Narrow Roads and Japan

You’ve been in Japan to long when, while driving on a two-lane road, you know the lane nearest the curb is going to be used as a parking lot. Since Japan has a lot less land area than the U.S., cramming four times the population of California into a space that’s slightly smaller, allowances for the lack of space have to be made, and on most streets you can expect to see cars pulling over along the side of the road so people can run into the conbini (convenience store) and buy milk. There are always two or three cars in front of my parents’ liquor shop on Sundays, too, since that the day Shonen Jump comes out. In all my years of driving in the U.S. I’ve never been on a road that was so narrow that two cars couldn’t pass side-by-side, but it’s not difficult to find roads like that in the more rural parts of Japan, and one of the skills you need when driving on such roads is the ability to back up until you can find a wider spot for the oncoming car to pass. Since there are many blind corners on narrower Japanese streets, there are curved mirrors posted to help you see oncoming cars or pedestrians, although learning to drive while being aware of these mirrors is quite a challenge — they just don’t enter my vision at all.