in cars
February 3, 2004
When I got back to Okinawa from Osaka, on arriving in the airport I almost immediately ran into a bloke from my island, and thereby managed to get a lift all the way to the port (saving me nearly three hours of bus and taxi rides). After Osaka’s breath-condensing chilliness, it was strange to see clear blue skies and people walking round in t-shirts. In the car was a gadget that is not only extremely Japanese but also probably one of the worst ideas of all time: a car tv, set into the dashboard, and presumably intended for the driver to watch. I’d heard about these things, but I always assumed that they were behind the driver, for passengers. But no – right there, in the middle of the dashboard, above the car radio. We watched game shows for a fair chunk of the ride home, and somehow managed to avoid causing any major traffic incidents.
Kim tells me that actually the ‘dashboard’ is the bit directly behind the steering wheel, and that the bit to the left, despite being continuous with the dashboard, is not in fact the dashboard proper. I stand corrected, and I would like to apologise for my misleading and confusing use of language in the above entry.