A male traffic division officer from the Miyako Police Station in Okinawa urged car rental companies not to rent vehicles to travelers from China and South Korea, citing high accident rates and time-consuming accident handling due to language barriers.
The Ryukyu Shimpo reported that during an opinion exchange meeting with car rental operators on Miyako Island on the 24th, the officer asked them not to rent to Chinese and Korean tourists, citing a shortage of Chinese and Korean interpreters at the police station. Although the officer stated it was his personal opinion, it immediately caused an uproar.
The officer said that foreigners renting cars often get involved in traffic accidents, and handling such incidents takes time. He suggested it might be better not to rent to foreign tourists who require interpreters to be dispatched to the scene, but that it's okay to rent to tourists from English-speaking countries.
The report pointed out that rental operators present responded by saying they “never expected police to say something like this. We don’t mind, but now that Okinawa is actively promoting tourism, making such a negative comment is surprising.”
Nagayoshi Morimoto, secretary-general of the Okinawa Human Rights Association, said, “While it can't yet be called discrimination against foreigners, the officer’s perception is indeed lacking, and it may be seen as the police obstructing the business operations of private enterprises.”
Statistics from Okinawa Prefecture show that in 2016, there were 9,648 fender-bender accidents involving foreigners renting cars in Okinawa, nearly double the number in 2015. Most were property damage incidents, mainly caused by tourists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea who were not used to driving on the right.
Local governments across Japan are also trying various methods to reduce traffic accidents involving foreign self-drive tourists. The Okinawa Car Rental Association has specially produced “Foreign Driver in Vehicle” magnetic stickers. Rental companies also plan to introduce VR practice devices for left-hand driving and systems to prevent car body scratches, while advising foreign tourists to purchase insurance when renting cars for self-drive tours.
In light of the increasing number of foreign tourists renting cars, Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism will begin experiments this autumn to prevent traffic accidents. They plan to use ETC data from taxis to collect information on accident-prone road sections, and install multilingual road signs in hazardous areas to alert tourists.
(China Times)