Driving in Japan - Awesome or Boring to Death?

"Flavien Vidal" (flyingfrenchy)
09/19/2014 at 06:40 • Filed to: Japanese experience

After the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! just a couple months ago, I too, wanted to share my own view of what driving in Japan is. It's not a first for me as I've been doing very regular round trips to Japan for the past years, but now that I really live here for good, I wanted to try and put my thoughts in order on Oppo... I will not go as much into details, as Kat already did a very good job at explaining what it is to own a car in this country, but more at the feelings you may get behind the wheel, on one of the country's islands.

1 - The roads:

Nice, they are VERY nice. If you are used to drive in the northeast of the US, in Quebec or in Belgium, this will be a whole new level of amazement for you... Roads are clean, smooth and look new everywhere!! Well everywhere in the cities at least. If you start wandering off in the mountains for exemple, it will often not be as nice (still better than in downtown Montreal of course, but not as nice...). And yes, roads are often narrow too. You might not want to do like some Japanese and "be different" by buying a Yukon XL or an Escalade. Narrow roads are tons of fun though, especially in the mountains. Combined with a tiny car like a Cappuccino or an AZ-1 it just becomes absolute perfection. Be careful nonetheless as lots of mountain roads here are not very well protected and it's fairly easy to end up dying in flammes while falling into a ravin. Some back roads merely have a small step to impeach you from falling into the abyss aka 60 feet into trees and rocks. In the city, it quickly becomes lots of fun too. Some streets are narrow to a point that it's laughable. Oh yeah and they have 90 degrees intersections just as narrow as the street you are onto, surrounded by walls, and not even one way, and with pedestrians, and dogs, and cats and stuff on the street and.... it never ends. It's ridiculous to a point that it's fun TRYING to go into those streets. Needless to say your C5 Z06 will not fit... Or will it?? That's the whole fun of these streets.

2 - Japanese drivers

Slow. They are slow. Not horribly slow like your grand mother trying to make a right turn and stopping in the middle of the road to turn the wheel and then finally crawl to make the corner, no, but they are slow. They tend to day dream quite a lot, jump on their cell phones at every single traffic light and don't often react when the green...sorry, blue light (here the light is said to be blue, despite being green like everywhere else) shows up. Being on a bicycle or being in a car and having to deal with bicycle is also one hell of an adventure. If you might think that car drivers are slow and day dreamers, people on bicycle are ten times worse. They are not allowed to use the road and have to stay on the sidewalk. So when you combine narrow streets, intersections and bicycles on sidewalks with their owners playing Puyo Puyo on cell phone, it's a receipe for disaster. I use my bicycle quite a bit here and the rule is that there is pretty much no rule. It's a bit like practicing to be the GhostRider, but a lot slower. Sudden accelerations to avoid someone in front of you who decided to stop walking straight, 3 high school students coming all next to each other and taking the whole sidewalk not even noticing you are arriving in front of them, old guy going slower than anyone else, cars zooming across intersections not caring if someone is coming....etc etc. How there isn't more people killed everyday in this mess, I don't know.

3 - Japanese road works

The next best thing on earth after Orangina. When there is a road that has to be closed partially or not, workers work!! Do you imagine something like that??? Unlike pretty much anywhere else in the world where one person work while the other 5 make sure nothing bad happens to him (in case of a sudden broken nail or something like that), in Japan, they actually work non-stop, day and night, to make sure the road user is not annoyed for too long by this!! Insane!

4 - Living a totally different driving experience

Overall, driving here is sort of fun. Fun in a different way though. It's not fast (it takes like 40 minutes to do 15 miles usually, and that's when there is no traffic at all), it's just different and that's what makes it interesting. Precision driving when crossing with another car in a small street, driving at 30mph but feeling like doing double that because your car is sooo tiny and the road sooo narrow that it feels awesome, doing a 3 point turn to turn left at an intersection 10 inches wider than your car. All this makes the entire experience fun. I was originally planning on getting another Corvette next year, as a "week end rider", but is it really what I want? Isn't it more fun to have something tiny and nimble that doesn't have the turning ratio of the USS Missouri? I'm not sure... Not sure at all.

Because he feels like he should do like Doug DeMuro and talk about himself in the third person in his signature, he'll do it now. Flavien has a japanese wife and now lives in Japan. He plans on creating his own business in Japan but for now he takes intensive japanese classes because he can barely speak the language. He enjoys writing stuff about cars once in a while and if he gets readers, he is even happier.

DISCUSSION (10)

Jobjoris > Flavien Vidal
09/19/2014 at 07:03

Nice write-up! You actually went to Belgium?

Flavien Vidal > Jobjoris
09/19/2014 at 07:07

Well, I'm french so, unfortunatly yes... I had to drive there quite often lol

Cities can be nice, but damn, the freeways are laughable lol

JKER > Flavien Vidal
09/19/2014 at 07:21

Sounds like you should get an enduro!

offroadkarter > Flavien Vidal
09/19/2014 at 07:27

Flavien is married to a Japanese and now lives in Japan.

A Japanese what? Scooter? Dog? Cup of noodles?

Also, I shared your article to the oppositelock FB page

Flavien Vidal > offroadkarter
09/19/2014 at 07:33

haha corrected it. That's a direct translation from the french, sorry about a that ;)

Thx for the share!

Flavien Vidal > JKER
09/19/2014 at 07:33

Sounds like I should get a motorcycle license first ;)

Jobjoris > Flavien Vidal
09/19/2014 at 07:39

Especially the ones in Wallonia are awful. The roads in Flanders are somewhat better most of the time. Antwerp, Brugge and Gent are awesome!

JKER > Flavien Vidal
09/19/2014 at 07:39

I guess that might be important, taking a training course would also be recommended.

Flavien Vidal > JKER
09/19/2014 at 08:15

I'm scared by bikes... I like to drive fast and I feel that I would kill myself way too fast if I owned a bike... it just looks way too fun for me to survive very long... so no bikes for now add far as I'm concerned :)

JKER > Flavien Vidal
09/19/2014 at 08:31

I can understand that! Going fast is tempting a lot haha