Lost in Matsuyama

The morning after I arrived in Matsuyama, Erin rode downtown with me so I could wander the shopping arcades at my leisure while he practiced the driving test for foreigners who want a driver’s license in Ehime. Ehime, by the way, is the prefecture in which I live. Japanese prefectures function almost exactly like states, but they’re closer in size to American counties than states (unless you count Rhode Island as a state).

Anyway, Erin left me to my own devices at about 10am. I found a restaurant that looked like it had been plucked straight out of some granola-eating Californian’s dreams, with salads made from vegetables and leafy greens with healthy amounts of avocados, sprouts, and tuna for good measure. Fortunately, I’m a granola-eating Californian, and I smiled at my fortune for not only finding this fantastic hole in the wall, but also for the fact that it had a picture menu to boot (common in Tokyo but rare in Matsuyama).

After wandering through a video game arcade (the Japanese seem to be peculiarly obsessive over rhythm-based games, BTW), a few overpriced clothing boutiques, and a five story bookstore, I headed for the apartment at around noon. I chose not to go back exactly the way I came with Erin because we took the scenic route down by the river to get downtown. I planned to take what I thought was the most direct route from downtown to the apartment, cutting out the section by the river.

I won’t bore you with a play by play of what happened next, because I have barely a clue more than you do what my ultimate path was, but suffice to say I became utterly lost in short order. Not “Shoot, I should have turned the other way back there” lost or even “Crud, now I have to retrace my steps and figure out where I went wrong” lost, but “Holy carp I’m in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language and even if I did I don’t know my new address yet and I can’t read the street signs and I don’t know anyone’s phone number even if I had a phone or knew how to use a pay phone why do these streets all look the same and why aren’t they laid out in a nice grid pattern I wish I had a map” kind of lost.

Most Japanese neighborhoods have a koban (こばん – neighborhood police desk about the size of a photo booth), and I had to remind myself that I’ve never been one to panic when I realized I hadn’t even seen one while wandering around. I was hesitant to ask anyone for directions because between my very limited Japanese and the fact that I didn’t know where I needed to go, I anticipated more awkwardness than productivity, but I eventually stopped at a gas station and communicated the fact that I wanted a “mappu.” The entire five-person shift of recent high school graduates then tried to simultaneously ask me questions using random English words whose meaning they might have known at some point but were mostly senseless as used. I really didn’t even know where I needed to go, but I remembered passing Route 11 at one point while we were riding around the day before, and I know we rode along the river to get downtown, so I pointed to where Route 11 crossed the Ishite River. Makes sense, right?

So they drew arrows on my map and I started back on my way, quickly realizing that even though my route was marked on my map, I would have to identify the turns by relative sizes and distances of the streets from one another, rather than street names.

My heart sank when I eventually got to Route 11 and the river – I didn’t recognize the intersection at all. I decided to follow the river upstream and see if I recognized any of the path I’d followed to get downtown, but I hadn’t ridden the road in that direction in the first place, so I still didn’t recognize anything. It wasn’t until I turned around and went the same direction as I had that morning that I recognized a stretch of road I’d ridden with Erin.

From there, it was sort of a recursive pattern of riding a section of road in both directions for a ways until I found a familiar corner, then go a little further and repeat. I eventually made it back to the apartment exactly at 4pm, which is when my large bags were scheduled to be delivered from Yotsukaido. I arrived as Erin was about to call out the National Guard to search for me; as I arrived he actually had the phone in his hand, about to call the school’s manager to see if she could help search the city.

Here’s a picture of the note Erin left when he went out to search for me at 2:45. After he finished his driving practice, he returned (just after I left, actually) to where he knew I parked my bike that morning, then went home when he saw that my bike was already gone. He’d spent the last hour searching for me by bicycle, returning home a few minutes before I got there.

You have no idea what kind of relief I felt sitting down on the couch in the apartment that afternoon. It was one of those situations where I knew I’d ultimately be okay, but whose resolution had the potential to be far more humbling than it turned out to be. I’m so glad the police weren’t involved.