In Japan, roads can be pretty narrow, and it’s not uncommon to find a street which is so narrow that you can hardly believe it’s even a one-way street, and then you realize it’s used for two-way traffic. Wide roads exist, but they are few and far between. A three- or four-lane road is fairly hard to find in Japan, with highways (expressways) being no exception to that rule. Commonly, two lanes is a wide thoroughfare in Japan, and most of the major traffic arteries in Tokyo are two lanes almost all the way.

So naturally, truckers make parking lots out of them. I see this pretty much every day on the way to work. I take Route 20, or Koushu Kaido, one of the major east-west routes going through western Tokyo Prefecture. And on the stretches where there are not many businesses, trucks are commonly parked along the side of the road, their drivers taking a nap or break or something. Here’s one I spotted yesterday. In the photo, with time frozen, it’s kind of hard to see that the purple truck on the left is not moving (I should have taken a longer exposure to blur moving traffic), but you can see its parking lights are on. Also note the no-parking sign at top left.

And no, there are no construction sites nearby to explain why they’ve stopped at that location–no unloading is going on, nothing. They’re just parked there. While this happens mostly on the major roads, I’ve seen it on most two-lane streets that I regularly drive on.

This of course forces all traffic for about a hundred meters or more behind the truck to merge into a single lane, and I have often seen three or four trucks parked like this along a few hundred meter’s stretch of road, essentially making a major boulevard into a one-lane street for a considerable length–enough to cause traffic jams.

And, as is usual for this kind of thing in Japan, nobody seems to mind or care or complain. Certainly the police never do anything about it.