Drinking and Driving Cultures

A Japanese friend of mine drove home drunk last night and almost hit a building on his way from where he was drinking.  I guess that's what made me think to write this post doing a bit of comparison between drinking and driving in the U.S. and Japan.

In the States, it always seemed to me that the society is built to encourage drinking and driving.  When you drink, you generally do it in groups of friends who also drink.  This makes it difficult to find a designated driver when everyone wants to participate.  And with the blood alcohol content limit at .08 or so, depending on your state, people are lead to believe they can have "just one or two" and be OK to drive.  Then, there is the almost total lack of public transportation except downtown in the largest metropolitan areas.  All of this contributes to a situation where it shouldn't be surprising to find people drunk driving and doing all sorts of damage and even killing themselves and others.  It always strikes me as so strange to see a bar in the suburbs of Anywhere, U.S.A. with a big parking lot full of cars.  How else do they expect people to get there?  Inside, they are drinking, many of them having driven themselves there after work or whatnot.  One person to a car, that's the American way.  Then, if we find some majority of them drinking alcohol and driving home, why should we be surprised?  None of this is to say that each person is not individually responsible for their actions.  Anyone who does this is the one at fault and responsible.  Not to blame society.  It just seems that things are set up such that we assume everyone will drunk drive and we'll only worry about it if we catch them or they kill someone.

What is surprising to me is that anyone here in urban Japan still engages in this self-destructive activity.  We live in a city with prolific public transportation and harsh DUI and drunk driving laws.  There are trains, buses and taxis literally everywhere, and the bars and restaurants will call you a cab any time, which will arrive in 15 minutes or less in most cases.  If we lived some inaka (rural) place where everyone had to drive or bicycle or scooter around, it would be a different situation, of course.  Even there, however, with the strict .03 BAC limits and the DUI definition being seemingly whatever the cop feels it should be, one would think that people would be effectively deterred from drinking and driving.  Apparently not so, based on my experience last night.

I don't know how true it may be, but I've also heard that the owner of the establishment where the person got drunk can also be fined or somehow penalized.  I do know that other passengers in a drunk driver's car here can get fines and perhaps jail if there is a death that occurs due to the drunk driving.  No passengers in the car last night that I know of, but he was drinking at a friend's restaurant.  If there was additional penalty for that, more people are affected directly than just the individual with the poor judgement.  He lied to us and told us he wasn't driving home.  Then, after we walked outside to go home, we saw his car careening down the alley, narrowly missing a building and an electric pole.  We should have been more responsible friends and taken his keys or called him a cab.  It's kind of sad, but there we are.

No control.