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The story
Shortly after noon on October 1, a high school girl fell asleep on a Fujikyu Mobility route bus running within Shizuoka Prefecture and went unnoticed when the bus reached its terminus at Gotemba Station — she ended up locked inside for about two hours after the bus returned to the garage. The driver reportedly went back to the garage without checking the bus’s interior at the terminus. The student has not reported any injury or illness. On the 5ch thread, many posters offered concrete suggestions for preventing this kind of oversight or shared similar experiences of their own, while others questioned why an incident with no injuries made national news at all — reactions were split.
Delivered 10/2 (Fri) 16:03 — Shizuoka Broadcasting System (SBS)
Shortly after noon on October 1, a high school girl who had fallen asleep on a route bus operated by Fujikyu Mobility went unnoticed and was left inside the bus for two hours after it returned to the garage. The company says the student has not reported feeling unwell.
According to Fujikyu Mobility, the student boarded the bus — which left Mishima Station at 10:50 a.m. on October 1 bound for Gotemba Station — at the “Nichidai-mae” stop partway along the route. She was asleep when the bus reached the Gotemba Station terminus, but the driver returned to the garage without checking inside, leaving the student stranded on board.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Well, glad she's okay anyway.
She's got a school commuter pass, hasn't she?
At the terminal, blast the sound of nails scraping a chalkboard through the cabin at full volume.
There's already a low-tech version of that — some buses have the driver push a button at the back-most seat when they reach the terminal.
Just make it so the only door is at the front and the driver's seat is all the way at the back.
Pretty rare these days for a kid not to have a smartphone.
Probably a case where the terminal stop and the garage are one and the same.
Total oversight on the conductor's part, and they still flat-out insisted they'd done nothing wrong!
To be fair, you were curled up asleep down in the footwell that time.
I figured 'yeah, no wonder they didn't see you' — but I still gave them an earful.
She didn't even do anything wrong, and now it's blown up like this — that's gotta feel awful for her.
Don't go turning it into national news.
But she rode all the way to the terminal, then quietly got off and walked home on her own — didn't she?
Right?
Toyota-sama, Hino-sama,
Isuzu-sama…
who else is there?
And isn't Mitsubishi Fuso basically Mercedes-Benz these days?
Gotemba, gotta love a good prank.
Oh I see
Hadn't read that
Did she pass out or something?
Re: #88
Japan's top company, Toyota-sama, apparently works off its frustrations right next door in Susono City, Shizuoka
The future capital
probably
if it had been some middle-aged salaryman who overslept instead,
would this even be news?
'The middle-aged man was uninjured.'
If the girl just got off the bus and went home, nobody but her would know what happened.
Did she tell her family or friends, and it somehow reached someone connected to SBS?
Obviously her parents reported it.
Eh, who cares about the technicalities — it's a heartwarming little story.
Had to work on my day off, and this somehow soothed my jaded soul.
She paid the fare all the way to the terminal, idiot!
was it some kind of family emergency?
But if so, sleeping soundly for a full two hours seems unlikely.
I don't really get it.
Maybe it was just 'heading home 'cause I'm sleep-deprived~'
'No complaint reported' just means she hasn't come forward saying 'I felt sick because I was stuck there for 2 hours!'
That's separate from whatever her reason for leaving early was.
Woke up because it got so hot, and was shocked to find the driver taking a nap.
The driver was just as shocked to see me.
Did you have a triangular cloth on your forehead? (the kind ghosts/corpses wear in Japanese folklore — joking you looked like you'd died)
probably exists precisely because of stuff like this.
So if you happen to be the only passenger on board,
should you just self-report: 'I'm about to fall asleep~'?
If it's just checking whether any passengers are left, they tend to cut corners with a quick glance or a shout-out,
but if it's checking for lost-and-found items or cleaning, you'd think they'd normally walk all the way to the back row.
Background and talking points
The report includes the line “the student has not reported feeling unwell,” but this refers specifically to not having reported any ill effects from being stuck in the garage for two hours — it has nothing to do with her reason for leaving school early. On the thread, some posters conflated this line with her early-leave excuse and speculated she might have been “skipping class,” but reading the article’s wording carefully shows this has no bearing on whether her early departure itself was legitimate. There’s also a structural reason oversights like this happen at terminal stops: many bus operators lack any mechanical detection method, such as seat sensors, and rely entirely on drivers’ visual checks. Several posters on the thread described similar experiences of their own, suggesting this wasn’t an especially rare case. Looked at purely as “nobody got hurt and she made it home safely,” it’s a minor incident — but the fact that it was framed around a parent’s anxiety over “my daughter, who was supposed to come home early, hasn’t come home” is likely one reason it ended up as national news.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “‘My daughter, who was supposed to come home early, hasn’t come home’ — high school girl asleep on a route bus goes unnoticed… left stranded in the garage for two hours, Shizuoka.”
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