Japanese Aorist?

I am beginning to think that Japanese has an Aorist-like tense in addition to the much-talked-about unmarked form vs. perfect. Compare the following pair.

I. 猫は/が、川を渡る。

1. neko-wa/ga kawa-o wataru.
2. cat-TOPIC/NOM river-ACC cross
   

II. 猫、川を渡る。

1. neko kawa-o wataru
2. cat river-ACC cross
   

Two sentences look the same but the former means, "The/A cat crosses the/a river" and the latter, "The/A cat crossed the/a river." The simple lack of postposition for the subject noun in the latter describes the action of the sentence as an objective event that happened in the past with little relationship to the present. This construction is often employed in newspaper titles. I would not consider it is far-fetched to see a phenomenon quite similar to what is called aorist in Indo-European syntax.

In fact, the two wataru's manifest morphological difference as below;
I' OK neko-wa/ga kawa-o wataru-yo.
II' * neko kawa-o wataru-yo.
where -yo adds to a sentence a spin to make the hearer take heed for a piece of new information. The whole sentence I' translates into, "Hey look, a cat crosses the river."

The aorist wataru cannot take a modality particle.

Understand? Do I really?

Let's face it: Czech is a weird language. Starting by its name: Czech. Why does it sound like check/cheque? Does that point to the Czechs' predilection for checks instead of cash? Don't know, beats me. What about the Italian name: ceco? It's a homophone with cieco, blind. Does that mean that an unfathomable number of checks are issued daily by a bunch of blind Czechs who don't know who the hell they are writing those checks out for?

And now we shall consider (yes, I can be posh sometimes) a pretty basic verb, rozumět, to understand (I just love those upsidedown hats, don't you?) Any normal person in his right state of mind (go ahead, call me a chauvinistic pig) would think that verb is followed by your regular accusative, but no! Czech doesn't like to be seen in company of its Slavic brethren. It goes for the dative instead. Here are a few examples - from a guy who still doesn't know where to place his Czech critical clitics (I'm not taking any suggestions, thank you).

Russian: Я хорошо понимаю русские книги. - Accusative.
Polish: Dobrze rozumiem ruskie książki. - Accusative.
Macedonian: Добро разбирам руски книги. - Accusative.
Czech: Dobře rozumím ruským knihám. - Dative, ladies and gentlemen!

Go figure!