04/09/2026 JPBT Day 18 : Komyuniti Sentaa

The way I mentally manage driving the bike in countries with left side driving is I tell myself, “Just ride on the wrong side of the road”. That actually works well for the first few days. But then you get acclimated, and your brain goes a little haywire - which is the wrong side again?? Now it’s not so clear anymore which wrong side we should be riding on.

In a somewhat related form of brain trickery, trying to remember which Japanese characters from which of the two Japanese alphabets correspond to which sound is giving me a bit of deja vu from when I was a kid. If that last sentence confused you, good. That is how it feels! I can actually still recall the childhood frustration of trying to understand the meaning of the curves, lines and shapes of the Roman alphabet. It’s kind of neat to stir up those memories.

The comforting part is having recently seen my nephew sounding out words, only to be reading fluently what seemed like months later. The struggle seems long from with-in, but quick from with-out.

We hadn’t been able to find a place to stay for the upcoming lighting storm. We bought a “data only” SIM when we arrived in Japan. This had the benefit of convenience (it was an eSIM so we just clicked a link and it worked!). To get a Japanese phone number, we would have had to show up in person, fill out lots of paperwork and also pay more. At first it did not seem worth it… But in today’s security landscape, à phone number is more vital than it used to be. In this very rural part of Japan, there aren’t any “booking.com” listings. (Actually, there was one priced at $964 for 2 nights). That means our best chance at finding a place is using Google Maps. The problem with that method is that the only contact info is a phone number. The Japanese don’t use “WhatsApp” very much… they use an alternative called “LINE” - but the only way to get LINE to work is by registering your… Japanese phone number…. You can already see how the situation has become an ouroboros.

But we did finally manage to scrape the email address of two places from the comfort of our downhill sloping tent. One of them turned out to be a community center where they rent floor space for $6 per person per night - up to 10 people. They asked us to rent the whole place, which was not a problem because of the low price, so if 8 of you want to make a quick trip to Japan, we will leave the light on for you (we can’t figure how to turn them off anyway).

We rode our bike to the roadside “rest stop” which is where we made the key exchange. There was a bit of confusion at first because this was a rest-area, not a hotel lobby, but finally they found a guy who knew what was going on. No one spoke English, and “hoteru” (hotel) - while à part of our limited vocabulary - was just going to do us more harm than good because they probably would have tried to send us to a city in search of a real hotel.

Shortly after our arrival, the lightning and thunder made its own arrival clear outside. Whew! Just in time.

By the way, today’s title.. that’s how tu say “Community Center” in Japanese. If you sound it out, it sounds pretty much like it does in English!