Stupid things I've done Recently: I Got into a Car Accident/ Car Incident

To make this story even more embarrassing, of all the people to have in my passenger seat I had the Gifu University Visiting Professor of Chemical Engineering from Thailand.

I didn’t know this gentleman previously, but he needed a ride to the party, and a mutual friend asked me to pick him up. We talked about life in Japan on the car ride there.

Since he didn’t speak Japanese, he had to communicate with people in his English, which is always an uphill battle in Japan. “It’s amazing,” he told me. “Hardly anyone in Japan can speak decent English. It’s not our native language in Thailand either, but we study it and we learn it. In Japan everyone has at least 6 or 8 years of English education by the time they finish college, and no one can speak a word.”

“That seems to be a common complaint,” I said.

He also talked about his students. “They’re very bright and they work very hard,” he said. “They even come in on the weekends to work on their projects. But their so obsessed with procedure that they just spend a lot of time doing little things that don’t need to be done.”

“You’d be surprised how much of that is true in the English education as well,” I commented.

So we were chatting away like that. I had some trouble finding my friend’s apartment, as I do every time. I knew the general area he lives in, but these Japanese apartment complexes all look the same and I was wandering down endless side streets. I was trying to avoid calling for directions because I always end up calling for directions. I tried to explain this to the Professor. “I can’t call for directions because he’ll really lose his patience with me. I always get lost on the way to his house.”

Eventually though I gave in and called for directions. My friend was gracious enough about it, and I listened to him explain it again. “Mmm hmm, okay, right, got it. Okay, thanks a lot. Good-bye.” As soon as I hung up I realized that I had only absorbed half of what he had told me. But maybe that would be enough.

So we were driving around the streets, looking out for the landmarks my friend had told me about, and I was trying to explain to the professor why I absolutely couldn’t call a second time for directions, when my side mirror hit the car coming the other way. The frame was on a hinge so it simply swung back like it was supposed to do. The glass on my mirror shattered.

In a way it wasn’t my fault. Japanese roads, especially Japanese roads in the countryside, are often not big enough for two cars to pass each other without one pulling over to the side. This road was especially treacherous as it had started out a bit wider, and then gradually narrowed. (It was the road’s fault, really).

It was my fault in the since that as I was looking for landmarks, I was blatantly not looking at the road in front of me. On the other hand, the car driving the other direction had been going just as fast as I was, and, since I was safely on my side of the road, I think the fault was mutual.

He thought differently though. He was an old Japanese man, and from the moment we stopped our cars he started laying into me about how I wasn’t looking at the road. And he had me there; I hadn’t been, so I didn’t argue this point. Then he accused me of not having a valid license, and I politely corrected him. Although I hate to be someone who cries “racism” everywhere, I’m pretty sure his attitude, especially the assumption that I didn’t have a driver’s license, was simply because I was foreign.

Because I drive a company car, the rules are pretty strict that I have to call the police after every accident. In fact the company accident report form warns ominously that “however slight you may think the accident, failure to properly report it to the police may have unpleasant consequences.”

The old man, whose car wasn’t damaged, didn’t feel it was necessary to call the police. I realized first of all that I didn’t have a clear idea of where I was, didn’t know the phone number for the local police, and besides I always have difficulty understanding the rough dialect the police usually seem to speak. I also imagined calling the police, waiting forever for them to get out to the countryside where we were, and then explaining to them that we had simply swiped side mirrors. And then I began to think to myself that this wasn’t so much a car accident as a “car incident”. We had simply bumped each other a bit in passing. So I never called the police. Hopefully that won’t come back to bite me in the ass.

However all in all, in 5 years of driving in Japan I think I’ve got a pretty good track record. There was one other “car incident” which occurred during my first year in Oita.

A bunch of us went out for a big night in Oita city. I was the sober driver as usual. At the end of the night we piled into my car, which was parked on the side of the road. I pulled out of my parking space, straightened out the car, stepped on the gas, and then immediately hit another parked car. Everyone had a good laugh about that and made jokes like, “Wait a minute, which one of us is the sober driver again?”

I really don’t have an excuse for this. It was just pure stupidity and not paying attention on my part. (Well, if I had to make an excuse, I would say that it was my first year in Japan, and I was still getting used to the narrow roads. Also I was somewhat distracted by the rowdy behavior of my drunken passengers. But both of these excuses are so pathetic that I would never bring them up.)

Again this was another unreported incident. I got out and looked at the damage to the other car. It was dark out and I didn’t look too hard, but seeing none, I simply got back in my car and snuck away.

Oh, and come to think about it there was also the time I caused an accident by driving too slow. That time I really didn’t have a valid drivers license. My international driving license had just expired, and it was a couple months before the local Japanese driving center could schedule me for a test. (They had just changed the law that year regarding international driving licenses, so a number of us JETs were caught by surprise when we returned from summer vacation to learn our international driving licenses were no longer valid.)

I still drove around anyway. Life in Ajimu for two months without a car would have been hard to take. But I was very careful to go exactly the speed limit.

Japan has an interesting system regarding speed limits. They set the limit ridiculously low, and then typically look the other way if you go 20 or 30 kilometers over.
So a car going exactly the speed limit on the expressway can cause problems (as I guess it would in America as well).

One night coming back from Oita city on the expressway, I was driving the speed limit, and a car came speeding up behind me not realizing how slow I was going. Then to avoid hitting me he crashed into the guardrail. I stopped the car to make sure he was all right. He wasn’t very talkative. I think he must have been either upset or embarrassed.

Not having a valid license, I didn’t want to stick around too long, so after I made sure he didn’t need any help, I drove off as he called the tow truck.

Link of the Day
My friend Matt sends me another bizarre article about Japan: Wicked and wanton woman seduces schoolboy same age as son