One of Ours

There's no doubt about it: living in Japan will make you a better driver.

The combination of driving on narrow roads with many twists and turns, dodging pedestrians walking along the streets that are too narrow for sidewalks, and parking rear-end first into tiny parking spaces, will polish your driving skills so much that you'll get compliments when you go back home. There's one problem though -- living in Japan will also make you forget anything you ever knew about your car's engine. Because cars here must receive a special check-up (called "sha-ken") every two years, it's customary for drivers to leave every minor technical aspect of their car's performance up to their car dealer or local mechanic. Even simple things like tune-ups and oil changes are nearly always left to professionals. The only time I've even lifted the hood (which the Japanese call the "bonnet," borrowing the British term) is when a cat managed to climb into my car's engine compartment to sleep, only to be ripped to ribbons when I started my car.

One of the biggest changes I've seen in Japan in the thirteen years I've lived here is a major opening of the economy to products from the outside. When I got here in 1992, finding a store that sold Doritos was a major find, and the only non-Japanese beer in the whole country was Bud. Now Japan is a much more open place, with many new products from America and Europe easily available in Japanese stores. However, some of the foreign brands in Japan aren't new at all, but have been here for decades. P&G (Proctor & Gamble) has been here for thirty years, so long that Japanese don't really consider brands like Pampers and Whisper to be a foreign at all. McDonald's is another company that started early in Japan -- I've actually been asked by Japanese if they have McDonald's in America. But perhaps the foreign brand most familiar to Japanese is Switzerland's Nestle. They entered the Japanese market officially back in 1961, and as a result nearly all their products, from Ritz Crackers to Oreos to Kit Kat, enjoy dominant positions in Japan. In 2001 they ran a 40th anniversary commemorative TV commercial, showing clips from all their past commercials for Nescafe instant coffee. It was pretty cool.