By The Wall Street Journal Tokyo – Traffic deaths in Japan fell to a record low in 2017, as Japanese car makers pushed to make some of the most advanced safety technologies standard in their vehicles. Fatalities fell more than 5% to 3,694, the lowest since 1948 when Japan began maintaining statistics – and when there were far fewer cars on the road. Japan's National Police Agency, which released the statistics, credited the record low number of deaths to stricter enforcement by police and said the "spread and use of advanced technology" would help improve the figures further. The steady fall over the past decade contrasts with an upturn in fatal accidents experienced by the US in 2015 and 2016, partly reversing a decades-long improvement. There were 37,461 traffic fatalities in the US in 2016, up 5.6%. Japan-based car makers have been among the most aggressive in putting automatic braking systems in their vehicles. More than half of the vehicles sold in Japan in 2016 came equipped with systems that can detect and apply the brake autonomously to avoid collisions, car makers say. The comparable figures for 2016 were 24% in Europe and only 9% in the US, according to London-based auto consulting firm Jato Dynamics. Japan-based auto makers have also been aggressive at rolling out the technology in the US Nearly 60% of 2017 Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles in the US were equipped with automatic braking, compared with 20% at General Motors Co., according to the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, a research organization funded by the US insurance industry. Toyota and GM are among 20 car makers which have pledged to make the technology standard in their vehicles sold in the US by 2022. The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety has calculated that automatic-braking systems could halve the number of rear-end collisions. Japanese drivers have proven more open than those in the US and Europe to technologies that blare warnings in the vehicle cabin when the system detects unsafe driving or an imminent accident. That is in part due to the country's aging population, with older drivers relying on these technologies to prevent collisions that become more common with age. To be sure, there are many more cars sold in the US than Japan, and Americans tend to use their vehicles more frequently than Japanese. But Americans are also more resistant to many of these newer vehicle technologies and sometimes switch them off because they find them annoying.