In Japan, almost nobody learns to drive from their parents. You go to a driving school. A man in a company jacket teaches you on a pretend road, inside a fence, with pretend traffic lights. You pay him. You thank him. You never see him again. Your father is not in the car. Your mother is not in the car. Nobody you love is ever in that passenger seat. So last month, I asked every American I know in Tokyo one question. "Who taught you to drive?" Twenty-three people. Twenty-two of them smiled before they answered. "My grandpa. On the farm. I was eleven. My feet didn't reach the pedals, so he put a phone book behind my back." (Nebraska, 38) "My mom. Dad said he 'couldn't take it.' Mom pressed her imaginary brake so hard for three months, she wore a hole in the floor mat." (Georgia, 29) "First lesson, Dad made me change a tire. Second lesson, check the oil. Third lesson, he handed me the keys and said, 'Now you can drive.'" (Texas, 52) "First snow of the year, Dad took me to the empty high school lot and told me to slam on the brakes. On purpose. 'Now you know what the car does when it stops listening to you.'" (Minnesota, 33) "My stepdad. He wasn't my dad yet. By the end of that summer, he was." (Oklahoma, 35) "The day I got my license, I drove home by myself. My dad followed me the whole way in his truck. He said he was 'just going the same way.' He was not going the same way." (Tennessee, 44) "Every day after school, Dad let me drive the truck to the end of our road to get the mail. I was nine. It was a quarter mile. Best quarter mile of my life." (Wyoming, 46) "My dad. Three hours in his pickup. He said one word the whole time: 'Easy.' I'm forty-two. I still hear it at every yellow light." (Iowa, 42) Not one of them talked about a class. They all talked about a person. Japan pays a professional so that nobody's parent ever has to sit in that seat. In America, a parent hands a fifteen-year-old the keys to a two-ton machine, sits down on the passenger side, and puts their own life in that kid's hands. You call it a driving lesson. I think it's the first time someone says to you, without saying it: I trust you with my life. And then there was the twenty-third. Colton. Kentucky. 38. He didn't smile when I asked. He looked at his coffee for a while first. His dad died when he was twelve. The truck sat in the barn for three years. A stick shift. Nobody touched it. His mom couldn't drive stick. The winter he turned fifteen, she started walking to the barn after he was in bed. Every night. The owner's manual open on the steering wheel. The dome light on. She stalled that truck, he figures, about four hundred times. He could hear it from his bedroom. He never said anything. Neither did she. One morning in March, she set the keys next to his cereal and said, "Boots on." She taught him in his father's truck, up and down their gravel lane. She sat on the passenger side, where her husband used to sit. He stalled it forty times. She never once mentioned it. "She learned the hardest thing she ever learned," Colton said, "so a stranger wouldn't have to teach me." Colton has a daughter now. She's fifteen. This summer, he started teaching her. Same truck. Same gravel lane. His mom insists on coming along. She sits in the back seat. She says somebody has to supervise. Somebody sat in that passenger seat for you. Who was it? (If it was your mom with the imaginary brake, she counts twice.)