Explore everyday life in Japan
Parking in Japan can be a big problem. The roads here are often very narrow and they rarely have shoulders. This means that on-street parking, for the most part, doesn’t exist. If you have a car, and you need to park it somewhere, you will most likely have to use either a parking garage, an elevator-like automobile storage facility, a rooftop parking area, or a paid parking lot. Before you leave your house or apartment, you will need to think about where you are going to park and how long you are going to park there. Keeping an extra pocket in your wallet for leftover validated parking tickets, tickets that stores give you based on the amount of your purchase, can save you a lot of money in the long run.
One kind of parking enforcement system in Japan that I have never seen anywhere else, or maybe just never noticed anywhere else before, is pictured here. Rather than taking a ticket from a barrier gate ticket dispenser, you can freely drive into a parking lot, choose an open space, and then back your car over a metal wheel block, which will elevate after your car has been parked in the same space for a few minutes. This wheel block is connected to a payment station that will keep track of how long the wheel block has been raised. When you are ready to retrieve your car, you type in the number of the parking space that you parked in, pay your fee, and the wheel block will descend, allowing you to take your car and be on your way.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting daily updates about life in Japan, please consider following me. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.