The Story of Time-Traveling to the Edo Period Due to a Pajero Theft

—A story about being stunned by the 'authoritarian' culture of the administration in Japan 30 years ago—

A car sometimes speaks more about its relationship with a person when it is parked than when it is being driven.
Only the moment it is gone do you realize how deeply it had integrated into your own time.
Even though it was just a car that disappeared, there remains a sensation as if something slightly different was taken away along with it.

A slightly higher perspective that stood out from the city

In the city back then, the Mitsubishi Pajero seemed to hold its head a little higher, stepping half a pace ahead of the surrounding flow.
It was an era when the term 'SUV' had not yet fully taken shape, and its boxy body floated in the landscape like something of an alien nature.
Even though it was my own property, it was a car that brought with it a sense of standing slightly on the outside every time it touched the city's atmosphere.

A morning where only the shape remains and the substance vanishes

One morning, the car that should have been parked in its usual spot had vanished as if it had been cleanly extracted.
Only a void remained there, and the outline of the event rose up silently and belatedly.
Only the silhouette of that tall body remained in my mind, placed at a distance I could not reach even if I stretched out my hand.

The procedure for filing a report with the police proceeded calmly, following a somewhat standard flow.
As a result, the car did not return, and the event was quietly pushed to the side of the past.
While reality moved forward, it felt as if the existence of that car alone had been left behind in time.

The order of erasing something that is already gone

When I moved on to dealing with the insurance company, the conversation suddenly took on a different texture.
I was told that a vehicle deregistration procedure was necessary to receive compensation, and I felt that the order of the words was slightly misaligned with the order of reality.
There remained a lingering sense of disbelief at the act of formally erasing a car that no longer existed.

The place where rules are placed before circumstances

When I headed to the counter at the Transport Branch Office, there was a different flow of time there.
Even before I began my explanation, it seemed as if the weight of rules, different from my own circumstances, had been placed there first.
Even if the words were polite, the underlying standards were not structured to lightly accept individual circumstances.

The moment I was quietly told that I could not proceed with the paperwork because the compulsory insurance would become unusable if I deregistered the car, the line of logic broke somewhere.
I felt that the premise of theft was being set aside without holding sufficient meaning in that place.
The more I explained, the more the conversation seemed to return to the same place in a circle rather than moving forward.

Before words, the atmosphere looks at you

As I continued to convey the situation, there was a moment when the official's expression changed slightly.
The remark that returned, 'Are you going against the authorities?', changed the atmosphere more than the volume of the voice.
More than the words themselves, the fact that they were placed so naturally had a strong tactile feel of the era.

Although it should have been the Heisei era standing there, it felt as if only the atmosphere had been pulled back to a different time.
Rules are supposed to exist to be followed, but when the way they are followed takes precedence over human circumstances, the scenery becomes a little rigid.
In contrast to the presence of that boxy car, I felt as if my own position had suddenly shrunk.

Searching for a place to reach, and repositioning the words

Even so, I could not give up on the procedure, and I ended up going back and forth between the counter and the insurance company many times.
The explanation changed its shape little by little, repeating the same facts from different angles.
It was closer to the feeling of changing how I placed my words to find a place where they would reach, rather than pushing through forcefully.

After exchanges that took time to layer, the procedure was finally accepted.
As a result, the insurance money was paid, and the series of events was settled in terms of form.
However, the texture that remained in that process was a bit too dense to be just a memory of a procedure.

What changed might be the distance rather than the procedure

Thirty years have passed since then, and the atmosphere flowing through government office counters has clearly changed.
The digitalization of systems and the softness of explanations seem to have been adjusted in a direction that is more considerate of people's circumstances than before.
I have almost never encountered situations where words like those from the past come out naturally.

Looking back, that incident feels less like a mere trouble and more like an experience that measured the distance between systems and people.
Perhaps what changed was not just the mechanism, but the sense of distance when facing it.
The length of the brief silence exchanged at the counter quietly reveals that change.

What truly changed might not be the form of the rules, but the stance of the people standing before them.