In many Japanese urban neighborhoods, the road has been a space shared by cars, bicycles, pedestrians, and kids at play. Traffic accidents and fatalities increased dramatically through the 1960s, the start of the era of mass automobility in Japan, when personal automobiles became affordable for the first time for the middle class. In this paper, I suggest that it was not just the increase in motor vehicles that was to blame for the increase in traffic fatalities. In looking at the era of high-speed growth, it is worth considering the particular threat that professional drivers posed to the shared space of the road. This paper uses the analytic of games and play to examine how “reckless” driving was incentivized ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, and how it came to be critiqued.

Joshua Hotaka Roth is Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. His publications include Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan (Cornell Univ. Press), “Mean Spirited Sport: Japanese Brazilian Croquet in São Paulo’s Public Spaces” (Anthropological Quarterly), and “Heartfelt Driving: Discourses on Manners, Safety, and Emotion,” (Journal of Asian Studies).