Finally having some sense of being settled into my home there was another thing I had to take care of. I didn’t like the idea of my company profiting of me through car rental to do a job they hired me to do. It took a lot of nerves to say no to the company car, but according to Jordan Peterson, you have to be a little disagreeable to get what you want out of life sometimes.
I was a little panicked as I began searching to no avail, all the cars on the websites I looked at were well above my price range. Looking through page after page I was beginning to lose hope. Being a dopamine addicted millennial I logged into Facebook to take my mind off things for a little bit.
Mitsubishi Kei Car For Sale 10万円
The last thing I expected to see was a car perfectly in my price range. . . although I was skeptical of the data Facebook was continuously collecting on me.
The Power of Asking
“Hey my name is Mauricio I just graduated college and I recently moved here to Japan. I need a car for work, but this MiniCar is a little out of my price range. Is there anything you can do to lower the price”
“Actually were holding on to this car because of friend of ours recently passed away, We can probably knock the price down a little bit”
I didn’t know how I felt about buying a car belonging to someone who had passed. . . especially when his friends were holding onto it. As weird as I am, I believe that a person’s possessions, especially a car, is an extension of the self. In highschool, I was able to tell who was in attendance that day by looking at the mostly full parking lot.
The Car I was Currently Sitting In
was a train car. To get to gunma without walking too much involved taking three trains and a bus. First was the local Oito Line to Matsumoto Station, followed by another Local Train on the Shinonoi Line to Nagano Station, the last train was a Shinkansen(Bullet Train) to Kumagaya Station in Gunma. Despite the lack of knowledge of the Japanese train system things went smoothly until.
I arrived at the bus station, not wanting to make a mistake and end up at the wrong place I asked the bus driver if the bus’s final destination was Ota. He waved me on board, sitting down I rode the bus for what seemed like an eternity. When we finally stopped it was at the bus depot . . . and the bus depot wasn’t in Ota.
I called John
When he answered he sounded upset, he told me to give the phone to the bus driver. After five minutes of discussion, I was directed to sit on another bus that was heading towards the right direction. . . it wouldn’t get me there completely, but it would get me a lot closer than I was. Thirty more minutes of riding a bus later and the bus driver motioned that this is where I was to wait.
The only thing around me was a bike park, rice paddies, farms, and residential houses. I thought back to the time when we had Japanese exchange students come to our college.
“Where do you want to go when you get to Japan?” they all asked.
“Gunma” When I said that all I was met with was blinking, blank stares, and gasps.
“Why there’s nothing out there but farmland and mountains?”
As I was reminiscing in the past a van pulled to the side of the road. I saw an american looking guy open the door and wave me to get in. It was such a relief to have someone there to show me the rest of the way. The man poured me some coffee out of a thermos, the warm taste felt nice after such an exhausting journey.
“You’re probably hungry so let’s go grab some lunch”
Pizza in Paradise
the same lacrosse sweatshirt that I wore when I met my girlfriend 
Sharing a meal is one of the best ways for people to bond. As I sat down to eat my pizza, drink my non-alcoholic beer, and the first thing that came out of my mouth was an apology.
“I’m sorry I took the wrong bus” my bad habit of avoiding eye contact was something that was hard to avoid in these situations.
“Oh I wasn’t mad at you, I was mad at the bus driver. . .you were obviously a foreigner so he should have taken extra care to make sure you were on the right bus.”
With that out of the way, the conversation included the essential topics when talking to anyone where you are from, why did you end up here, and where are you going? When John heard me talk about cars he mentioned making a couple of detours before taking me to see the car.
I was all for it.
First Stop was a Shop
John’s friend owned a shop specializing in drift cars. It was unfortunate that it was closed on that day, but just seeing the cars was enough for me to be happy on the inside. I thought back to sitting in my friend Brandon’s drift car. . . yeah, that feeling was one of the reasons I sat here.
The next place was the Subaru factory. Being an owner of a WRX myself it was amazing to see a parking lot filled with nothing but Subarus. Kei cars, Subaru Forester STI’s, and Imprezas from every year you could imagine sat in the lot outside.
“If you work for Subaru I think you have to drive one” John said as we slowly passed by. Thinking the car would be at a place like a warehouse I was surprised when we pulled into a little neighborhood.
I Was Served Tea and Snacks
in a western looking home with a BMW sitting under a carport outside. The owner, who was a friend of John, was talking about how the materials and building plans for the hoe had come from Seattle. Another odd synchronicity I thought as John grabbed the keys.
During this time I asked John why there wasn’t some sort of craigslist or private party selling in Japan. He told me that it was rare because Japanese people were afraid of selling private party for some reason.
The car sat among a grass field down the road from the house. And although it wasn’t an aggressive, sporty looking car by any means. It was cute and the size of the A-Pillar wasn’t as large as most modern cars. Owning a kei car would mean that fuel would be cheap as the engine was smaller than what some motorcycles utilized.
After taking a test drive we returned to the house. John sat down and said that he would be further reducing the price by another seventy dollars due to my transportation costs. After that he and the Japanese woman were having a discussion on which way I would take home. I didn’t understand much of what they were saying, but I understood the part where they said Usui Touge.
I Wanted to Hit up The Touge
but that would make my two-hour trip into a three and a half hour trip if I didn’t get lost or stop for snacks. Assuring my new friends I would be fine as I had made five-hour road trips before I took to the highway and made my way home.
