On the 8th May 2015 a judge of a civil court in Fukui Prefecture ordered the victims to pay a the offending family a whopping half a million pounds in damages in a car accident that wasn't their fault.
On late December night of 2013 in Japan, the driver of a car dozed off at the wheel and crossed the centerline crashing into an oncoming car. The accident caused the death of the passenger in the offending car and seriously injured the two occupants of the other.
The family of the deceased blamed the driver of the other car who was a university student and filed a Lawsuit with the civil claims court that lasted for two years.
On May 8th 2015 the judge of the civil court in Fukui Prefecture ordered the university student to pay 67 million yen (￡362,000) and the passenger of the non-offending car to pay an additional 40 million yen (￡216,000) in damages totaling a massive 107 million yen (￡578,000).
The university student and passenger of the car that was hit tried to argue to the judge that they did nothing wrong and that the oncoming car with the driver who dozed off was at fault. The judge claimed that the ruling would hold due to the fact that the university student didn't make any attempt to stop or even avoid the offending vehicle. He went on and added that the car crossed the centerline 80 kilometers before the cars crashed in each other and that the university student had enough time to avoid the oncoming car.
Every year from the end of April to the middle of May, the Japanese have a whole week of national holidays called the Golden Week Holiday. At this time of year, many Japanese will take time off work and cram the roads, train stations and airports to travel. As the Japanese don't take book holidays at times that they desire they all have prearranged holidays booked by their companies, which leads to congestion on the roads all around Japan. With all the roads crammed with drivers racing to and from holiday detestations this puts a higher risk for accidents to happen.
