Says he remembers parking his car, but can’t remember the exact date he did it anymore.

Because many Japanese apartments and condominiums don’t have their own attached parking spaces, it’s common for car owners to have to find a nearby lot to park in. Usually they’ll seek out a place where they can lease a reserved parking spot on a monthly or other long-term basis, but a resident of Kobe’s Nada Ward apparently decided one night that an automated coin parking lot he found near his condo, one where you pay when you leave, was good enough. So he pulled into an empty spot, got out of his car, and walked home.

However, he didn’t go back and get his car the next day, or the day after that…or the day after that. Just how long was he parked there? Since April…of 2019.

Yes, in the time the man’s car remained parked in the lot, the coronavirus pandemic came and went. The Tokyo Olympics were both postponed and held. Japan became the world’s hottest travel destination. The glacially paced Japanese government approved the morning-after pill for use without a prescription. Through all of these momentous events, the man left his car in the same coin parking spot, for more than six years…and now he’s been arrested for it.

▼ The lot the car was parked in (the vehicle itself seems to have finally been removed)

On February 4, the Hyogo Prefectural Police announced that they have arrested the car’s owner, a 47-year-old man. However, since users of the parking lot don’t pay until they leave, and the man’s car was still there, he couldn’t be charged with theft, fraud, or non-payment. Instead, the charge he faces is Forcible Obstruction of Business, a catch-all category in Japan that covers various kinds of disruptive behavior in stores, offices, and other places of business, with the ostensible specific offense being that by remaining parked in the space for so long, the man was preventing other customers, who would have then vacated the space and paid in a more timely manner, from using it, thus depriving the lot’s owner of revenue.

The car’s owner is an employee in a shipping company, and so presumably not philosophically opposed to the idea of things occasionally moving from one place to another. When questioned by police, he admitted that he had parked his car in the spot, but also said that he couldn’t remember the exact date he’d done so, understandable considering that it was, again, more than six years ago. As for the parking bill he’s run up, it’s grown to more than three million yen (US$19,000).

The man said that he had gone back and tried to start the car up, but that “the engine wouldn’t turn over,” so it’s possible that he hadn’t been intending to leave it in the spot for so long, and that while trying to decide whether to repair, sell, or scrap the vehicle, the days stretched into weeks, months, and then years. Still, a half-decade-plus seems like more than enough time to address any mechanical issues.

That said, the way in which the parking lot owner handled the situation wasn’t exactly normal either. The laws governing parking lot operations must include some sort of time frame for the disposal of abandoned or unclaimed cars, and the grace period before getting one towed away and impounded can’t be six years, right? Likewise, it seems like consumer protection laws would have some sort of clause that prevents coin parking fees from continuing to accrue endlessly without any kind of required communication between the lot and car owner after a certain amount of time, which would have in turn limited the potential benefit to the lot in putting off having the car towed.

Hopefully, the legal mess can be sorted out, and the car will find a more attentive owner.

Source: TBS News Dig via Livedoor News via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso
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