Life In Japan: Highway Service Areas

There are highway service areas in Japan so elaborate and well-outfitted that families pay the pricey highway toll just to visit them and spend the day. For these folks, going there is the same as going to a park or a shopping mall to hang out and have fun.

Highway service areas in Japan are what we in the U.S. call ‘rest areas’.

Years ago, I used to spend a lot of time traveling the entire Eastern half of America by car. This was roadwork for my music business activities, initially as a musician, then later as a band manager and music producer. Trust me, I’m very familiar with rest areas. While I hear that these days there are some very fancy ones — with restaurants, shops, showers, and the like — this is how I remember them. Since these are current photos, there are obviously still many which conform to this basic design.

There are simple, basic highway service areas in Japan. However, they tend to be atypical. Even these rudimentary iterations provide more than just a restroom and a picnic table. Want to take a break from driving to do some fishing? Or feed some ducks?

Most of Japan’s service areas offer abundant opportunities to shop, eat, relax and play. They are more stop and play than gas and go.

We have a highway service area about 15 minutes from our house, which we visit with my step-daughter, Azusa, and her dog Ji Ji — because it has a dog run! We access it from a small road behind the service area grounds, which runs parallel to the tollway. So actually we visit this highway service area without even going on the highway.

So I won’t be accused of cherry picking a few exemplary but unrepresentative examples, here are just some of the highway service areas within 100 kilometers of my home town.

How do I explain how things work here? I guess it suffices to say that Japanese excel at taking everything to a logical and elegant extreme. They have extremely high standards and are perfectionists. This even shows in something as routine as setting up a place to pull off the road to take a break from driving.