Four Hundred Days Til Re-entry

One thousand days before i have to go back

I haven't been doing much fiction recently. Not since my last project died. However, I have started up a new fiction page at under the radar.

Most of what I do comes from my everyday life, and what a wealth of inspiration I got yesterday. I got a postcard in the post (funnily enough) a few weeks back saying that I had to go back and renew my Japanese drivers license. Though in fact it was more of an upgrade. I moved up from green to blue. This may sound good but it makes little or no real difference, other than serving as a stepping stone up to a gold license and giving employment to a higher number of officious little men.

In I went, in line for the window, payed, accidentally signed up for a charity and was shown into a room with some road-safety videos showing. I can't remember the first one (Nice going guys. Good work - big impact there!) though the second one is still very clear in my mind. This is how it started; a guy drives up in a sports car, parks and walks off. I am with you so far, Mr. Road safety video maker.

Then I started wondering if I was in the wrong room, I started wondering if I had wondered into the cycling proficiency test because someone thought it was a great idea to inform adults about road safety with talking cars. No joke - I was sat there in stunned silence while the sports car told her Grandad, a Rolls I think, that today was scary becuase her owner drove fast. While they spoke, the cars flashed their lights. We are talking ultra low budget kids TV. I got moved on to the next room before I got to hear what the truck had to offer on the matter. I was tempted to start furiously scribbling down notes like, "fuck! you're supposed to put the lights on when it's dark?!" and "Don't forget to look for pedestrians as well as cars."

The next room was a bit of a shock because it said "at the end of your two hours there will be a test." "No-one told me about a test," I thought. If I had known there was going to be a test I would have brought someone to translate for me, as my written japanese is terrible. A glance around the room revealed the following points:















Road safety posters - there is a very special world in which the guys who make these things live. In that world (shown here) it is OK for old people to drive badly if they put a sticker on the car saying they are bad at driving. That is the orange and yellow one off to the right. In this world, lazy people who email whilst driving are suddely shown the error of their ways by poster 2, in the middle. Finally, in this very special world, people have to be told that two people on one bike is not safe.



The supreme air of absurdity in the building means that the desks have to be screwed down. Otherwise they would float away on a cushion of frivolity. Either that or it was to stop the remedial class from beating the teacher to death with them.

The teacher came in and did a sketchy bow, glared randomly round the room and then introduced himself. One look at his face told me that there was no room for jolity in his life. He had a cloud of anti-humour around him. Put a whoopie cushion on his chair and he would either implode or float above the thing. He switched on a video.

The video was one of the usual collages of cheap drama and real brains splattered round the nations roads. It was based around an everyday nuclear family who all had a bit of a rotten day, as it came out. First the father knocked a woman off her bike because he didn't indicate, then the son wrote his car off getting the news by phone from his mum. "Ho ho ho, isn't dad an idiot for crashing his car!" smash! The comedy made me cringe more than the blood on the roads. By the way, what have the road safety video makeers been doing these last thirty years? I can understand them giving up and doing something else, but no-one seems to have made anything since the seventies and eighties. Maybe they all went off to make porn - the production values are about the same.

At this point my group was split into two - upgrades without accidents and those with. It is like streaming at school. I was in the top group, with roughly five percent of those present. This meant I got to skip the test. Everyone else was in the remedial class, with the joy sink. I was back downstairs with a delightfully sarcastic bloke. He told us that passing was not quite a forgone conclusion, and anyone sleeping or emailing on their mobile phone would be failed and would have to join the next bunch of boy-racers and nervebags upstairs with the basilisk. "Don't get too bored," he said. We all promised solemnly, one of us smirking behind his hand.

He went on to tell us about the number of deaths / injuries in the country and in the prefecture. Direct quote; most of the deaths in this area are caused by people not looking out of the front of the car. OK, then. He went on to say that if you divide the number of casualties by the population of the prefecture, it comes out at 1% per year. Let's say a mother has quaruplets and they are fifty years old. If probability has it's own way, two of them will have been seriously injured in a car-crash by now. No wonder the guy upstairs was glaring at the biker-dude in front of me.

The lecture was punctuated with lots of comments like, "so you think japan is a safe country, do you?" and "this is the country you live in." and "it is a sign of the times." We saw eye-to-eye on a number of issues, including recent japanese innability to keep rules and the derioration of manners. In the middle of this little speechlet he extended his finger, rotated on the spot until he was pointing at this one girl off to the left. "You!" he said, "which side of the road should you walk if there is no pavement?" You could more or less see her freeze mid-breath. She didn't answer by the way. I was tempted to put my hand up and say, "the top", but I was worried he might fail me so contented myself with a quick smirk.

At the end he said in a stern and commanding voice, "you absolutely must not have any accidents!" I wrote it down.

That was the end of my japanese driving license adventure. It is up for renewal in another thousand days or so, and I will be long gone by then.

posted by Between daisies @ 10:36