The Times they are a Changin'
Dave's endless musings on the paradise lost of Southeast Asian bungalows made me think of sharing some of my own musings.
I'm on my way back from a road trip in Kyushu. Of course I would rather push my car than rely on a Car Navi, so I navigate with paper maps. My Kyushu map book is nearly 10 years old, bought for my first road trip there in 2017.
It's quite remarkable how little has changed in 10 years. Navigating with the older maps is still incredibly easy. Some highways and bypasses have been extended, but not at a crazy pace: if you look at the old map and see an unfinished highway, you can guess that it's probably been extended one or two towns over by now.
It's rare, but some roads have been re-named. So what was once prefectural road 221 might now be prefectural road 53. It's a little disorienting when you come across it, but it was quite rare.
The map shows the location of key services of interest to drivers: convenience stores, supermarkets, gas stations. A good 80-90% of these are unchanged. Enough that if you're looking for a gas station, say, and the map has two in the town you're coming up to, you can be reasonably certain that at least one of them is still there, in the same place.
The only completely new thing I came across was a huge industrial complex (still under construction) for developing semiconductors, which was all farmland 10 years ago, according to the map.
The other thing that's changed are road closures in Kumamoto: my map, printed just after the 2016 earthquakes there, has lots of notes about roads closed at the time of publication, due to earthquake damage. By now, those roads are largely fixed and operational again....but there are all kinds of new roads closed due to the more recent earthquake.
Japan is heavily mountainous. Minor roads through the mountains are regularly being taken out by landslides, flooding, etc. If you want to drive on more obscure roads, you need to look up the latest road status online regardless.