Cars and Driving

If you choose to drive in Japan, at some point you will have to interact with the police; whether it’s a simple safety checkpoint, a traffic infraction, or worst case an accident. Most scenarios are just like their counterparts in other countries, but there are some minor differences to laws and procedures that may land you in hot water if you’re not careful. What did I do? Of course we’d like to avoid getting pulled over altogether, right? So the simplest way to do that is to follow the law whilst on the road, but some of the ones here are a bit obscure to us foreigners. In the last 10 years of driving in Japan, I’ve managed 3 traffic citations and all of them were due to laws and rules that don’t exist in my country. Ignorance, as they say, is not an excuse to flout the law so let me shed light on some of these obscurities. Don’t cross the yellow line In the USA, yellow lines on streets separate oncoming traffic only. traffic going the same direction is separated with white lines. But in Japan, they use whatever color line is appropriate for the conditions. Yellow lines…