Rural resident doesn’t have time for slow driver, somehow does have time to stop and call him a dumbass.
Ideally, I think we all want to achieve a sense of satisfied inner calm as we get older. Surely, by the time you’re in your 70s, you’d hope that you’ve learned how to get along with, or at least make peace with, the other human beings you share the planet with.
Likewise, while there are many sources of stress that come with living in the city, spending your days in more bucolic environs, like, say, the rural town of Komono in Japan’s Mie Prefecture, seems like it should help you become a laid-back person.
▼ In addition to beautiful scenery, Komono also boasts a local hot spring.
But sometimes the opposite happens, and being 70-plus years old simply means that someone just has seven decades’ worth of pent-up anger inside, and living in the countryside means that all that ill-will gets flung at a person who really doesn’t deserve it, simply because there are no other targets around, as shown in this video of perhaps Japan’s angriest elderly motorist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CoO5LzNizc#t=0m52s
The video, uploaded to YouTube channel Shogeki na Channel, was originally captured by the drive recorder of an unnamed 20-something Japanese man who was driving through Yokkaichi, the town that borders Komonocho to the east, shortly before 1 p.m. on the afternoon of Saturday, January 13. For those who’ve never driven in Japan, speed limits can sometimes feel extremely slow, and in the residential section shown at the beginning of the video, the posted limit is 30 kilometers (19 miles) per hour.
Nevertheless, the driver obeys the law and makes his way slowly past the houses. Once he gets out into the farmland and the road opens up, the speed limit rises, so he increases his speed, but not enough to please the car behind him, which crosses over the center line like its driver is in a hurry…only to pull back into the lane and come to a complete stop.
This obviously means the 20-something driver has to stop his car too, and out of the car in front steps 77-year-old Komonocho resident Noriaki Matsuoka. Matsuoka strides up to the window of the young driver’s car, and fires off the opening salvo of his tirade with “You were driving slow on purpose, weren’t you?”
Confused, the young driver responds with, “What?” When Matsuoka repeats his question, adding in an extra dose of anger, the driver starts to explain the obvious, saying “The speed limit is 30 kilometers per hour back there-“ before Matsuoka cuts him off with “You dumbass!”
Startled, the driver tells Matsuoka that it’s dangerous to be standing in the middle of the road as he is. Bafflingly, this causes Matsuoka to start yelling at the driver to “Get out of the way!” despite the fact that Matsuoka is currently stopping traffic to pick a fight with the younger motorist. The confrontation takes enough time that the clouds actually begin to shift position in the skies above, and eventually a truck coming up from behind has to swing into the opposite lane in order to pass Matsuoka’s parked car.
During the heated exchange of words, neither Matsuoka nor the other driver can be seen, but the younger man claims that Matsuoka reached into the vehicle during the argument, causing him to say “I’m going to call the police!” He made good on the promise by contacting the authorities, who tracked Matsuoka from his car’s license plate, as seen in the video, and on March 5 arrested him for violation of traffic regulations and attempted assault.
Matsuoka denies reaching into the younger man’s car, but does admit to illegally parking his car in order to yell at the other driver, saying “I was angry that he was driving so slowly.” How he mentally reconciled his apparent urgent haste with taking time out of his journey to stop and jaw at a stranger remains a mystery, though police might want to look into whether or not Matsuoka is an associate of the similarly impatient man in Aichi Prefecture who attacked a truck driver he thought was driving too slowly with a replica samurai sword.
Sources: FNN via Hachima Kiko, Sankei West, YouTube/衝撃的なチャンネル via YouTube/Panda_AU
Insert images: Wikipedia/Kazu2011
