Police and driving instructors in Japan have adopted an unorthodox approach to road safety in the hope of reducing incidences of drink-driving — by allowing drivers to consume alcohol before getting behind the wheel.
Chikushino driving school in the south-western city of Fukuoka recently began offering controlled drink-driving experiences as part of a police campaign to convince “overconfident” motorists never to drink and drive.
The initiative was launched around the 17th anniversary of the deaths of three children from the city — two boys aged four and three, and their one-year-old sister — who died when their family car was struck by a municipal government employee who was driving under the influence of alcohol.
Photo: AP
Drivers taking part in the recent experiment included two reporters from the Mainichi Shimbun — one who drank and drove, and another who observed her colleague as a sober passenger.
The drivers were first asked to negotiate three sections of road — a slalom, an S-bend and a series of tight curves — while sober. The newspaper reporter, Hyelim Ha, then drank a 350ml can of beer, as well as a cup each of umeshu plum wine and shochu spirit — both mixed with water — over the course of about an hour.
A breathalyser test on Ha detected 0.30mg of alcohol per liter of breath, twice the threshold of 0.15mg, the newspaper said.
Despite having cold hands, a raised heart rate and red face, Ha said she felt able to drive — a sentiment reportedly expressed during questioning by the driver who caused the fatal collision in 2006.
Ha’s confidence was misplaced. Her fellow reporter, Rokuhei Sato, lurched back and forth as Ha repeatedly accelerated and slowed down unnecessarily along a straight section of road. She managed to clear the bollards on the slalom course, but was brought to a halt by the school’s vice head, Shojiro Kubota, before she took on the S-bend.
To Ha’s apparent surprise, Kubota told her she had entered a curve at a higher speed after drinking, and at one point had strayed into the opposite lane.
“Even though [drinking] impairs the skills people need for driving, such as cognitive capacity, judgment and vehicle maneuvering ability, the driver assumes they are driving safely — that’s the danger of drink-driving,” Kubota said, according to the Mainichi.
Japan’s national police agency says that many drivers who drink and drive without incident develop a sense of invincibility and continue to repeat the same dangerous behaviors.
It cited data showing that the probability that a road traffic accident will involve a death is seven times higher when the driver has drunk alcohol compared with accidents in which the driver is sober.
“We are calling on people to properly manage the risks before drinking, such as not driving to the pub in the first place, on the premise that once they are drunk, they are unable to make normal judgments,” Yoichi Furukawa, deputy chief of the prefectural police’s traffic enforcement division, told the newspaper.
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS