I had a really insane experience today. A friend was going to pick me up in her car from the station and it was a bit busy but not too bad. I saw her car pull into the roundabout, nothing unusual. When I got to the car (I did not lose sight of it) I noticed a yankii looking guy talking to her at the window. He was claiming she bumped him with her car. I (and my friend) did not see this happen (we saw her pull in). She didn’t hear or feel or see anything. He was not injured whatsoever. Nevertheless he was acting hostile, suspicious, and banging on her driver’s side window, which scared her bad enough that she drove off. He chased her for 3 blocks (and I chased him) and stopped when my friend called a nearby security guard and started explaining. He started trying to tell his side and kept saying he “just wanted to talk” and demanded she come back and apologize or he would report it as a hit and run incident. He finally was talked into by both me and the security guard accepting a (fake) apology from me and a promise not to do it again. She didn’t want to come back cause he was scary and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t get violent. Basically what I want to know is if he did decide to go back and report it, would he have any legal case? He had absolutely no injury so it would be just his word vs 3 gaijins. I get the feeling Japanese police will always side with natives over foreigners. My friend is pretty certain this guy was just one of those scam artists who pretends to be hit in order to get cash, but he never asked for money.
Should we report it to the police?
7 comments
Does she have a dash cam?
Are you absolutely sure she didn’t hit him? Him not having any injuries doesnt matter
If you hear from a lawyer, it’s quite possibly a scammer.
It may just as likely be that there was slight contact, or he was almost hit or cut off, and he’s just screaming at her to get it out of his system.
In such cases, call the police immediately.
The police cannot convict her based on his testimony alone. They will take a sample of the area of clothing he testifies he hit and the surface of her car and scientifically verify if they have the same stains on them.
Besides, if it was a roundabout at the station, it would be caught on surveillance cameras.
If there is no evidence of a collision, the police can arrest him for fraud.
If he is Japanese, he knows this and would have run away if you said you would call the police.
These scams do happen. My student’s daughter was confronted by two men in a supermarket parking lot, claiming that her car had hit theirs and demanding compensation. No such thing had happened. She went into the supermarket and immediately spoke to the manager, who offered to call the police *and* assured her that the parking lot had surveillance cameras. The two “victims” mysteriously disappeared after that!
I’m so sorry this happened to you.
I have some doubts here, why your friend run off? Why she didn’t call the cops? Knowing that cops take seriously this firm of harassment
Apologizing is often in legal terms an admission of guilt. That is what he was trying to get out of you or the driver.