Chino, Japan, Oct. 29, 2020—In a court hearing on Oct. 8, 2020, Kozo Iizuka, a former Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry senior official who killed a young mother and her daughter in an automobile accident in Tokyo 1-1/2 years ago, pleaded innocent saying that his Toyota Prius developed ‘some kind of abnormality,’ causing the vehicle to run at high speed and slamming into the two victims. Prosecutors said in the hearing that they have proof that the vehicle’s control system showed negative to the defect claim.
Toyota keeps its lips zipped tightly toward the allegation saying that the automaker is watching the court proceedings. The automaker’s silence against the allegation is sparking speculation that it weighs its relationship with the ministry and the Japanese government at large as vitally important for its business.
The accident drew national attention not only for its ghastly scene of the bodies of the 31-year-old mother and her 3-year-old daughter, who were crossing the green traffic light when Iizuka’s Prius hit and run over them at extraordinary high speed but because the driver was the head of the powerful ministry’s top science and technology institute and was not arrested, sparking a barrage of public criticisms of the government to have handled the case for ‘a high-class Japanese.
Iizuka, 89 served as the head of the powerful ministry’s Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), which the U.S. government watched as one of key threats to U.S. technology in the 1980s for its lead role in developing Japan’s industrial policy. AIST was founded in 1948 as Japan’s top governmental research entity charged to collaborate with the private sector in practically all advanced tech areas including the environment, human science, manufacturing, geology, and standards and certification. It was restructured into the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (Sansoken in Japanese, and also abbreviated as AIST) in 2015 and currently has more than 3,000 officers at its Tsukuba headquarters north of Tokyo.
It’s natural for police who rushed to the accident scene at Ikebukuro in Tokyo past noon time of April 19, checked Iizuka’s driver’s license and asked his occupation, to have judged the old man as belonging to a special class and so they did not take the customary procedure of arresting a suspect who caused a serious traffic accident. Iizuka has never been arrested for the accident since then.
At the Oct. 8 hearing at Tokyo regional court, Iizuka apologized to the two deceased victims’ bereaved family members as well as those of other victims, yet, challenged the prosecutors’ claims saying, ‘I did not keep stepping on the accelerator pedal. It is my belief that some kind of abnormality occurred (in the Prius) and caused the car to speed out of control,’ according to Japanese media reports.
The prosecutors claimed in the hearing that the vehicle’s control system was functioning properly and that they have data that Iizuka was stepping on the accelerator pedal when the car was speeding and that he was not stepping on the brake pedal.
A Toyota Motor spokesperson said the company had no comment to release and that it would watch court proceedings.
The Tokyo district court hearing, which was the first since the accident, came at a time when the Japanese auto industry sorely needs government support to shift to a new technology and environmental stage. Even the mighty Toyota cannot move to the next stage without government support for developing driverless vehicles, traffic modal innovations, electric vehicles and next-gen power trains, as well as other technologies. So Toyota must behave like a trustworthy, subservient private-sector company for years to come. Plus, the Covid-19 pandemic is far from put under control, so it cannot be complacent about its short-term business performance.
What Toyota ideally needs to do, as its CEO Akio Toyoda often reiterates, is to shed the mundane and distance itself from the Japanese bureaucracy, and transit to the next-gen areas, like Tesla is doing. In this vein, Toyota has years to go to catch up.
###
Insight Into the Future