I have always been hesitant to drive a car in Japan. I'm afraid I'll run over pedestrians. I'm from the countryside in Ohio, where we have no pedestrians, just possums and raccoons. You're allowed to run over them. Sure, I had seen pedestrians before, but they were always on signs. They never actually walked off the sign and crossed the road. So when I came to Japan, I was surprised to see many pedestrians crossing the street.

Then I considered learning how to drive a motorbike. I figured I couldn't run over too many pedestrians, since I could hear them shout, leaving me enough time to swerve and avoid them. Besides, learning to ride a motorbike must be easy -- it's just a horse on wheels. I imagined riding my metal horse on the road with other moving hunks of metal, like a metal horse race. It must be similar to what rush hour was like before they invented the automobile: workers stampeding home on horses.

I had an opportunity to learn to ride a motorcycle when I was in Indonesia, a more chaotic place to learn but more convenient because you don't need a license. When I saw 10-year-old Indonesian kids driving motorcycles, I knew that whoever came up with the idea of vrooming around on a piece of metal must have been a genius.