Parking

My idiosyncratic travel obsessions are all on display in this blog: food, language, transportation, vending machines, and parking, as exemplified by the excessive number of posts I've made in the past on these subjects.

There's plenty of interest to say about parking in Japan.  It seems that it's not just me who is obsessed with parking; sometimes I feel that the whole country is obsessed with parking.  In Matsuyama, pay parking lots are everywhere.  You have to get pretty far out from the city center to find free parking.

Aren't those little Japanese cars cute?  You'll notice there are two colors of license plate: white and yellow.  Cars below a certain weight have yellow license plates; I'm told that there is a tax break for purchasing such cars.  My Japanese host told me that you can compare the relative wealth of different parts of Japan by looking at the percentage of yellow license plates, and you can also chart the continuing economic difficulties in the country by observing the ratio of yellow plates increase over time.

Usually the cars with white license plates are bigger, but occasionally you see small heavy cars (like Mini Coopers) with white plates, and big light cars (Japanese SUVs that seem to be made of plastic) with yellow plates.

Quite a few of the small, new Japanese cars look like throwbacks to little British 60s numbers, like the white car on the left in the picture below.  I'm quite fond of those.

Many of the pay parking lots have mechanisms in each space that appear to be designed to prevent cars from moving.

Here's a close-up of one in the engaged position:

I never did figure out how these work.  Do they come up automatically after you've parked, and not retract until you pay the full amount owed?  Or does the car owner voluntarily engage them to discourage theft?

Here's a different design:

And here, just for fun, is a Mini Cooper, a car lock mechanism, and a stray cat:

Because space is at a premium in Japan, there are many mechanisms for squeezing cars into small spaces.  Some are quite elaborate, and while there is some overall similarity to some of the parking structures I saw in Seoul, there are quite a few differences in detail.

Here are some cars stacked up in layers:

I really like that last picture, it puts me in mind of an Olympic medal ceremony.

More intriguing to me than the lots are the parking towers, which seem impossibly narrow.  This picture was taken from Osaka's Tsūtenkaku Tower:

I wish I could see inside these things to understand how the cars are distributed.  This is the parking tower in the tourist section of Matsuyama:

There are two entrances, each of which is a car elevator.  What happens to the car after it reaches its destination floor?  Does it drive forward?  (The driver does not go up with the car.)  Is it shunted off to the side?  It's hard to see how more than two cars can fit in each level, given that much of the interior space must be taken up by the elevator shafts and counterweights.

Here's a video of a car getting whisked up into the tower.

Many parking structures are even more elaborate than the simple elevators. After many weeks, I finally managed to get some video footage of them in the last days of my stay in Japan. I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

The above two videos are of commercial parking structures.  This one is residential: