Japan to mull over legal steps to clear roads of abandoned cars for emergency vehicles

The Japan Times quoted Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, who shared at a press conference on Monday that the state is mulling over legal steps to provide officials authority to remove cars that were abandoned in snowstorms to give way for emergency vehicles.

Japan is currently under hostage by another snow storm that visited the country this week, making roads almost impassable due to thick blankets of ice, said a Sydney Morning Herald report. The report said the latest snowstorm increased the number of deaths due to the cold weather to 23. In central Japan, roads are covered in over 1.1 meters of snow, of which the Australian newspaper said was a record-high in over a century of recordkeeping. The snowstorm also had taken Tokyo with its 10.6-inch snow.

Suga said that because of the abandoned vehicles in almost all Japanese roads, local authorities are having a hard time clearing paths using snowplows. Moreover, he told reporters that local authorities had already sought the state government to help them regarding the matter, said the Japanese daily.

Suga touched base with the dilemma of removing abandoned vehicles without the consent of the owners. He told reporters in the press conference that the Japanese government is looking to address legal issues such as compensation for forcible removal of abandoned vehicles or other awards that will not violate the constitutional rights of the owners to property.

The Japan Times said that Suga underlined the fact that the legal steps to remove the abandoned vehicles did not only apply to just snowstorms. Suga also cited other natural calamities, such as a large-scale earthquake, of which the country is all too-familiar off. Suga later underscored that the need to come up with legal measures that would be applicable immediately, the Japanese paper said.

The concern over the removal of abandoned vehicles in certain events was not only raised in the press conference. At a joint meeting of the state's Liberal Democratic Party and the government also on Monday, LDP Secretary-General Shigeru Ishiba commented after the meeting that the said legal measures could take time and that there has been no decision yet regarding the matter, The Japan Times said.

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Japan, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, Japanese Liberal Democratic Party

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