Car Crash

Last Wednesday while I was teaching an English class an old woman drove her car off a cliff next to the school. Ever since I got here I often wondered, with the multitude of steeply sloped and winding roads, what happens when someone makes a mistake and doesn't make the turn. Well, it would seem not very much.

We saw the lady drive through the fence sideways and slide down the 60 degree slope until her car got caught in some underbrush. Which was fortunate because another 30 meters and the slope ends into a 15 meter drop on another road. So every kid in the classroom rushes to the window to see the action. There is no movement that we can see from the car, the bush is obscuring our view.

There was a person walking along the road near where the lady drove off. This person did nothing. They turned around and left. I asked the teacher I was with if we should call 110 or 119 (the Japanese equivalent to 911). She said no and we tried in vain to get the students to settle back down for the lesson.

20 minutes pass, nothing is happening. I am getting worried. I mean this lady could be bleeding to death and we are just going on doing nothing. If I were in America, I would have left the teacher in charge and went out to help but here, I look toward the example set by the natives. I ask again if we should do something. (By this time the kids have quieted a little but there is little use teaching them as they keep looking out the window. Now I see a few of the teachers from my school investigating the accident. This causes another wave of chaos as all the students get up to look out the window again. So we just give up on teaching and watch. As we are watching a few of the teachers go down the slope to the car. after about 5 minutes a little old woman in a red cardigan is brought up to the road. I was releaved that she was okay or at least appeared to be but appalled that it took twenty minutes before someone went to help her. The extra horribleness of it is that it took forty minutes for any emergency personnel to get on the scene. I snapped a few pictures after the class was over to give you an idea of what happened. The pictures aren't that great because of the angle.