breaking the speed limit
I have very recently got my license and I decided to go on a little road trip. It was only the second time I have driven after graduating driving school.
I decided to go to with a Japanese friend, who can also drive, and we took turns. However something began to really bug me.
Whenever it was my turn to drive, I'd quite stubbornly go the speed limit at fastest, because that was what my driving instructors had drilled into me, and I wanted to be safe. I also didn't want to just start throwing rules out the window as soon as I could drive on my own. Not to mention that if there was accident and I was speeding, I'd have even more liability.
However my friend kept bugging me about going too slow, saying I should accelerate because the speed limit is a '目安だから'. Even when I was doing 50 in a 40 zone he kept bugging me about the speed saying 'its ok to speed up on a straight road because its not that dangerous'. He also kept going on about how 'you wont get pulled you over if everyone else is speeding, so you should go with the flow'. I did notice that others were generally speeding, but I didn't think it was a good reason to do so myself. So I would tell him I wanted to stick to the speed limit and quietly decelerated when he wasn't paying as much attention. He didn't seem to understand that I didn't want to speed no matter what and continued to pressure me with ちょっと遅いな etc over the course of a couple of days which was driving me insane by the end of it.
So I wanted to ask, am I lacking in common sense? Or is my friend just a speed freak? Or do most drivers in Japan just ignore the speed limit?