Will Miss #508 - volunteers when you look lost

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that I got lost during my first trip to Japan and, what I didn't realize at the time was that there was every chance some kind Japanese person would help me. There were many occasions when my husband would pause to look at a map to figure out where we should turn in a new area that we were exploring. We were not lost at those times. He just wanted to get his bearings, but very often a Japanese person who saw him studying the map would stop and, in English, ask if we needed some help finding our way. 

Japanese people are generally pretty insecure about their English language abilities. In fact, I'm certain one of the reasons why people often back away from giving service to foreigners (or scurry away when they see such customers approaching) is fear that the foreign person won't speak Japanese and they'll have to try and negotiate things in English.. The way in which people who are generally afraid to speak English step up to the plate to help someone they believe is lost always impressed me and I miss that. 

Won't Miss #456 - helter skelter street layout/addressing

One of my students told me that Tokyo has a labyrinth of small streets snaking all around and carving the blocks up into triangles and trapezoids because those streets were once small waterways and streams that helped the locals conduct the business of living with a steady water supply. I'm going to take her word for that as I have never researched the history of the topography of Tokyo. I have, however, attempted to navigate the odd layouts of the streets in various cities and it seems at times as if the system was created by a madman. Unlike European-style streets, which tend to be laid out in blocks and have numbering which makes at least a little sense, the Japanese use a three-number system which can be pretty confusing, even for some Japanese. More than one student has told me that she or he gets lost trying to find new addresses. There simply is no systematic arrangement to the addressing in many cases. You can "get the hang of (the address system)", but you can never really predict where things will be as things tend to be idiosyncratic.

I won't miss the helter skelter layout of many of the districts in Tokyo.