Hitchhiking Japan

With my university teaching contract in Tokyo coming to an end, I thought about hitchhiking a bit. It would be nice to add another country to my hitchhiking repertoire (this would be #17). But it was winter and I was getting lazy. Then in a conversation about my hitchhiking trips last year in Mexico and from Spain to Poland, someone said, “You can’t really hitchhike in Japan.” That was the motivation I needed. I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo to Kyoto, figuring I’d be better off hitchhiking into a metro area of 35 million than out of it.

The night before

I switched from my Pakistani friend’s house to a cheap hotel the night before and took a last walk around Kyoto.

 

On the road

I left at daybreak. It’s at least a 6-hour drive (2 and a quarter on the bullet train) from Kyoto to Tokyo, and I wanted enough cushion to arrive before dark. Got directions from hitchwiki online to find a good spot in a service area at the edge of town. I was warned that I’d have to jump over a gate walling off the controlled access area of the highway, but luckily the gate was open. I just had to ignore the “no trespassing” sign and climb the hundred broken steps up the side of a hill with my full backpack.

Normally, when I’m in a service area rather than on the side of the road, I greet people with a word of two while holding up my sign. In Japan, though, random greeting by strangers is considered a bit strange. People are very nice, but everyone stays in their own space. This is a mixed blessing. There is something quiet, calm, and reflective built into Japanese life, even in the teeming city of Tokyo. It holds the best of the introvert’s potential. But there can also be a sense of loneliness and isolation – this too in the teeming city of Tokyo – and many Japanese feel it. As a gregarious, clumsy Westerner, I stand out. Strangers don’t seem to mind when I greet them. A few might find my extroverted ways disruptive, but more often they find it humorous, endearing, or just plain odd.

In any event, I figured I’d just stand by the curb and smile instead of greeting. In five minutes, a fortyish couple going to Nagoya picked me up. With my 10 words in Japanese and their 20 in English – and the telephone translator – we were on our way. They laughed that I was hitchhiking as a tourist activity, but picking up a hitchhiker was a kind of tourist thing for them too. They eagerly wanted a picture of the three of us in the car to send to their daughter.

Toshiyuki, my driver, found me a good service area on the east side of Nagoya — the Tokyo side — near the Toyota world headquarters. Great for me. Nagoya itself is a city of 2.5 million, and I did not want to get stuck in the middle of it. The new service area was vast, really 3 or 4 interlocking service areas, each with its own commercial center and each with several parking lots and lanes going in every direction. I picked a place with a friendly face to get my snack and coffee, hoping that the friendly-faced server would get me oriented on the road to Tokyo. Again, we each had a few words in each language, and she went far beyond duty – even went to get me a map of the service area complex, but all the loops in traffic lanes were too much for us. I walked over to a gas station near the exit, where I thought cars would funnel toward Tokyo, but it was a bad spot and the worker there gestured me away. I went back to my helpmate’s snack area and just randomly chose a lane going any which way. Good enough. A boat distributor, Shina, with an empty trailer (he had sold his boats for the day) picked me up.

Shina was also a champion rower, and when he went to conferences in the US, he would go with his friend who spoke English. The friend was not a rower but a sailor and a world-class one. He had either won or participated in – our communication was choppy on this – a number of America’s Cup races.

Then, rather suddenly, we passed Fuji-san.

Shina was going back to his dad’s farm, where they raised cattle or rice, depending on the season (as best I understand) but dropped me at a service area at the outer reaches of the Tokyo metro rail lines.

And home

I scrambled past the fence to get from controlled access to surface streets, and in two hours of walks, buses, and trains, I was at my hostel in Kita-Shinagawa, back on my old street in the south of Tokyo.

* * * Click covers below for links * * *