Turn Off The GPS, Switch Off The Sat Nav: Author Katie Kitamura Rediscovers The Magic Of Japan Without A Map

Many years ago, before we had kids, my husband and I did a road trip across the American southwest. There were some impediments to this journey – chiefly the fact that, despite growing up in California, I’d never learnt how to drive. My husband and I struck a bargain: he would do the driving and I would give him directions.

We purchased a pleasingly oversized Rand McNally road atlas from a petrol station and as we set out I settled into the passenger seat, map spread across my lap, flagging imminent turns. I occasionally lost track of our location and I have the distinct memory of pointing out several highway exits just as we sailed past them. Looking back, my navigation attempts seem comically inefficient, but the entire trip is ringed with a halo of nostalgia in my mind – for the pleasure of detours, of unplanned discovery, of losing my way.

Travel has changed and nowadays it’s a lot harder to get lost. It’s easier to plan a trip, and easier to execute it, but the price of this efficiency is that you often feel like you’re following a well-trodden path wherever you are in the world, one you’ve travelled before via countless blogs and reels. We’ve forgotten the joy to be found in total disorientation, the adventures you invite when you veer off the sat nav-recommended route.

I recently returned to Japan for the first time in nearly 15 years, this time with my husband and two children in tow. It had been a while since I had navigated the country or used my middling Japanese. I was relatively confident that we would get lost, that there would be failures of communication. Nothing of the sort took place. Some of that had to do with the fact that, in the years since I’d been there, the general level of English-language proficiency had risen, but it mostly had to do with the fact that travel in Japan, like travel everywhere, has been smoothed out by the advent of various kinds of technology. There are apps that give directions in any language, in any city, disembodied voices that give you plenty of warning when an exit is approaching. It’s now possible to contact friends and family via WhatsApp without worrying too much about international service fees and, of course, Google Translate allows you to communicate in 249 languages with a single tap on your phone.