I'm absolutely positive I'm not alone in my opinion that there is something wrong with drivers in Japan. Daily when we lowly foreign English teachers hop on our bikes to get to school, we bet our lives on those rickety frames. Just ask Roy who got hit and injured not just his bike, phone, and computer but also his body. Tons of people ride bikes here, which when I first got here made me think there was reason to believe that drivers would be more observant about them. Oh, how I was wrong.
There seems to be a basic problem with observation here. Drivers all over the world, of course, are in their own little worlds, but here it feels a lot worse. People tend to think that once they've hopped in their car, they don't have to worry about the little guy on the side of the road. Run him off the road (I can't tell you how many times this has happened), he's just got a bike, what can he do? I was driving the other day, stopped at an intersection and waiting to turn out into the intersection. A truck wanted to turn onto my road, so I waited. Instead of turning normally onto my street, he instead turned directly into the car I was driving. There was the whole other lane of the road, which he should have been turning into, completely clear, but instead he wanted to take the corner ridiculously tight and illegally turn into oncoming traffic. He was largely unaware, it seems, that my car was even there until we were literally a foot apart, at which point he and his wife stared at me indignantly like "why are you here?" Um ... I'm here because it's my side of the road you fuckup. I can't tell you how many times I've been a passenger to a Japanese driver and thought "oh God I'm totally gonna die." I've only been with one driver who actually appears to look carefully both ways when coming out of an intersection. Naoki is a very very good person.
I could be wrong (of course) but I think it's the insurance system here. I don't know much about it, but I'm always asking questions to try to get an idea of how it works. The basic gist is that very very rarely is fault established solely on one driver. The majority of the time, fault (and thus payment of damages) is split straight down the middle. For example, if I am driving on a main thoroughfare and some dolt pulls out from a side road and I nail him, the fault is still 50% mine. Why? I couldn't have stopped, but the law says that it was somehow in my power to avoid the accident and I didn't, so thus it's half my fault. Even if someone is driving on the wrong side of the road and causes a head-on, the victim is still 10% liable. From what I've gathered from asking a bunch of different people, it's close to impossible to establish 100% fault in an accident.
So then it makes sense why people are so careless here, especially when it comes to bicyclists or smaller cars. If you smash a cyclist, she'll end up paying for the damage her head made to your windshield. On top of that she'll probably end up paying her own medical bill, some of yours, and the fees to get rid of her mangled bike. Same goes for a small car. You clobber that thing with your brand new Toyota Monster, and you get the better end of the deal and end up penalizing someone thousands of dollars for being stupid enough to think that you were a responsible driver. The end result is that nobody cares when they drive, and it's a dangerous place out there for the rest of us.
If you have a better understanding of the insurance system here, by all means comment. But I may hunt you down and hit you with a car.