Today's Picture- Weekend Trip to Niigata, July 2006
Story behind the picture:
As the billboard in Los Angeles read when I was a working class university student commuting between my work shift at the LAX Airport and classes at Cal State-Dominguez Hills, "Life sucks with a car.", courtesy of a local insurance company in an effort to crack down on the recent law requiring drivers to have insurance to operate a vehicle.
One of the biggest differences between Japan and the US are the cost of gas and the convenience of traveling without your own personal car. With gas selling under $2.00 a gallon in my home state of South Carolina as I write, it was a few short months ago that gas around here was selling for twice that this. Even then, gas was roughly half the price than found in Japan at that time. This is a rough estimate since buying gas was not part of my monthly budget when I lived there due to the easy of travel without a car. Of course this line item was replaced with "bus/train fare".
For three years, I traveled to work by either train, bus or bicycle or a combination of train and bus with the most frequent being train and a relative short walk. The downside to this is with inclement weather. These were the days that I wish I had a car but as we all know, cars are not a disposable item therefore you just sucked it up and prepared accordingly. This mentality was acquired from years of playing football, working in less than ideal conditions on two different warships in the US Navy, working my way through college three time zones away from the nearest family member and being the only hakujin (Caucasian, white person) working in a old-fashion traditional Japanese company in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles. Just as the one-star Admiral explained to us when we had an awards banquet of sorts when I was junior enlisted E-3 sailor serving as ship's company on board the 35-year-old aircraft carrier, USS Independence, "The Navy life is hard. I don't expect you to totally accept this lifestyle, I expect you to adjust." Then he went on to say that since you are receiving an award that indicated you are meeting and exceeding my expectations. In other words, going to Japan and doing without a car for three years was a personal decision that I endured but made possible due to the Japanese's approach and understanding that a personal vehicle is a luxury item than can not be afforded to everyone.
Aside from traveling to work and pursuing my hobby for improving my Japanese at a local university requiring travel by train meaning two transfers and a 20-minute walk, I also traveled from Japan's most northern island, Hokkaido and most southern region, Okinawa and the other regions in between. This was all done without a car. With the rare exception of going to Mount Fuji and Gunma-ken via a rented van when my mother came to visit or when my father-in-law visited Tokyo from his native Kyushu or visa versa, we always traveled by public transportation.
Today's picture was taken on our return from Niigata back to Tokyo in July 2006. For a weekend trip, my wife and I commuted from Warabi Station in Saitama's southern region to Tokyo station (about a 30-minute commute) and met my mother-in-law and sister-in-law and via bullet train arrived in Niigata by lunch time. From there, we checked our baggage into a long-term locker at the train station and did a walking tour and visited the nearby mountains and rode the sky tram up the mountain and road a bob-sled down the mountain until our hotel-ryokan was available. Here, we dined "viking-style" on regional Japanese cuisine and bathed multiple times in the facility's hot spring baths.
The Divine Wind Vault http://divinewindvault.blogspot.com (C)2006-10
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