Rainy days and mondays...

The weekend is finally over!!! YAY!!! I was about ready to kill my whiney husband by last night but then a miracle happened and Joey went to bed at 7.30pm and stayed there so I got to relax for the evening and didn`t feel so frantic! I did go to bed at around 10pm just in case he woke up in the middle of the night but he slept until I got up at 7am so I am feeling quite relaxed today!!! I also have an easy morning because my student cancelled class at lunchtime so I am going to keep Joey home with me which means no obento and no having to take him to daycare. I think we are going to spend the morning cleaning though because my floors are really dirty and the clutter is driving me insane so it is time to do something about it!!! Yesterday morning I went to renew my license, along with a couple of hundred other people!! The lines were long and I had to wait for ages but it wasn`t so bad once I got through to the desk. I even got them to change my name and address on it without too many problems. (In Japan anything involving bureaucracy is normally an enormous pain in the butt for anyone and is 100 times worse for a foreigner, i was pleasantly surprised by how easy everything was yesterday!!!) I filled in all the forms, had my eyes checked, had a picture taken and then had to go and listen to a 2 hour lecture on road safety. The lecture was actually more interesting than I was expecting, even though alot of it was about drink-driving, something I would never do anyway. One part of the lecture really showed me how different things are here in Japan. Apparently last year they introduced a law whereby the people who are drinking with someone who then goes on to drink-drive are also liable in the event that that person causes an accident. I was really shocked at this because although I can understand someone who is in the car with a drunk-driver having some responsibility, I am not sure how people at a drinking party are supposed to take responsibility for the actions of every other person at that party IYKWIM. We are all adults and it seems bizarre to me that next time I go out for beer, I have to check how everyone who is with me is getting home in case they decide to drink-drive because if they cause an accident, it would be partly my responsibility. I am not sure I am explaining myself very well but the thing that struck me is that it is typical of Japanese society. By introducing this law, they are taking the responsibility away from the individual and placing it firmly with the group. As I said, I am not sure how the laws work in the US or the UK but I am pretty sure that an adult would be expected to take responsibility for causing an accident through their own stupidity, they wouldn`t be able to say "well, it is also the fault of all the people I was drinking with, they should have stopped me from drink-driving." It is true that people shouldn`t knowingly allow someone to get in a car while drunk but this law also applies to people who leave the party early. Totally bizarre. The other part of the lecture that stuck with me was a discussion about the drunk-driving accident in Fukuoka last year that killed 3 small children (the parents survived) I was absolutely furious to hear that the guy who caused the accident (a 22 year old who had been out drinking, the family were on their way back from collecting beetles when he hit their car and sent it spinning through the barrier and into the river) called his friends straight after the accident to try and get someone to come and pretend to be the driver so that he wouldn`t get caught with alcohol in his system. He also asked them to bring lots of water so that he could try and reduce the amount in his system. The thing that makes me most angry about this is that I bet at this point while he was phoning around to save his own butt, he could have been helping the parents in their desperate attempt to save their kids who eventually drowned when their parents were unable to free them from the sinking car. The news of the accident made me really sad at the time but hearing stuff like that and knowing that if he had maybe tried to help them, the tragedy might have been less, makes me really angry. So much for group consciousness, all he was interested in was saving his own skin. Alot of food for thought so early on a monday morning! The first thing I did when I got home was give Joey a big cuddle as you really never know what is going to happen in life.