In Which I Get Hit By a Car

So, there's this stereotype in Japan that people from Okayama are bad drivers.
It turns out this is true, as one of them hit me last night.
I was on my bike, crossing a narrow street, and all of a sudden a car turned, suddenly, and hit me as I was in the crosswalk and he was rounding the intersection. Fortunately for me, he hit the back of my bike and not my leg, and I proceeded to go flying off of my bike.
You know that thing they say about time slowing down when you're filled with adrenaline? Quite accurate, actually. It was probably just a few seconds, but from the moment the car hit my bike, time really did seem to slow down in all of the typical ways that they say it does. I fell/leapt from my bike, freeing my leg from the space between my ride and the car. In front of me was the sidewalk, and I successfully managed to land there rather than on the street in the path of the car. My left hip (which still hurts a bit) hit first, followed slowly/quickly by my left arm and right hand. I managed to tuck my head, though. The expanse of my back and shoulders took the rest of the weight of the fall, and I'm somewhat proud of my reflexes, as they ensured that my skull did not hit sidewalk.
I watched the car slide a bit more into my bike, which is a gratefully sturdy machine until it eventually stopped. I lay there in the glare of the headlights, covered in a spontaneous sweat, and found myself suddenly very, very pissed off.
More than anything else, I was angry. I wasn't worried about broken bones or bleeding, I wasn't thinking about any of that. The only thing I wanted to do was to physically retaliate against the man who'd done this to me, the man who was emerging from his car at that moment.
He opened the door and said something frantically in Japanese that I couldn't understand, and then stopped suddenly when he saw I was a foreigner. I don't know what I looked like at that point- I probably looked angry as I forced my left leg to cooperate.
(In retrospect, this guy was probably scared out of his mind. He'd hit a guy, which is bad enough, but that guy happened to be a six-foot pissed of white dude. Foreigners seem to make people nervous often enough- I imagine that an angry, bloody foreigner would be even more cause for alarm.)
He seemed like a normal business guy, maybe in his forties. His shirt was undone and his tie hanging loose, and he looked like he'd just come off of one of Japan's typically long days at work. He looked at me and nervously said,
"Nihongo...?" Meaning, "Japanese." I told him that I study Japanese but don't know a lot. He asked if I was alright. I said "I don't know, maybe."
And, at this point, I really, really wanted to punch him.
He'd hit me with his car, after all. I'd been thrown to the ground and bloodied up because of him, and I wanted to physically retaliate. Perhaps I'd hit him in the neck or throw him down on the same sidewalk that I fell onto- my imagination was not keeping up with the kind of violence that I wanted to commit.
But I didn't, of course.
I think it was the language barrier that stayed my hand. As soon as he said "Nihongo...?" I was put into a frame of mind where I had to think. Speaking the Japanese I know doesn't require much thinking, but I still need to put myself in a specific mental place in order to do it, if that makes any sense. Because I had to go to that specific mental place and say something, even a simple something, in Japanese, my more reasonable parts won out.
And, after I said "I don't know, maybe." He got in his car and drove away. In an abstract, moral sense I was glad, am still glad, that I didn't retaliate. But in a more visceral, emotional way I still wish that I'd done something to him, even though I know that it would probably not have been wise.
I went home and washed up. I'm fine- just a few cuts, though my left hip still feels sort of weird. Nasty cut on the right hand though- it'll be fun to explain to students.
Goddamn Okayama drivers. They really do suck.