Suspect claims she wasn’t driving dangerously and wasn’t driving.

It’s been a few years since I got my driver’s license in Japan and I’m happy to report that I’m well on my way to a gold license. In Japan, driver’s licenses are color-coded, depending on your record and a gold band indicates that you’ve had no accidents or violations and are eligible for preferred insurance rates.

▼ Mr. Sato – or as the government calls him, “Mr. Yamashina” – is one such gold license holder.

It’s not super easy though. Especially in Osaka with its narrow, congested, and occasionally baffling streets, an accident seems possible at any given moment. Still, if you don’t rush yourself, constantly check those blind spots, and go with the flow, avoiding problems is entirely possible.

And as a living example of what happens if you do none of those things, we have a 47-year-old woman who somehow managed to cause eight traffic accidents in the span of 35 minutes. To clarify, this isn’t like a single crash that involved eight vehicles or people. This woman managed to get into eight separate collisions at different times and in different places between Osaka Prefecture’s Minoh City and Yodogawa Ward in Osaka City.

All of the incidents took place on Shin-Midosuji Street, a main artery that runs through the northern center of Osaka City. Although busy, Shin-Midosuji is a relatively wide and straight street that’s one of the easier routes to drive along.

▼ Apparently it’s a 29-minute drive so she made surprisingly good time when taking all the collisions into account.

The first collision happened at 7:00 am when the woman hit a car driven by a 46-year-old man and drove off. Six minutes later she hit another car driven by a 49-year-old man and drove off yet again, only to collide with a third car driven by a 60-year-old man two minutes later.

The woman fled that scene as well and managed to drive accident-free for five minutes until crashing into a 49-year-old woman riding a scooter at 7:13 am. After driving away from that, she then struck a 57-year-old male pedestrian at 7:21 am and drove away from him for eight minutes before hitting an 82-year-old pedestrian with her car.

With six hit-and-runs under her belt, she then hit a wall along Shin-Midosuji street and then struck a 33-year-old male motorcyclist, both around 7:35 am. It would seem the police caught up with her shortly after that to prevent any further mayhem.

Fortunately, only the two pedestrians and the motorcyclist suffered injuries and none of them appeared to be severe. No alcohol was found in the woman’s system but when she was questioned by police she reportedly said, “I am not driving dangerously enough to cause an accident,” and “I am not driving a car,” suggesting she may have had a break with reality.

Readers of the news couldn’t help but compare the incident to their own performance while playing open-world games like Grand Theft Auto.

“I’d totally do that in a game, but not real life.”
“Tell her to stop playing GTA.”
“Even if I was playing a game I’d limit myself to five accidents per half hour.”
“That’s almost impressively bad driving.”
“That’s exactly how I play Mario Kart.”
“The fact that she was sober is even more frightening.”
“I hear a lot of people tell police they don’t remember what they did. I wonder if that’s some kind of defense mechanism in the brain.”
“Is that a world record?”

As you might expect, there is no official world record for most traffic accidents caused in a certain period of time as that’s not really the kind of behavior anyone wants to honor. However, for the sake of comparison, there were about 300,000 reported traffic accidents in Japan in 2022 which boils down to about one accident per two minutes. This means that for a brief period, this woman was causing about one accident per four minutes and was nearly at pace with the entire nation of Japan.

Unfortunately, this means she is very unlikely to get a gold license any time soon but hopefully, she’ll get the help she needs and lots of friends who can drive her places from now on.

Source:  ABC News, Hachima Kiko, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism
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