GPS gadget

In true Japanese gadget fashion, every rental car here seems to come with a GPS map system. The higher end cars in the States do too, but here even the cheaper cars have them. At first I wasn’t sure it would be all that useful. After all, the map is all in Japanese (no romanji at all), as is the voice stuff. And even if you learn the basics (“right”, “left”, and “straight”), you’re always left with accidents like one of the guys who was here before me – he managed to program his to tell him how to get to work, but he couldn’t figure out how to have it get him back to the hotel.

After two months of living by it, I have to admit I’m sold. It’s true that you do need another map – not only is figuring out your ultimate destination a little easier on a bilingual map, but the screen is really too small to plan out a long route on. So you figure out the general idea of where you’re going and set off. It completely takes away the need to be able to read the street signs because the little arrow tells you where you are (although most of the major intersections have signs with Arabic numbers at least).

We figure it has to be hooked up to the car’s electronics (odometer etc) and have some kind of dead reckoning system. That’s the only way to explain how it updates itself while you’re driving through long tunnels (unless there are repeaters inside the tunnels, which seems too expensive). And if you drive in reverse, the arrow still points forward – it knows something about the car.

But it is not perfect. My personal gripe is that the icon for park or garden is very similar to that for a golf course and these posh country clubs get very upset when a very dirty, cheap little rental car comes trundling in. It’s also always amusing to be driving in blank space on the map. And it’s got some kind of snap to function – if you drive along a road that is not on the map but you’re close to one that is, it will tell you you’re on the road it knows (this has caused several inadvertent detours). It also takes a little practice to be able to both look at the road and the display (and the mirrors along the road showing you what’s coming at you around the next blind corner). There’s always the danger that you’ll get too used to watching your progress on the map. While you can generally stay on the road that way, the map doesn’t really tell you about oncoming traffic turning in front of you or the monkey crossing the road.