After a few days at the in-laws, we are getting ready to return home. This means we are doing everything we can to avoid packing. I’m working on meditation and breathing exercises and trying to teach She Who Must Be Obeyed the proper swear words to use for the drive home.

I’ve mentioned before how one of the traditions of Japanese news is to report on the vacation rush and the U-Turn rush every time there’s a major holiday.

Part of the purpose of this seems to be to find a use for the dozens of tower and traffic cameras that have been set up around the country. This means we are subjected to dozens of images of expressways with one half packed and the other barren. The news reports include details about how many kilometers long the traffic jam is and how long it will take to get from Interchange A to Interchange B (not their real names). The reports are usually along the lines of “The line to Interchange B is 42 kilometers long. If you leave now you will reach Interchange B in four days and will have to eat one of your children or find a child to eat. If you are traveling the opposite direction, from Interchange B to Interchange A you will reach Interchange A in 17 minutes.”

(Note to the uninitiated: Probably 98% of Japanese expressways are toll roads. The interchanges are the only places to enter and exit the toll roads.)

The networks also send reporters in cars into the heart of the mess as if we won’t believe the traffic jam is bad unless we see the traffic jam from the inside. It never occurs to them that by doing so they are contributing to the mess. It also never occurs to them they could get the same effect by carefully filming in a parking lot. (This is the same mentality that convinces reporters to don expensive rain gear and stand along the coast in the middle of hurricanes so they can tell us not to go near the coast during a hurricane.)

I also suspect the news programs are struggling to stay relevant. In the smart phone age we can get up to date traffic information as we drive. We don’t really need the news reports. We can see the red lines on Google maps and get our swear words ready. We can also pick which child we love the least and prepare her for cooking. (Something like that.)