Coming "home"

The day after our son's wedding we farewelled our two younger sons as they flew back to Brisbane and then worshipped with my parents and two close friends at the church of our son and new daughter-in-law. They, of course, weren't there. 

We briefly farewelled my parents after church. When I say bye to someone I often mentioned something about when I'll see them again; this time we were able to say: see you later this year. Our plan is to visit for a short time in south-east Queensland during July. Mum asked if we had dates and I laughed. Despite the blog post I'd shared the week before about looking forward to 2025, we'd barely thought beyond that weekend!

Home, with a new tablecloth!

Then had lunch with our friends and farewelled them. I wasn't ready for the farewells, but they happened anyway. We then gathered our stuff and left town, heading four hours north to Cairns. Australia is a huge place with long spaces inbetween many places (Tasmania being the exception to that). If you've been to our native land and haven't figured that out, then you haven't seen much of it! It was a tiring journey, but we listened to radio commentary of the Aussie women playing cricket against England. We cruised into a very quiet looking Cairns around dinner time, watched more cricket as we wound down in the evening, and crashed on the bed.

The next morning we were moving again: to the airport and back to a chilly Tokyo. The trickiest part was always going to be getting back home from the airport when we were so tired. We'd parked in long-term parking and once again cricket on the (internet) radio helped us on our journey! (Yes, we're cricket-mad, and not ashamed at all.) 

The most immediate culture shock we had was figuring out what speed to drive! Yep, we've driven for nearly 25 years in Japan and in 13 days forgot that most driving is slower in Japan than in Australia. Quickly sorted that and we were home in 1 ½ hours by about 8 pm. It felt odd, but also good to walk back into our apartment. It's at the same time still new-to-us and very home-like. We moved around like we were in a dream, reminding ourselves that the most urgent thing was being prepared for David to leave before 8 am the next morning (Tuesday) for work, and getting some sleep.

Some Christmas presents from our
sons that we received before
the wedding.

I predicted that it would take several days to get back into the groove, and that is exactly what happened. By Saturday we were exhausted and very thankful for a quiet day with nothing at all on the schedule.

Now those 13 days in Australia seem like a dream, except that every now and then there are reminders from our time there: like photos, messages from our new daughter-in-law, and things that we brought back with us. As usual, things have moved on in our absence, so it has been a delight to have a few friends here demanding to see photos from our time away!

So, we're going through the motions, but sometimes my thoughts and soul are still catching up with where my physical body is. It remains true that the last 12 months have contained much change for us, and I think I'm still finding my feet in this new phase of life. Please pray that I'll be patient with myself and people around me as I walk through this.

Where did you go in the last fortnight?

More than half the 60 km into town from their
property is on a gravel road.

It’s more than two weeks since I last wrote here. In that time we've driven over 2,500 km. We drove up to David's sister and brother-in-law's place in Central Queensland: it took us 10 ½ hrs. Then on each of the next four days we drove 60 km into town (they manage a property). 

We spent those days helping my sister-in-law prepare for and (a little bit) run her Alpaca stand at the Emerald Agricultural Show called Ag-Grow. They were long days, but we were glad to work alongside her, rather than be the kind of visitors that took her away from her daily life. And of course time spent with family is valuable, especially when you rarely get to do it!

My amazing sister-in-law (in pink).

Ag-Grow was mostly a place for farmers to look at stuff they were interested in buying, so there was a lot of large equipment and things we had no use for. They had cattle dog trials (dogs competing at cattle work) and Camp Drafting, which is horses doing a similar thing. I learned the latter is a unique Australian sport, but unfortunately I missed the actual event and only saw the horses the next day as they showed off their skills prior to an auction. 

We enjoyed Australian "show" food (but not the Chiko rolls) and the general atmosphere, though did feel a little bit out of our depth at times. For starters, we didn't have the "uniform" of an Australian farm show: long-sleeve button-up cotton shirt with blue jeans. But in the downward run towards packing up and flying back to Japan, we're also not in a mood to buy stuff, not to mention that prices continue to sky rocket.

Always chooks!

Rosegum Alpacas is my sister-in-law's business

Outback sunset

Sunset with view of the large Burnett River

After that, last Saturday, we drove 600 km out to the coast to stay with friends in Bundaberg. These friends we hadn't seen in over 25 years, but had kept up with what each was doing via Facebook. During that period they worked in three different large Asian cities as teachers and it was great to swap some of the many stories that arise from an international life.

On Sunday we spoke at their church, but overall had a quiet afternoon without driving much at all!

Walking with friends along Woodgate Beach

On Monday and Tuesday we drove about 65 km each day to a nearby township on the coast to spend the days with two families we are very close to who were holidaying there, then each evening we drove 65 km back to our lodgings in Bundaberg. Those were precious days of just hanging out together, unfortunately we then had to say goodbyes, just like we had to with David's family.

On Tuesday we had a bit of a car scare, but it was sufficiently resolved for us to be able to get back to Brisbane the next day. We've got a lot of car uncertainty in the coming weeks, and more than one car as our adult sons look at cars too. Probably that's something to write about another day when I know more.

Then on Wednesday we drove 450 km home. That night (and the next one too) we had family parties while watching football (State of Origin, an annual rugby league competition between our state and New South Wales).

Thursday afternoon I spent driving around town getting medical tests done, hopefully I'll know more about that next week after going back to the dr (it's related to the infection I had while we were travelling in the southern states). And David's been taking our middle son driving the last couple of days as he prepares for his second attempt at getting his licence on Tuesday.

It all adds up to a lot of driving and a lot of people! And a number of farewells too. Yesterday I woke up with a headache and pretty much just blobbed around all day. I read a 200-page book too! Today I'm feeling better, but still not hugely energetic. Tonight we're looking forward to our first evening in nearly two weeks when it's just the two of us.

We have just over two weeks until move in with friends and less than three weeks until we hand the keys in for this house. Three weeks on Monday we will, hopefully, fly back to Tokyo. Time is racing past and some days I'm really feeling the pressure. Not so much the pressure of packing up – I think that will be fairly simple – but the pressure of other things that we want or need to get done while we're still here.

Moving our sons out (part one)

We're getting close to being able to tell you the "end of the story", the end that we've been working towards and praying about for many months. The story of how both of our boys move out of home. Here's part one.

Last Friday our 18 y.o. moved out into a house near his university that he will share with two other students (24 km from where we're living). The house was found through a real estate agent that goes to our eldest son's church. One of his housemates also goes to that church and so does our 18 y.o. son now! We're thankful that they did most of the work finding the place, sorting out paperwork, and finding a third housemate.

We did the move the cheap way using our car and a borrowed trailer, so it took longer than if we'd hired a big van. But it wasn't a simple move from one place to the other. We picked up stuff like a washing machine and microwave from several places close to his new house as well as a bed and bookshelf from the far east of Brisbane (nearly 50 km from our house). We got home for the final time at 10pm on Friday night after driving around all day. Then we hopped back in the car on Saturday morning and picked up another item, then (because he doesn’t have a licence yet) picked our son up to take him to the optometrist because his glasses frames had started to break the day before. On our way back to his place we picked up one final thing: a two-seater sofa. When we finally got home on Saturday at 3pm we were very tired, but also very satisfied.

Saturday was a very different day to
the rain we encountered on Friday.

Everything seemed to take twice or three times as long as it looked like it should on paper. We encountered heavy rain, bad traffic, an ATM that wouldn't give me a $80 (no $10 in the machine, presumably), a Saturday morning market, parking difficulties, communication delays, and bad directions from Google maps. We forgot things and had to go back again, had to buy a new tarp, and had to take detours to get food.

Along the way we met an Ecuadorian who hasn't seen her family for over five years, a Belgian who has a new baby and is returning "home" via New Zealand, and a lady who works for the RSL (Returned Services League) and is committed to not continue contributing to landfill by helping her adult kids pass on their unneeded stuff. We met people who stood by our sides 24 years ago as we left Australia the first time. And more recent acquaintances who, in 2022, housed members of our family three times (including one emergency stay when a plane got cancelled), picked us up from the airport that same year when it took us 35 hrs to get from Japan to here (usually it's an 8 hr flight), and drove two of us to the Gold Coast to catch our flight back to Japan. We had things thrust into our hands and left on the front step that would help our son set up his new place with his two new housemates. What a wonderful confluence!

It was quite a process, but we felt satisfied at the end. Not only had we achieved a major goal (raising our son to the point where he could live independently from us) but we were able to physically help him move out. So many times in the last 25 years we've been unable to help our loved ones by being physically present. 

We've missed many significant family celebrations, including our eldest son's 21st. And have never helped our parents, sons, or siblings move house. We’ve even missed moving into our own house several times (when we’ve asked people to help set up our newly rented house before we arrived back in the country, so that we could settle the boys into school as quickly as possible). It was a joy to be able to help this time. It was fun to scour second hand shops and Facebook Marketplace, and to make lists of household products to add to my grocery list, all of this to help him get started in this new life.

But I can't finish this post without telling of how we're praising God for his great provision. Queensland has been experiencing a housing shortage for some time now, and people have been very fond of telling us how hard it is to find places to rent (which hasn't been very encouraging). But God's purposes for us haven't been thwarted. At least that's how it looks from our perspective. In order for us to continue to serve God in Japan, we needed him to find places for our sons to move to, and it's happening! 

We've been praying about this for years and many others have been praying in recent months. At our church on Sunday the worship leader reminded the church they've been praying for our sons' accommodation for eight months! So we're praising God for his provision and his ongoing leading. Of course he could have led us out of ministry in Japan and that would have been hard, but hopefully we would have been able to praise him for that too.

We've been watching a season of The Chosen recently and one of Jesus's disciples said, after witnessing a miracle, "I don't know why I continue to be surprised." This is how I feel. And I feel chastened regarding my lack of faith and trust in God. But also just thankful for God's provision.

Psalm 68:19 Praise be to the Lord, to God our Saviour, who daily bears our burdens. (NIV)

Part 2 is planned for next week. It will look different, but you’ll have to wait to hear that story!

Looking like an idiot

I've been doing some heavy editing recently and my head is a bit heavy. I think writing a little today might be something of an antidote. Besides, I've got a good story to tell you...

I saw an article today called "Four rarely mentioned (but essential) missionary qualities". These were the qualities:

1. A sense of adventure
2. A sense of humour
3. A willingness to look like an idiot
4. A high tolerance for ambiguity

Generic photo, not from Japan...those number plates are wrong.

I'm not sure if I have all of these, but having stuck around for nearly 20 years, perhaps I do?

Let's see if I can dig out some examples, but I'm going to change the order:

A high tolerance for ambiguity
This is huge in Japan. Not just that we're in a culture where we don't understand many things, but the language and culture itself is full of ambiguity. In Japan people often learn by observation, rather than being explicitly told what to do. Living as a foreigner in this land that is multiplied many times. My observational skills are far better than they used to be, simply because that's often all I've got to make it through a situation. 

When we have visitors, they often ask many questions and we often don't have good-enough answers for them. We can't seek answers to all the questions that arise from what we don't know: we simply don't have the energy or time to do that. So instead we learn what we need to do our business and live our lives, and most of the rest has to just be left to one side.

Sense of adventure
I wouldn't characterise myself as someone particularly adventurous in the traditional sense of the work. I'm am not a big risk-taker. But from where you stand, what I do might look like an adventure, though it doesn't feel like it. However, I think probably our camping reveals our sense of adventure. Wading into the world of wrestling as we have is probably an adventure that many wouldn't care for. Travelling Tokyo trains can be an adventure...that's true!

A sense of humour
Missionary life (and life with teens) can get quite serious. But the willingness to laugh at oneself and at the odd things going on around you is pretty important. I guess one example of that is seeing interesting English or a funny meme or video. I do love to laugh and am happy to do so at myself. Most of the time I'm happy to tell the stories of when I've messed up, and have a laugh.

A willingness to look like an idiot
This is connected to the one above. I guess I often look like an idiot here, whether willingly, I'm not sure! It's common to not know what the protocol is for this or that. Or to get into trouble because you can't read something fast enough. 

This happened to me just last Friday. I drove with a friend to our "local" Costco, about an hour away. It's usually a stressful trip because it involves negotiating around a crowded shop with a large trolley, spending lots of money, and takes a good part of a day. But last Friday another layer of difficulty was added. In fact, it felt like I was in an international airport—there were so many things I needed to keep track of. 
A. My membership card: which was needed to get in, as well as to buy my groceries. 
B. My receipt for groceries: as they check this at the exit.
C. My receipt for the whole pizzas I bought at the restaurant: so I could collect them once they were made.
The above is usual, it was the fourth and fifth that threw me over the edge:
D. Car park ticket: the car park is usually free, but this time they had the gates activated and we had to take a ticket to get in. I presented it at the cashier when I bought my groceries where I got E.
E. Another car park ticket: I had no idea what this was for, but it seemed important and had an all-important stamp on it, so I put it in my purse.

After lugging the full over-sized trolley back to the van and loading everything into it, we joined the line to get out of the car park. There isn't usually a line, so it was strange and frustrating.

When we got to the boom gate there were three buttons on the machine, two yellow and one red. Plus two slots: one for the ticket, and one for money. We'd been waiting about ten minutes to get here and knew that the people behind us were also probably frustrated. So there was time pressure. 

I couldn't quickly read anything on the ticket machine. So I thrust one of the two car park tickets into the slot. It told me I owed them ¥1,000 (about AU$13.60). I wasn't about to pay that! I'd just spent hundreds of dollars buying groceries and the sign at the entry said that entitled me to three hours free parking . . . so I pushed another button and the ticket came out and I tried the other ticket. Then the display told me I owed them ¥6,000. I then pushed another button, in fact I probably pushed all of them one after the other, over and over . . . I can't remember now.

There was no obvious call button, and no staff member lurking nearby. The car behind me started to beep his horn, but didn't back up to let me unblock the single exit lane.

I am so glad my friend was there. Her presence helped calm me, but my cool was pretty much gone. Finally, two men approached our van, one on either side. They told us you had to put both tickets into the machine. Bingo: the boom gate rose and there was great relief all round. Belted into my car, I couldn't bow deeply in apology to those stuck behind us, but I wanted to.

I can't say that I was willing to look like an idiot. In fact I hate looking like one. But I find it easier to cope with that in Japan than in Australia. My white skin betrays me time and time again. But it does give me an excuse to mess up on occasion. I'm not sure the men who helped us would have been so patient with a woman who looked Japanese. 

Our foreignness got us off the hook, but in Australia it doesn't. Every time we go back we get odd looks at one time or another when we reveal our "foreignness" with a "stupid" question or lack of understanding of a situation. Our white skins don't save us there, nor do our Australian accents!

But back to those four characteristics. I don't know that I'd be known by any of them, except perhaps the humour. However, we have had to grow in each of the others. An ongoing sense of call, a strong desire to make an eternal difference, meaningful work we're gifted in doing, and a dogged stubborn streak has meant that we've stuck around.

Foil gift

An important value in Japan is to not inconvenience other people (or, another way to say that is: not annoying other people, as I wrote about in a post three years ago). 

As a foreigner, it is not always easy to figure out when you might inconvenience other people and we're still learning. But in a city where space is at a premium, where you put yourself, your children, and your belongings is a serious issue.

But when it comes to doing construction work on your house, you're heading into a land of much inconvenience to others. So we find that construction workers are generally very considerate about things like their vehicles blocking the narrow roads. However, to ward off any potential bad feelings, prior to doing construction it seems that they do an obligatory run around the neighbours to give an apologetic notice accompanied by a gift.

Last year we got a towel from the neighbours behind us. And we got another towel six years ago when a neighbour's fence was being fixed.

This time we got 20m of foil.

A house on our street, about 30 m from ours, has been demolished. It looks like they are going to be building again very soon. The block of land is bordered by two roads, neither of which is very wide. They aren't main roads, but they do get a reasonable amount of traffic on roads that are only about 5m wide. We've caused minor traffic jams by someone stopping near there to pick us up by car. 

Blue rectangle: our house
Red star: the construction site
Green arrow: entrance to kindergarten
Orange arrows: roads

I'll have to write another blog post to explain why there's
white paper suspended from string in the middle of the block!

Obviously, large construction vehicles are going to potentially cause traffic congestion and inconvenience to pedestrians, especially because across the road is a large kindergarten where most kids arrive by bus and on foot. They have a car park, but it is down the street about 50m. 

So, we've received a letter of apology in advance and some foil! I presume the kindergarten and all our neighbours received something similar in the name of keeping neighbourly relationships smooth.

Why do you ride when you could drive?

It might seem strange if you never lived in Tokyo, that we often ride our bikes here when we could drive (especially when the weather is nasty). The truth is that often we can get somewhere local faster on a bike than in a car. Tokyo roads are narrow and have low speed limits. Add to that the traffic, including pedestrians and bikes, that you might have to deal with, and driving can be very slow. Not to mention that when you get to the other end, you might, or might not find a free park to put your car in, or have difficulty parking your car. In most cases it is much easier to park a bike!

Here are roads I rode on today:

Note that this narrow road has all sorts of obstacles on the actual road: electricity poles and signs. To drive this you can't actually drive much faster than 20km/h because you'd be dodging these obstacles as well as any pedestrians or cyclists who are sharing the space with you. Not to mention the possibility of kids or other vehicles emerging from the many near-invisible roads that empty onto it. You will often have to give way to oncoming traffic on these narrow roads as it's not possible for two cars to pass easily in all places along the road.

 This one is a bit wider and faster at 30km/h, though still has some poles on the road. There are no dedicated footpaths (sidewalks), the painted lines are to indicate where you should walk.

This is a quite a wide two-lane 40km/h road that wasn't very busy, mostly because it's got t-intersections at either end of its relatively short length.

And the "big" two-laned 50km/h road. Cars were ripping along here, probably faster than the speed limit. I've driven on this road many times, and the lanes are quite narrow in places. There are also many traffic lights, so if you get up to speed, you quickly have to decelerate to stop again.

Here's another 30 km/h road, with a footpath and poles on the road. The white T on the road is to indicate that there is an entering road on the right.

Medical matters

I feel as though medical/paramedical stuff has taken a significant chunk out of our last two months in Australia. Looking back at the diary, we've had at least one thing almost every week, sometimes more than one. Some of it is routine, others...not so much.

Here's much of what we've had:

• two year medicals (OMF requirement and has resulted in some of the below)
• psychological debrief
• blood tests
• mammogram and PAP smear
• iron infusion for me
• several physio appointments for two of us for various minor injuries or niggles
• immunisation (catch-up for the boys)
• skin infection necessitating antibiotics
• three x-rays
• optometrist (two of us thus far)
• dentist (just our eldest, the rest of us did this before we left Japan)

Still to come:

• another blood test for me following up on the iron infusion and who knows if that might lead to more appointments
• more physio appointments
• wisdom teeth removal
• more psychologist appointments
• and who knows how many more injuries/illnesses that will need attending to, our youngest is on quite a run at present.

It takes time. I have to admit to being a bit over all the driving. Yes, driving in Brisbane/Ipswich is much easier than Tokyo, however there's so much of it. Most of the above has meant at least 20 minutes drive each way (some more than double that).

And for the most part we've not been significantly unwell. I'd hate to see the list if we were!

It is nice to be doing this in Australia, though. Much of the above would look quite different in Japan, even if you take away the language barrier. For example:

• Mammograms and PAP smears only happen once every two years. To get it you have to be a certain age and go in a certain month. For example, in our local area ladies in their odd years ( eg. 41, 43) who are born Jan to March can get these tests done in June, if you are born April to June you can have them in July. (These details may or may not be exactly right, but they give you the idea). If you miss that month of that year, you have to wait two more years unless you have a symptom that needs investigating! This means that people like us who aren't necessarily in the country on the right year or in the right month can fall through the cracks.
• You can't just walk into a physio (PT for Americans), it is much more medically focused, though I've heard that in Tokyo that there are therapy places you can go, I'm not sure if you don't need a doctor's referral. Thankfully we've never desperately needed that, except for the one time I had a very stiff neck and saw an orthopedic doctor at a local hospital who referred me to a physio in the hospital.
• The immunisation schedule is very different. The shots our boys are having aren't regularly available in Japan.

Does it sound like I'm whinging? I hope not. I'm really glad that we have such ready access to good medical care. I'm just tired of it taking up so much time. But really, compared to what some people deal with on a daily basis, this is nothing. It's good to stay in touch with my friends who have significant disability in their families, it helps me to stay grounded. 

But when people say, "What are you doing while you're in Australia?" It's hard not to think about how much time we've had to spend doing these self-care things, things that aren't really considered "work", but are taking up significant time and energy. 

And of course we're still adjusting to having one car, two people working from home, having a school run to do twice a day, and a fifth person who occasionally needs use of the car (and a parent) but who lives 30 minutes away! This afternoon, as we tried to coordinate our schedule to accommodate one car, a doctor's visit, an optometrist's visit, an x-ray, school run, and a simple trim, I exclaimed, "I just want to go 'home'!" Where there is no school run, the doctor and x-ray, would have been within 1 km from home, and I can independently ride to the hairdresser.

Our local area

This is Six Mile Creek, still running despite how dry everything is. We've
had short, light showers only a couple of times since we arrived six weeks ago.

We've landed in a delightful area that I didn't know existed, though we've driven past many times. We're in basically in the same area as last time, just 6 km west in a neighbouring suburb. This suburb, Collingwood Park, is about 30 km south-west from Brisbane CBD in the neighbouring city of Ipswich and about 11 km east of Ipswich's CBD. 

It used to be a mining area, though I can only find information about one mine in the actual suburb. The area has a reputation from an incident of subsiding land that happened ten years ago and resulted in a group suing the government.

In any case, there isn't any mining happening here now, but there is nearby bushland to roam about in. In researching a little for this post I discovered the suburb has only a bit more than six thousand people living here. Population density is distinctly lower than what we're used to. Where we live in Tokyo there are more people per square kilometre than there is in this whole suburb. 

We're still close enough to major roads, though, so it's a convenient spot to be located for these months. The Ipswich motorway, a major east-west road, is only six minutes from our front door. School for our youngest is only six kilometres or 10 minutes away. Yesterday I drove to a doctor's clinic 27 kilometres away and it took me well under an hour. Granted I wasn't driving at peak commuting times, but it still surprises me how easy it is to get around in this spacious city. The roads are wide too, driving on them isn't so much a "dodge-em" exercise as it can be on the tiny roads in Tokyo. It's a good thing that driving isn't nearly so stressful as driving can be in Tokyo as we're doing whole heap more than we usually do. We can reach several decent shopping centres within 20 minutes by car, including a large grocery store just down the road (1.5km, which in Australian terms is very close).

Below is the view from our front door. The road seems a long way away! We can't quite see the horizon, but there's plenty of sky. Out behind our house is scrubland. So from our windows we can see gum trees in most directions.

Below is a Jacaranda tree in the car park of our home church (located just five minutes drive from our house). Church does have a car park, something we don't have in Tokyo.

A beautiful "mackerel sky" spotted last week at our local gym, where we're all exercising at least once, if not twice a week—it's between our house and the school.

I just love the blue skies (even though I know that means no rain). That blue is so common here that you can take it for granted...unless you've lived overseas. In Tokyo we rarely see such blue sky. 

This is a eucalyptus tree (colloquially known as "gum trees" in Australia) in the scrub behind our house.

Another new driver's licence

Today I renewed my Japanese driver's licence. I now have had a Japanese driver's licence for about 17 years (and an Australian one for over 25 years)! That sounds amazing to me, have we really been here that long? Sometimes, if I think about the consequences of something going wrong in Japan, it scares me to get out on the road, but for the most part I'm fine. I'm really thankful that Australia and Japan have an agreement that allowed (after a decent amount of red tape) us to transfer our Australian driver's licence without a test.

In the midst of our camping trip last July, stopping for lunch and food
before moving on to our next scenic campsite.

Having a car and a licence gives us a number of additional options like being able to explore more of Japan on our budget because we can take a tent and being able to serve others by helping them get to school sporting events, retreats, and conferences. These two things are wonderful gifts to us and to others.

Today I was also able to do this "chore" with a friend whose birthday falls this month also. We got the job done then stopped for lunch and coffee on the way home. We had a great informal "debrief" on recent parenting stresses, plus lots of deep conversation about doing life as internationals. It was a wonderful excuse to spend extra time together. We're both busy people, with eight children between us, so an excuse to do this alone was great. And again, in this cross-cultural life you never know how much time you're ever going to have a friend in your locality, so it's best to grasp it in both hands and make the most of it.


Here is the description of the much lengthier process I had to go through last time I renewed my licence. I've been "good" since then (no traffic infringements) and was rewarded with a much shorter process in a closer (and smaller) location. It only took us about an hour and a half, as opposed to half a day!

The sights you see

When we're out and about in japan, we often see interesting sights. One of the fun things of being in a country where people travel a lot on foot, bike, and by public transport is that you see more of people's lives than you do in countries where people load everything in their car and drive around. For example, the other day after church we saw a man pushing a double bass along a road on a trolley. 

Another factor are houses without large yards to hide things, so you see things outside the front of a house that you probably wouldn't in more spread-out countries. Here's a somewhat random collection of photos from the last several months of driving/riding around.

Here's a confusing intersection. Not only do the signs have way too many arrows, look at the traffic signals!

I told you it was random. Here were some beautiful rock formations we drove past on our camping trip (west coast of the Noto peninsula, for those who want to know)

We drove 2,000 km on our camping trip. I can't tell you how many tunnels we drove through, but "dozens" would probably be the best way to describe it. On some roads we barely seemed to get out of a tunnel before we were back in one again.

This was a curious jacket we happened upon not far from home.

Lots of people in Kyoto on a late Saturday afternoon.

This one was local, but not unusual. This two-way road is too narrow to have a footpath/sidewalk/pavement. Instead there is a white line drawn on the road. If you were dependent on a wheeled pusher, would you use this road to get around? Probably this lady didn't have any other options.

Washing hung out to dry and shoes on the fence, just a couple of metres off a major road.

Thin houses are common.

This photo I took in the car park of a camping shop. One of these is ours. I think we fit in pretty well, don't you? Until we put our camping gear on top covered by a blue tarp!

There is a propensity to the cute in Japan, as you probably know. It isn't uncommon to see cute logos. This dentist even has two animal statues outside the clinic.

This was probably once cute, but it is now just sad. These poor two Miffies are terribly soiled.

Today we drove past this house with stuffed toys stuffed in the fence. I'm not sure why, but surely they'll soon end up like the Miffies above?

Yes, the below photo is as seen. The Japanese language works fine in three directions. Top to bottom and right to left and left to right. So they have no problem with messing with English, though I think the below is supposed to be seen in a mirror. I think it would be the lucky person who could catch sight of this truck in their mirror!

Whenever we go to Costco we drive past this apricot coloured restaurant. I find the name of it rather intriguing: "Flying Garden". I'm not sure if I'd be game to go in!

Another common sight: mums riding with their children on the way home from kindergarten with all the various bags the kids need strung off the back of the child seat. I have to say, though, that these seats are a whole lot safer than when we first bought one in 2001, back then there were no headrests. The only seat you could buy was waist high.

This is representative of many homes in Tokyo. With little garden space, the metre or so between house and fence is often filled with garden. I love how they make the most of every little space.

Again, drying washing wherever you can. This was a commercial property and also just off a major road.

These amazing "time" capsules are often seen riding around. They cover the child seats, protecting them from rain and also cold wind. I sometimes look at them in summer and think the kids must be roasting, though.