A Cautionary Tale

So back at the end of February, I was in a very minor car accident. I was following some friends to a party and when they turned at a stop sign, I went to follow them without looking quite well enough to the side. I hit the passenger door of a car coming up to the intersection. Thankfully, no one was hurt, the damage to both cars was all cosmetic, and the other driver was exceptionally nice to me, especially since it was my fault and I'm a crazy foreigner here. This was my first accident ever in a car, and I felt terrible about it, but the friends I was with assured me that as accidents go, this one was not so bad.

Unfortunately, I had this accident in Japan. Which means dealing with the Japanese police. I am still dealing with this incident, now well into the month of May. Here's the story of my recent day with the Fukusaki Police.

On Friday, I went in with my supervisor to the police station. I'd been told we were going to the site of the accident and I was going to say what had happened. I assumed this meant we would go to the intersection where the collision occurred. A good guess, you'd think. But it was not this straightforward. I got into the unmarked police van with my supervisor and three police officers, two of them in plain clothes. I had my picture taken next to the van first, of course. Then, we proceeded to go back to my apartment, which is fairly close to the police station. I thought this was in order to look at my car. But no, they just wanted me to get out of the van and have my picture taken next to my car. Not near the damage to the front right light, but at the back. Just to have it.

We then loaded back up into the van, and they asked me where I went to meet with my friends. I explained the directions I took to get to the parking lot where I met the Kasai folks before heading to the party. We proceeded along this route at about 20km an hour (twenty km under the speed limit in this area), and the officer in the front seat with the camera took a picture of every corner or intersection where I turned. People behind us were honking their horns, oblivious to the fact we were on police business. When we arrived at the gravel lot where I had waited for my friends, I again had to get out of the van and have my photo taken, standing in the empty lot. After this, we once again got into the van and went back the way we'd come to the accident site.

Here, where it actually made sense to me, I got out of the van and explained about where the cars had collided. The officer with the camera then marked a chalk circle and X on the spot I estimated the actual hit happened. Then I again had to have my picture taken with it. I had to point my finger to the spot though. The picture could not be taken until I understood that I HAD to POINT to where I said the accident happened. This was the end of the first part of my adventure.

Back at the station, my friend Clay was waiting for us to return. He'd been in the car with me that night, and so the police had requested he'd come in to give a statement. We were taken upstairs in the station, to a room with tables and chairs facing a chalkboard and podium, clearly meant for teaching and lectures, not an interrogation room of any kind. I had already given my statement to the police back closer to the date of the accident, but since then, April had come.

In Japan, April is the time of year when all the people in public service and school jobs change over. Sometimes you stay in the same job, sometimes you switch departments or offices. The person who had been in charge of the department my case fell under had changed, and instead of the salt-and-pepper haired man I'd spoken to in March, a young woman sat across the desk from me. This meant I had to restate everything that I had said previously.

At the same table, side by side, an older male officer I had not met before sat across from Clay. After being told we had the right to remain silent (which took a little work with the electronic dictionary), they proceeded to ask us questions. At the same time. I had difficulty sometimes hearing the soft-spoken woman's questions over the louder voice of the man talking next to her, and I actually had to lean over and cup my hand around my ears to hear her. Sometimes we had to wait for the other officer and my friend to finish with something before we could get my supervisor to try and help with Japanese I didn't understand. Not that my supervisor speaks English, mind you, it was just a "two-heads-can-use-an-electronic-dictionary-better-than-one" scenario.

While it was embarrassing that I couldn't understand all the questions, the fact that the questions ranged so widely might explain why I was at a loss at times. I was asked about where I went to high school, what had I studied in college, why did I want to come to Japan, what were the names of the members of my family and what did they all do for a living, how much money did I make a month, how much of that money was I able to save, was I satisfied with my salary/lifestyle, had I found my apartment on my own, what was my schedule at work like...I can't even remember now all the questions I was asked. I was surprised I wasn't asked for my blood type and list of sexual partners. How much of this had to be revealed to deal with the accident is something I'll never understand, but I knew that it was probably better just to answer than to put up a fuss.

After answering all the questions, the officers read back to us the entirety of the statements. It was like listening to a biography rather than a police report about an accident. Once they'd read it aloud, they printed it off the laptop. Thankfully I noticed that my young officer didn't have the printer hooked up to the computer, otherwise we might have been there even longer. Small misprints and spelling errors caused the report to be printed no less than three times. After they were printed, we were asked to read them yet again and sign the statements. Going over the accident in the van had taken about an hour, and this question and answer session took three times that long. Having gone in at 1pm, we finally left the station at 5pm. I was informed that the police would probably also call again to settle out the rest of the details.

I apologized to Clay for making him take time off work to come into the police station for so many hours. He commented on the Japanese commitment to the very letter of the law. It seemed to me like an obsessive relationship to the brush strokes that make the characters that made the letter of the law.

The moral of this story? Do your best not to get into a car accident in Japan.