After a few days in the United States, it came time to go stock up on groceries. As I had only just arrived, I was still living with my parents, and so we bundled into the car and went off to the supermarket. I had forgotten just how far we had to drive to get food!
In Japan, supermarkets were very convenient. In the last apartment that I rented in Japan, I could walk to two different supermarkets in less than five minutes! I also had two 24-hour convenience stores and over ten restaurants that were equally close.
And no, I did not live in the city center. Easy access to food was not limited to my suburb, either. For my first five years in Japan, I lived in what Japanese people call 田舎 (inaka, literally "countryside," but used in conversation to mean "the middle of nowhere"). Even there, I lived a five-minute walk away from one supermarket and a twenty-minute walk away from another.
With food being so convenient, people usually don't buy a carload of groceries at a time. Instead, they usually only buy a few days' worth, a small enough amount that the food can be carried home easily. The mentality behind bagging groceries is, therefore, very different between the United States and Japan—but more on that another time.
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