Over the weekend I came across a cool map of old Route 66 in my house in San Diego, and decided to take an impromptu road trip to the historic American highway — like, leaving immediately after throwing some clothes in my mother’s prized Mazda Miata. Road trips are always fun, but when you’re coming from a cramped, urbanized country like Japan, which has around half the population of the U.S. crammed into 1/25 the land area, there’s something special about getting out on the open road and driving for hundreds of miles. They have freeways in Japan, but for the most part you only use them when making a long-distance journey like going from my home prefecture of Gunma down to Tokyo, not for short hops around town. Instead, most driving in Japan is on normal roads, with traffic lights, road construction and pachinko parlors all around you, and you could easily drive for an hour and only have travelled 20 km or so.
At the Grand Canyon, I happened to drive past the Flintstone’s Bedrock City Campground, an RV park designed to look like the world of Fred Flintstone, right down to the rock-wheel car he drove in the animated series. The first word out of my mouth when I saw the amazing place was dasa-kakko ii. This is a combination of the word dasai (da-sah-ee), which means uncool, out of fashion or cheesy, and kakko ii (kah-koh ee), which means cool or “good style.” Put together, the two words describe something that’s both campy yet awesome nevertheless, meaning something like “dorky-cool” in English.
This campground was dasa-kakko ii or “dorky-cool.”
