It is 9pm on a residential backstreet in Nakameguro and a woman on a mamachari with a child seat is bearing down on me carrying what I can only describe as a small sun bolted to her handlebars, aimed with surgical precision directly at my fucking eyeballs.

Not at the road. Not at the ground where a human being might reasonably expect to find, you know, the ground. At my face. Level. Flat. A thousand-lumen tactical floodlight designed for spelunking, mounted on a shopping bike, pointed at head height, because tilting it down by fifteen degrees would apparently require a committee, a subsidy, and an act of the Diet.

When did this happen? When did the humble bicycle headlight, once a sad little dynamo-powered flicker that died the moment you stopped pedalling, evolve into airport approach lighting? I have lived here long enough to remember when you could see a cyclist coming. Now you can only see the light, a searing white hole punched into the night, behind which some absolute clown is silently judging your inability to get out of the way of a beam that has already blinded you.

Why nobody in Japan tilts their bicycle headlight down

Here is the thing that makes me want to lie down in traffic. There is a correct angle. Every torch, every lamp, every bloody headlight ever manufactured has a bracket that pivots. You loosen one screw, you point the light at the road, you tighten the screw. That is the entire operation. A child could do it. A child should do it, given how many of them are being ferried around at ramming speed by parents who've weaponised their commute.

But nobody does. Because to tilt the light down would be to acknowledge that the light affects other people, and acknowledging that other people exist on the pavement at night is apparently a bridge too far in the land that invented kuuki wo yomu, reading the air. You can read the air on a packed Yamanote carriage with the sensitivity of a bomb-disposal expert, but you cannot read the extremely obvious fact that your handlebar-mounted death star is currently cooking my corneas. For fuck's sake.

And it is an arms race. That is what nobody wants to admit. Once one tosser turned up with a 400-lumen job, the next one needed 800 to feel safe, and now we're at the point where teenagers are commuting to cram school with lighting rigs you could use to signal passing ships. Each one brighter than the last, each one dead level, each one turning a quiet street into an interrogation room. Truly the work of a nation's finest engineering minds, applied to the single problem of ensuring I never see anything again.

The pavement is not a runway, you muppets

Let us be clear about the geometry of the crime. A headlight tilted at the road illuminates the road. Revolutionary. A headlight aimed flat illuminates precisely nothing useful for the rider and instead delivers the full payload into the retinas of every pedestrian, oncoming cyclist, and driver within a hundred metres. It makes the rider less safe, because they've swapped seeing the tarmac for the warm glow of temporarily blinding a pensioner. It is the worst of all worlds, chosen by everyone, defended by no one, corrected by nobody.

And of course the police, who will stop you and interrogate you for twenty fucking minutes because your bike registration sticker looks slightly wonky, have precisely zero interest in the bloke doing 25kph through a shopping arcade with a lighthouse strapped to his frame. Wrong-colour sticker, that's a real problem. Actively blinding oncoming humans, that's just Tuesday.

I have started walking with my hand up like I'm surrendering to an approaching column of tanks. Every single night. Palm out, eyes down, flinching. Thirty-odd years old and I am cowering from the shopping bikes of Meguro because a screw that costs nothing to turn has gone unturned across an entire archipelago. It is not a lighting problem. It is a nobody-can-be-arsed problem wearing a hi-vis vest.

Tilt it down. That is the whole ask. Tilt the bloody thing down.