I was driving and the cars ahead of me pulled to the side of the road, so I pulled to the side of the road, because I assumed we were all about to be arrested. Nothing came. No siren. No police. Then, slowly, from the other direction, a line of cars with their headlights on. The oncoming traffic stopped too. Both directions. A four lane road went silent for a stranger. A man in the truck ahead of me got out of his truck. He stood beside the door. He took his cap off, held it against his chest, and looked at the road. He did not know them. I asked him afterward. He did not know them. I want to describe what I did next, and I am aware that it was excessive. I got out. I straightened my jacket. I faced the road and I bowed from the waist, thirty degrees, which is the depth we reserve for a superior you will never be able to repay, and I held it until the last vehicle had passed, which took forty seconds, and my back hurt, and I did not care. Then I said to the man in the cap that in eight hundred years my country has produced a great deal of ceremony, that we have written manuals on the correct depth of a bow for seventeen separate situations, and that we have nothing, nothing whatsoever, that stops a highway for a person no one in the road has ever met. He said, "Yeah, we do that here." I said that it is not a small thing. He said, "Nah." I said that a nation which halts its own commerce, with no order given, with no law compelling it, for a family it will never be introduced to, has understood something my ancestors would have gone to war to be taught. He said, "You from Japan?" I said yes. He said, "Cool," and got back in his truck. I have since been told it is not required by law in most places. It is done because it is done. Somebody's grandfather did it, did not explain it, and the explanation was not necessary. I have stopped four times since. Twice I was alone on the road. Nobody saw me do it. I got out both times.