Doing donuts in central Japan’s biggest city is a sure-fire way to get the police to bring out their fists of fury.
I totally get the appeal of driving for driving’s sake. I don’t need a compelling destination. Just give me a car and I’ll happily drive from Point A to Point B and back again, appreciating the sensations of turning the wheel, pressing the pedals, and rowing the gears.
But while I genuinely enjoy essentially driving in circles, I don’t recommend literally driving in circles, at least not ones small enough that their diameter fits inside the intersection of a public road. Oh, and I definitely don’t recommend driving in circles in a major urban area, like Osaka. And finally, I definitely, definitely don’t recommend driving in circles while high on crystal meth, which is what most people think the guy in this video is doing.
At around 4 p.m. on November 6, multiple passersby saw this black Toyota Celsior (marketed in some countries as the Lexus LS) doing donuts underneath the rail and expressway overpasses in Osaka’s Bentencho neighborhood. Unfortunately, the full-sized sedan doesn’t have the tightest turning radius, and the driver repeatedly runs the front of the car into various roadside objects.
Even in the country that popularized drifting, this kind of vehicular jackassery is frowned upon, and it wasn’t long before the police showed up, as they do at the 50-second mark of the video above, when the truck driver who recorded it murmurs “Here come the cops.” With the police on the scene, the driver of the Celsior stomps on the gas, which sends his car headfirst into the metal frame of a planter, immobilizing it as other police officers gather and swarm on the vehicle. When the driver doesn’t comply with their verbal instructions to get out of the car, one of the officers wraps a protective cloth around his fists and delivers a glass-shattering two-handed strike to the driver’s side window (seen at the 1:05 mark in the video below) before the police drag the driver out, press him to the pavement, and place him under arrest.
While o official toxicology reports have been released, online commenters felt they had a pretty good idea of what was going on.
“Somehow I don’t it’s alcohol that he’s got in his system.”
“He’s on meth, right?”
“Yeah, he’s tweaking on meth. You can tell by the way his body jerks around when they’re pulling him out of the car.”
“Say no to drugs!”
“Hey, he’s got a cool custom license plate number: 11-11!”
▼ A man who apparently cares about his car enough to spring for a vanity plate, but not enough to keep from smashing it against the urban scenery.
Of course, we can’t entirely rule out the theory put forth by one Twitter commenter that the driver is somehow a poorly programmed NPC from an open-world sandbox game that somehow found his way into our reality. Still, the vast majority of online commenters are leaning towards some sort of illegal stimulants being the cause for the right-turn-only early-evening cruise.
Source: Twitter/@kyosangyo via Jin, Matome Da Ne, Twitter/@Syuta19950926Ta