There are stop/go lights for pedestrians and cyclists at every corner of every road junction in Wakayama City and when you appreciate that Wakayama, like many cities in Japan, is built up along a huge system of grids it starts to dawn on you just how many stop/go lights that amounts to.
The speed of any journey is necessarily frustrated by these lights, which are not user triggered and seem to be timed arbitrarily. Often you wait and wait and wait and wait, the length of time increasing proportionally when it's raining, raining, raining, raining.
On an average day I encounter 23 of these crossings and wait an average of 1.5 mins per crossing which works out to about 34.5 mins a day spent waiting. That's an average of 241.5 mins a week, 966 mins a month, which means that, on average I will wait at road crossings for 8 DAYS every year. 8 DAYS!
Surely then, given these figures, I can be forgiven for occasional bouts of jaywalking from time to time, particularly during the evening when there's little road traffic. Surely? It would seem not. Stand up (if you can) elderly population of Wakayama City! You whose reproachful glances have steeped me in guilt these many days, you whose open mouthed, disbelieving stares have made me hang my head in shame and check my reflection in shop windows in the fear that horns may have sprouted from my temples or, at the very least, a penis lolls ridiculously from my forehead. In deference to your collective greater years I now wait out the changing lights and count the minutes of my life pissing away into the wind, just as you have yours.

I guess I can use the 1.5 minutes each crossing demands of me to calculate how much time I'll spend sat on the toilet during my lifetime. Or maybe I don't want to know.