Very unfortunately, some people choose to close their eyes to difficult or unpleasant things which are just over the horizon.
That doesn’t work. Life requires people to make choices and decisions (often those very tough ones) all the time.
The insurance route is a tricky one. Insurers won’t be happy that he has a string of serious accidents he’s hidden from them. But, they can’t act without proof on an active policy. Other than his boasting of getting away with it again, I have none.
As @IanRobertM mentioned, there are no GPs in Japan. But in his healthcare profession, there is also a crony network with him and doctors “having each others’ back” so not sure it would help anyway.
@JimDog I’d laugh if I had not already tried that! Got him set up with a steering wheel in front of the telly and everything a few years back, Gathering dust.
Doing some research here from Japanese forums, it doesn’t seem like many people have had much success with their stubborn gits either. Checking the law on the matter, if he gets in an accident we wouldn’t be liable for charges but we would be liable for fines up to $300k if he can’t pay.
I’m far less concerned about preserving the relationship than I am about making sure no one is killed. But elderly rights are fiercely guarded here and I can’t step out of the bounds of the law to do it. I very much like the ideas around rendering his car useless. It’s in the shop being repaired from the last wreck for a while. I hope the fact he wrote off the rental will mean no rental place will touch him. However, these days you can just walk up to an unmanned car pool and swipe a credit card (or even use cash!!) and it spits out keys. Anyway, I’m discussing with Mrs. FZ about whether someone can just take the wheels off his car when it comes back. Maybe hide the bolts in his own house somewhere he’ll never find them so no one can claim he was robbed if everything stays on his property.
Failing that, disowning him. I really can’t abide people who don’t value other people’s life.
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I don’t envy you.
As he is an in-law, how is Mrs FZ with the whole thing, including the idea of disowning him?
This is most often the route that caregivers have to take when handling difficult situations involving a loved one with dementia, so I hope you don’t feel bad about it. We had to do the same with my mother to get her into a home where there were people that knew how to properly deal with her demented actions. We did our best to care for her for over 2 years and it was much more difficult than I ever could have imagined.
The first week or two of the new situation is always difficult, but after 2 or 3 weeks things settle down and it becomes the new norm.
We’ve had to take drastic measures in the past. My father in-law has in fact had to have his own wife literally dragged away by men in white coats and institutionalised when her paranoid schizophrenia started to become a danger to others. So to me, the idea that others might have to take drastic measures with him shouldn’t come as a huge shock - after all, he’s done it himself too.
As for disowning, the family is a bit of a soap opera of drama with factions disowning each other and feuds going back longer than I’ve been alive. So again, there is precedent. But to me it’s really extreme. I come from a fairly drama free family without any of this crap so I try and distance myself and stay well out of that poison… until now when people’s lives are endangered.
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My condolences. We had a similar situation here (the US) with my FiL a few years ago. He’s always been a terrible driver, but nobody in the family appeared to notice. Things came to a (small) head when my daughter was old enough to stay with her grandparents. I insisted that someone other than him drive if she needed to be taken anywhere. We worked that one out (grandma is a competent driver).
After a few such visits, he made a heartfelt plea to my mrs. to be allowed drive our daughter, which made her feel terrible. This situation resolved itself for good when he drove us to the train station and got close to a serious accident, avoided only thanks to the quick reflexes of the other driver.
The final resolution came when he made some kind of moving violation and was chased down by a state trooper, resulting in the permanent loss of his license. Whenever it comes up, he laughs it off as a kind of administrative screw-up, and insists that he’s fine to drive, despite medically diagnosed advancing dementia. We’ve had a couple of situations where we were at a loss for a driver, and he casually offered to do the driving, so we’re not entirely out of the woods yet.
The most striking thing about this story is how common it is. Once it happens to you, and you share it, you hear all sorts of similar stories from friends and others. I hope you find a speedy and safe resolution to this.
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We had a comparatively light ride on this one. My father was always a good driver and never lost that even when dementia started to set in. But he began to get lost (including the time when it took my parents 4 days to find where he had parked the car. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad). We got increasingly worried that he would look both ways at a junction but then forget what he had seen and pull out.
In the end, with my mother’s help, we hid his keys. At this point his dementia was beginning to get severe and he soon forgot about driving. Mind you his ability to escape unobserved from the house was uncanny. And he would walk miles. Once the search parties started to involve the police helicopter, we had to get him into care.
Oh, that sound familiar. My Japanese ex-wife and her sister regularly fall out in a big way - and my son tells me they are still at it. He’s over there currently… 
Ganbatte - as they say.
When I visited Japan in 2019 for 3 weeks with my wife and two ons (covering Nagasaki to Sapporo) we were all struck by the respectful attitude of all Japanese people we met, young or old, and felt we definitely want to return and spend more time there, one of our sons even thinking it would be great to spend a year or two there. I’m beginning to feel that attitude of respect is a front, with more problems than UK but hidden better…
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Having lived there for 3 years (89 to 91), I cannot say you are wrong. There is a huge amount of plain weirdness in Japan, which most visitors will not see.
Seniority or ‘rank’ - in all its forms - is a huge thing. Working for a UK company with a Japanese company, we often had to fly in suitably ‘senior’ people to front up a particular meeting - because that was ‘appropriate’. Didn’t matter that the UK senior bod didn’t know much about their subject. It was their Rank which mattered - !!!
In the context that @feeling_zen has, Seniority is literally Age. It is accepted that (very) older people can ‘get away with’ lots of things that younger people cannot. (Very young children are also afforded the same privileges.) So Father-In-Laws age means that the Police will (as they have) ‘forgive’ his indiscretions, to a very large degree.
“You are not Japanese, you can never understand…”
PS. As a Brit living there, with a Japanese girlfriend, racist abuse - to her mainly - was normal. Taxi drivers were the worst.)
Family problems and stubborn old gits transcend culture though. They are in abundance the world over.
I’ve lived over half my life here. And the things that really trip you up are the things that are the same, not the things that are different.
Whenever you hear “Yes but in Japan it’s done the way I say.” or “You’re not Japanese, you don’t understand.” it is simply code for, “I’m losing this argument so I’ll present my personal preference or opinion as a cultural fact and shut down this discussion.”
I hear it from younger people and have to remind them I’ve worked here longer than they’ve been alive.
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So sorry reading all this, must be so tireing and stressful for you all
My suggestion would be to remove yourself as much as possible from events that involve him driving.
Never allow him to drive to your house, and don’t let him in if he does
Do continue to visit him at his house
Refuse to go to any family event that would involve him driving there
Offer to take him to such events
Try and get family members to follow your lead
Possibly a mad idea, but consider buying him a public transport pass for a present. If he is tight with money, he may consider using it
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From what you’ve posted it would seem your FiL is unlikely ever to change his opinion.
Given that fact you have - I feel - 3 possible approaches.
The first is to scare him into change - long shot & depends on how much involvement you want with the man. An example would be arranging a day out with him that involved visiting victims of RTA’s - extreme perhaps and complicated to arrange but may make him reconsider his actions.
Option 2 has already been touched upon - nobble the car. Hide the keys, remove fuses, let tyres down, banana in the exhaust - everything you can think of & do them all.
Final option is to walk away. Cut off all communication completely. Don’t answer calls, refuse to open the door to him. Difficult but eventually even rhino skinned people get the gist.
I hope you find a solution - or just some peace of mind.
The only approach I can suggest is to identify who he respects and ask them to approach him on the matter.
One of the toughest things I had to do was tell my (now late) father it was no longer safe for him to drive, after a number of prangs - gatepost, bus at a bus-stop, etc. Fortunately, after a lot of family handwringing, when we finally told him he took it with kind of good grace, and just said to me ‘Take the car, sell it and keep the money,’ and the whole deal was done and dusted, despite the car being sold damaged, within a day.
By contrast my uncle, who was sufficiently dementia’ed not to remember he’d done a hit and run on a parked car, which was totalled, had to have his car taken out of the garage and disposed of after a period of the keys being hidden from him. The local village bobby, who was also a neighbour, was a real asset in getting that one done!
Having a local responsible bobby to assist is great but unfortunately the OP has the opposite the cops there have become the inablers.
One of the frustrating things about dementia is the lack of insight that sufferers have. This is especially true with frontotemporal dementia(FTD). My father has FTD , and his GP told him not to drive after quite a few minor prangs. He would tend to leave his indicator going when driving on a straight road. This led to many close calls and at one stage he ran off the road mercifully not killing anyone. He then decided his GP was against him, and got another GP who let him resume driving. He can still come across as quite intelligent and charming. One day he came home without the car stating a local gang called the Mongrel Mob had stolen his car. He had parked it round the corner and forgotten where it was. This led to GP #2 stopping him driving. Lots of fun and games is dementia.
I was actually going to ask if it was a matter of honour and respect, and I can’t remember if it was The Last Samurai or another movie that suggested it was regarded as polite and honourable to ‘help someone to save face’, especially seniors for errors/indiscretions.
I actually consider it quite a noble concept in principle.
Of course that doesn’t help, just an observation.
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Please understand, I am not making fun of your father, or his vile mental condition.
But something is clearly still sparking, as blaming the alleged theft of the car on the supposed ‘Mongrel Mob’ is brilliant!
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They are a local predominantly Maori gang, and dad has a bee in his bonnet about them. Love the name and very appropriate, as they can be quite nasty.
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