was about to give us the flag, but you can't start out on any kind of enterprise with such incongruities as justa rittle stomachy and nice wezzer left hanging in the air. I reached for the dictionary.
Sure enough, haré means "a stomach tumor," and a word spelled exactly the same means "clearing weather."
"You win," I told Richi-san. "Why have you people mixed up the language like this—haré and haré? I'll never learn Japanese! Japanese is taihen muzukashii— very difficult!"
"Engrish easy, Papa-san?"
"Of course, English is easy. Hare—we pronounce it hare, not har-reh. Same as the hair on your head—kami. However, it means usagi.
"Thirty seconds!" yelled the starter, meaning us. "Twenty... ten... five ... Go!"
We went—one of twenty-odd sports cars popped at timed intervals into the stream of traffic—to watch for special signs along the road indicating where numbered clues were hidden; to attempt to overtake the usagi, if we could; and to wind up about noon somewhere in the vicinity of beautiful Lake Hakone—where neither of us had ever been. Three blocks farther on, in a welter of bleating takushi-cab horns, Richi-san looked up at me and made the understatement of the year:
"Engrish anda Japanese, Papa-san, justa rittle different!"
Driving an automobile in Japan is justa rittle different, too, if you ask Papa-san. Driving in Japan will give you stomach ulcers, if not even a sizeable haré, or tumor. A day at the wheel leaves you weary, dusty, bewildered, and certain of only one thing—Japan is an ancient country, and its roads were here a long time before the automobile was invented. Japan will still be here, too, a long time after the last jidosha has rusted. That is, unless the Tokyo takushi-cab driver, who is the original Young Man With a Horn, blows it off the map.
It is true that some small improvement has been made in recent months, but only a year ago experts called Tokyo the world's noisiest city, and I doubt that it has lost the championship title. Factories do not create this pandemonium; they are mostly small, and the larger ones are located in outlying districts. Trains and streetcars contribute only a small share, although some of them are equipped with bugle-like horns operated by compressed air and can make the kami rise on the back of your neck at a distance of a quarter-mile when they let go a blast. Much of Tokyo's working population is whisked back and forth by subways, and the subways are not heard above ground.
It is true that during election campaigns hundreds of sound trucks shriek hysterical promises of a chicken in every nabé, and throughout every business day loudspeakers on any corner extol the virtues of products ranging from soap to TV sets. The geta's clack and the chindonya —a one-man band—plays bells and drum and samisen to advertise a new restaurant, or the bill at the corner movie theater. Rut day-in and night-out most of the bedlam can be blamed on Tokyo's thousands and thousands of small, scurrying, pomade-scented takushi-cabs.
Back in 1933 the following "Rules of the Road" were posted in Tokyo's Central Police Station, and it is reasonable to assume that the same chauffeurs' catechism was promulgated in Japanese:
1. At the rise of the hand policeman, stop rapidly.
2. Do not pass him by or otherwise disrespect him.
3. When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him. Melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigour, express by word of mouth the warning "Hi, Hi."
4. Beware the wandering horse that he shall not take fright as you pass him by. Do not explode the exhaust box at him. Go soothingly by.
5. Give big space to the festive dog that shall sport in the roadway.
6. Go soothingly in the grease mud, as there lurks the skid demon.
7. Avoid tanglement of dog with your wheel spokes.
8. Press the braking of the foot as you roll round the corner, to save collapse and tie up.
The Japanese were ever remarkably obedient to the law of the land. They are still tootling, with vigour. Tokyo is, without doubt, the tootlingest town in the world, and the practice has spread into Yokohama, Osaka, Sendai, Yokosuka, and Tachikawa, as well as into the more remote prefectures. Not only have the Japanese developed tootling into a fine art, but their mechanical skills have not been idle, and horns stamped "Made in Japan" can make a Detroit tootle sound like a confidential whisper.
A little of this frays the nerves of foreigners, who are more inclined to be high-strung than the Japanese. Especially did the din offend the auditory senses of the British, and some of them wrote long letters to the editor of the Nippon Times, complaining of the "excessive horning."
Papa-san's own reaction to the cacophony varies, depending on whether he is afoot or awheel. As a pedestrian, crossing a narrow, teeming street in Shimbashi amidst a babel of raucous, ear-splitting blasts, which appear to serve no useful purpose, the impulse is to flee up the nearest alley like a scared usagi and take refuge in some little four-mat restaurant that serves Chinese noodles. Behind the wheel of a car on which ¥6000 road tax has been paid, Papa-san has what is probably an average American urge—a strong desire to get out of the car and poke a cab driver in the puss. But he doesn't. After all, we are all goodwill ambassadors in this, a sovereign country, and what is more, somewhere an MP is always lurking, like the skid demon in the grease mud....
There has been some improvement in the noise situation, yes. But it will not get much better, and the general traffic problem would appear virtually insurmountable. Japan is a crowded country by either metropolitan or rural standards; and although Tokyo has many broad streets, you have only to turn a short distance from them to find yourself squeezed between narrowing, medieval walls, on a way that is hopelessly winding. There is barely room for the present traffic, and yet motor cars, like the population, are on the increase. The last figures available were for 1952, when there were 652,000 vehicles of all kinds registered in Japan. If you have driven a car in this country, you will not be surprised to learn that 320,000 of these were trucks—and I would estimate that 319,000 of them were driven by people addicted to a middle-of-the-road philosophy. In addition there were 22,000 buses, and I estimate that 21,364 of these were Diesel powered and gave off huge clouds of black smoke in the faces of those who had to follow because there was not room to pass.
About 39,000 automobiles belonged to us, the foreigners, and that left some 74,000 privately-owned cars for the Japanese. It will shock anyone who has driven in Tokyo to learn that there were only some 23,812 taxis—I, myself, have encountered at least 22,009 of these on a single drive down the Ginza.
Incidentally, it is interesting to compare the ratio of privately owned jidosha in Japan to that of other countries. There is one car for every four persons in the United States, and one for every twenty in the United Kingdom. But in Japan the ratio to the total population is only one car to every two thousand people. Japan manufactures more trucks, however, than Italy does. I suppose that figure includes the pack of small three-wheel jobs you meet at every turn—when you are going straight....
Stick your neck out—literally, if you are around six feet—and ride in one of the smaller ¥70 or ¥80 cabs. Signal from the curb by waving, as if you were waving goodbye—in Japan, that means "come here." Or merely appear on the curb. The takushi is an extremely mobile vehicle, and will veer from the middle lane of traffic on short notice or none at all, throwing half a block into confusion. Look in your conversation dictionary, speak the address,
