right to left, top to bottom, except when it’s not – ha ha. Newspaper and comic books still follow the traditional way, but magazine and other written materials may use the Japanese way or the Western way or some combination of both.