^[1] Imagine waking up every morning to the sound of a talking truck. Or several talking trucks, loudly saying, over and over again, I’m turning left. Be careful. I’m turning left. Be careful… (左に曲がります。ご注意ください。)

My apartment is on a busy corner, and that sound is the first thing I hear every morning, because in Tokyo (and the rest of Japan too, I guess), trucks talk. Their vocabulary appears to be really limited, but from what I’ve been able to ascertain so far, they seem to have perfectly mastered this one I’m turning left. Be careful… phrase and really like to say it. A lot. Especially as they round the corner outside the window of my apartment. At 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning.

Some know-it-all friends of mine have told me that the reason so many trucks have decided to say this all the time is so that visually impaired people can realize there is a truck turning left directly in front of them, thereby preventing the people from wandering straight into the blind-side danger zone of the truck’s path while it’s in the middle of making a left turn. (Remember that vehicles travel on the left-hand side of the road in Japan, for some reason. And on top of that, drivers sit on the right — the side which the steering wheels in vehicles here all seem to have been moved over to. Yeah, I know it all sounds crazy, but it’s true.)

But I think there is some other hidden purpose to this “truck talk” — similar perhaps to the purpose of those shortwave radio frequencies where all you hear is the voice of a woman with a Spanish accent repeating the same letter of the alphabet over and over again: f f f f f f f f…