Japan 2014: In Car Sat Nav

While in Japan we hired a Toyota 86 (aka GT86), although we managed to get a manual gearbox model it was not equipped with a English based navigation system. But we did manage to use it for over 1000km of travel in cities and out into the Gunma mountain roads and tolls.

Unless you know the Japanese characters entering an address, postcode etc is almost impossible but we quickly found a option that I had not seen before. This option is the ability to navigate by phone number.

Entering the number is just shown as a numeric keypad on our system which you simply enter in the entire number. This works for almost any landline number for places like hotels, filling stations etc and proved extremely accurate method of setting the destination.

Obviously with a Japanese sat nav comes spoken Japanese instructions but these are often only repeating what is clearly shown with the on screen maps and directional arrows.