The narrow road I walk

It’s now the second week of September, but it appears someone’s forgotten to tell the weather here in Osaka: days are still sweltering and incredibly humid, while at night the heavens open and a regular downpour thwarts my attempts at getting my laundry to dry by the following morning. When I was a kid, there were times when I wanted the summer never to end… but this is not exactly how I envisioned it. Far from being an extension of summer fun, the heat only really manages to make autumn somewhat more unpleasant as I go about my job and daily life. Who knew?

Now, then… I believe I’ve previously brought up the subject of earthquakes quite a bit, and my coping with their rather alarmingly frequent rate of occurrence here in Japan. But for all the worry I have over whether The Big One might come tomorrow, there is a far more real threat to my daily existence than any measly earthquake. That would be the roads.

Roadways in Japan tend to be a very fickle thing. There are places you can go in this country which are crisscrossed by modern elevated expressways, with multiple lanes, and even major routes that, while not particularly pedestrian friendly, still provide ample space for the vehicles on them. Then, there are the streets. The old, designed-when-the-city-was-still-a-village spaces that seem to revel in seeing precisely how small they can get while drivers attempt to negotiate them.

As it happens, most of the streets in older residential areas, such as the one where I now live, were not designed with road vehicles in mind. In fact, even horses were rarely a concern, as most people of the farming and merchant classes got around on foot. Consequently, you have what were once medieval pedestrian paths, now accommodating not only two lanes of traffic, but pedestrians, cyclists going both directions, scooters darting in and out of the car lanes, and cars parked on the edge of the street for lack of a better place to put them. The one saving grace of the road I travel to work each day is that there is a pair of traffic lights regulating the flow of cars in the (truly harrowing) most narrow section, but that’s not saying much.

All that wouldn’t be too bad, of course, if not for the fact that there are also very few sidewalks. Again, as many of these old streets came into being as places to walk, not much consideration was given to where the pedestrians would go once the main area was taken up by horseless carriages. On the newer roads, and on the major thoroughfares of big cities like Osaka, you get spacious sidewalks with ample room to walk (if not maneuver around all the people), but on streets like this one, you’re lucky if you get a line in the pavement… not that it means much when you’re dodging oncoming traffic edging over into your space as it is. I’m just lucky that they at least cover the storm drains in this town; in some places I’ve been, they’re just a foot-wide concrete trench on either side of the road, which another American I know actually labeled “foreigner traps”. Bike-rider beware.

With all these things working against me, I’m frankly surprised that I haven’t actually been hit by a car. In places like this, you can only imagine that it’s a matter of time, and I’ve been extra careful just to avoid tempting fate. I’ve already had cars brush up entirely too close to me for me to be comfortable with, and the drivers not even slowing down to notice just how many millimeters they came from knocking me to the pavement.

I suppose I’m lucky in at least one respect: many of the more popular models here are of a special sub-subcompact class called “Kei-cars”, which get special tax breaks for their space-saving and fuel efficiency (they also helped keep foreign competition at bay while the Japanese economy was still regaining its footing after the war). These cars are perfectly suited to the tight spaces of Japanese city streets, and to me they offer something of a relief because I get the sense that if they did hit me, they’d be the one sustaining damage. Not that I’d like to test that hypothesis, of course. And anyway, what concerns me more are the lumbering behemoths (at least in comparison) that automakers here have been churning out to satisfy Japan’s increasingly Westernized tastes, high gas prices and narrow roads notwithstanding. There are (thankfully) no SUVs here as far as I’ve seen, but I certainly wouldn’t want to bump into any of the minivans or large-type station wagons that emulate them, which always seem to come barreling down the street at speeds far greater than what I’d consider “reasonable” or “safe”. Just keep me as far away from those monstrosities as possible.

Perhaps surprisingly, the one thing that hasn’t bothered me too much about the roads here is the direction of the traffic. Japan, like Great Britain and former British colonies apart from North America, drives on the left. (It was never a British colony; supposedly the direction of traffic here had something to do with existing Samurai etiquette that just happened to parallel British practice, but I don’t know if that’s actually true.) I adapted quickly to looking right first when crossing the street, in spite of some of my compatriots’ blunders, and have no trouble anticipating the direction an oncoming vehicle will be moving in. The British ALTs in my city tell me that my speedy adjustment is because driving on the left is “nature’s way”, but maybe I’m just easily adaptable. At any rate, I’m sure I’d feel different if I were behind the steering wheel of a car instead of on foot or riding my bike. One thing’s for sure, though: I will never complain about narrow roads back home, ever again.