ETC

We drove up to Kobe on the the national toll road system, the Japanese equivalent to the U.S. Interstate system. Tolls are wildly expensive. My wife mentioned that Japanese toll roads cost 23 times as much to build as their American counterparts. There are miles of mountains to bore through and monumental bridges were required to span the Seito Inland Sea and Tokyo Bay. The Japanese language trip calculator informs me that the four hour trip to Kobe covers 271.41 kilometers and costs 8350 yen, or about $71.00. One way to reduce the cost is to buy a pre-paid highway card. The lower priced cards don't save you much money, but the 50,000 yen card ($426) buys you 58,000 yen ($494) worth of tolls. Unfortunately the highway system stopped selling the 50,000 and 30,000 yen cards last Friday. We tried to snap up a final 50,000 yen card, but trips to a shopping center and a convenience store and a few phone calls revealed that the cards had long ago sold out.

Sales of these cards were halted because of a problem with counterfeits and because the Japan Highway Public Corporation (JH) wanted to push people to use the ETC system. For years I've been driving past empty ETC toll booths thinking that ETC stood for etcetera, in this case, exotic cars that did not fit the criteria of normal toll booths. Surprise--ETC stands for Electronic Toll Collection. A machine in your car broadcasts your highway usage to a machine in the toll booth and the money is automatically deducted from your bank account or charged to a credit card. This system not only does away with the necessity of stopping at toll booths, it lets drivers buy the electronic equivalents of the discontinued 50,000 and 30,000 yen pre-paid highway cards. So far the ETC system has been as popular as taking a salary cut, or raising the national sales tax. First use of the system requires that you plunk down 15,000 to 20,000 yen ($128 to $170) for the transmitter that goes in your car. Secondly there re no transmitter available for motorcycles and a lot of people seem to feel that, "If you can't use it on bikes, I don't want any part of it."

In Kobe

Just got back from Kobe, using my semiannual eye checkup for an excuse to indulge in some urban ambiance for a couple of days. I was actually awake enough on my commute to the hospital to notice that they now have women-only cars during the rush hour periods. This is because so many women were being groped on crowded trains. On some trains the glass on the windows turns opaque when you shoot through a residential district, presumably to protect the privacy of apartment dwellers. Are we being too considerate here? As usual the Japanese were in orderly lines, 20 deep, waiting to file into the train when it stopped. This now seems normal to me, but It suddenly hit me that people in other countries probably don't do this. Suspended in a crowd of suits, headphones and paperbacks, I wondered how the masses were going to shoehorn onto the train. We stopped; the first 10 people boarded the; the rest waited patiently for the next train, which granted, would be along in about 3 minutes. I know that commuting everyday would be a nightmare, but this is the kind of stuff I miss living in the country. Along with American coffee: I spotted a Tully's across the pedestrian mall from the hotel. There was also a Starbucks nearby.