Japanese Driving Test: The Horror...The Horror!!

First of all, I'd like to say that I am way overdue for a blog. I have so many half finished or ideas penned down, but that doesn't mean  a thing if they never get posted! So to make it up to you, I have a doozy of an entry.

Second, I'd like to say that if you know what book I was referencing in the title of this entry, then you are hereby awarded 1200 literary points! Feel free to exchange these for such valuable prizes as "Book Club Street Cred", "Smarty Pants Status", and hugs from every English and literature teacher that thinks their students never retained anything. For those who didn't know (or who just want a quick reminder), I'll post the answer at the bottom of today's post.

Now to our topic for today: the Japanese driving test.

I'm afraid that this can only end in tears. Let us begin this fairly odd tale...

Once upon a time, as the Embassy of the United States Tokyo, Japan puts it,

The Embassy spoke with the Superindendent of the License Division, Traffic Bureau, of the National Police Agency (NPA) to learn that prior to June 2002, Japanese law had allowed foreigners bearing international driver licenses to drive indefinitely in Japan.
As of June 2002, however, foreigners are only able to drive on an international driver license for up to 12 months, then have to have applied for and received a Japanese driver license. Long term foreign residents in Japan who attempt to avoid taking a driving test by continually renewing their international driver license abroad every 12 months will now be required to prove that they obtained the international permit at least three months before re-entering Japan. Tourists and others coming to Japan for short stays may drive with an international license obtained at any time before their arrival into the country.
The driver test consists of hearing, eyesight, written and practical/road test components. Citizens of 21 countries, not including the United States, are exempt from taking everything but the eye test. Some of these countries met the exemption requirement because the NPA examined their domestic traffic safety record and determined that it was at least as good as Japan's. Other nations exempt Japanese license holders from a driving test.
Canada received approval on February 1, 2003 after a lengthy (3-4 years) review. Canada had to submit responses to a lengthy questionnaire, regarding each of the country's 13 provinces and territories. In order for the U.S. to be exempt from the driver test requirement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must instruct the Japanese Embassy in Washington to contact each of the 50 states and provide them with a questionnaire. Once the 50 individual questionnaires are collected, they will be translated into Japanese and studied by the National Police Agency. In addition to individual state safety records and procedures for acquiring a license, the National Police Agency will be looking closely to see if each of the 50 individual states exempt holders of valid Japanese licenses from taking state road and written tests.
We shared with the NPA statistics which showed that the United States had a risk value much lower than that of Japan's with respect to fatalities as a share of vehicle kilometers traveled. We were told that the Japanese police still needed to see the safety records of each individual state. The Police are also concerned to see if each of the 50 individual states exempt holders of valid Japanese licenses from taking state road and written tests (many do not).

With that lovely bit of politics goes the stress and bane of every non-Canadian currently in the rural areas of this country: I have to take this test????? Come on, already!

Even as a college student, I heard the gruesome stories of foreigners who went to get their Japanese license: They failed me six times just to take my money!! They'll fail you on purpose to see if you'll come back!! It is so difficult, there is no way you can pass the first time!! They're heartless, I tell you!! (granted, some of these tales seemed difficult to believe at the time, but everyone was saying the same thing - the test was hard, expensive, bothersome, and racist)

I was so worried about taking the Japanese driving test before even coming here that when I applied for my international license back in the USA, I forced the AAA agent to tell me twice that I would be able to renew this license and not have to take the Japanese one. She assured me of this. And I believed her. There in lies my folly! Technically, she was telling the truth, but it only works if I return to America (WHICH I TOTALLY DID!!!) and obtain a new international license before coming back to Japan (which I didn't, so, yeah...). For you see, ladies and gentleman, the Japanese drivers test is not the mere hassle that the American DMV makes it out to be. No, no, no. The Japanese made improvements to that nightmare. Here are some of the 'joys' that can be expected from the test.

1. Unreasonable scheduling. The Japanese government offices work like many other companies. However, while other companies report employees staying late into the night, dying from exhaustion at their desks, or logging incredibly long hours at work, public servant sector offices maintain VERY strict hours of operation. Except in the case of national holidays, the Japanese driving centers are open ONLY from Monday to Friday from 8ish until 5 with one hour breaks between the morning and the afternoon. No Saturdays, no late hours. In order to come to their office to do anything, you must miss going to yours. In order to do anything at the driving center, I was required to take my paid vacation time since there was no other way of going when I was actually off work myself. What a nightmare.

2. Lengthy waiting. Even with their decreasing population and living in a rural area, Japan still has a high population. This means that waiting rooms will be filled and lines will be long. I did not include this section to say that you will wait in line long. They are very efficient in filing everyone through. I included this section because there is so much waiting out of line that is required. At first, you'll need to translate your license into Japanese. You'll take it to an office and then have to WAIT for them to mail it back to you before you can even think about making an appointment at the driving center. Then you have to make an appointment, go to the center, and WAIT for the 15 minute window of time when the desks open their windows (see what I did there?) and are willing to talk to you. Then you must WAIT in the waiting room (where else, right?) until they have finished all the paperwork. Then, if you pass the paperwork and interview step, you must make an appointment to come back another day (a completely DIFFERENT day!) to take the written test. On that day, you must WAIT to take the test with everyone else who is taking it during your time frame, and some slackers will be so late that your testing time will be pushed back an hour. Then you must WAIT to get your results from the window people again. Then you must sign up for a driving test appointment to come back another day (a completely DIFFERENT day!) to take the driving test. WAITING happens again on that day as you file into the car one-by-one and take the test one after the other, only hearing if you pass or fail after WAITING again when the last driver has finished. If you fail any one of these steps (and I failed the paperwork and driving test part - a 2200¥ charge per test, I'm told), then you must add more WAIT time to your total process. Also, in the spring when all the high school grads and foreigners who weren't warned about this entire process are scrambling to get their license, the WAIT time between steps increases due to clogged scheduling. It took me 20 days between my first driving test and my retest because there just were no free openings during that time. Bring a book or sudoku - this is going to take a while.

3. Inconvenient locations. My lovely prefecture of Mie is oblong in shape and has only one driving center and one translate-your-license-into-English office. They are inconveniently located in the same city smack in the middle of the prefecture, in our capital of Tsu. That is great if you live there, but for those of us in the areas north of Kameyama/Suzuka and south of Matsusaka, that is quite far! I'm out and over in Shima. It takes me two hours to get to Tsu! Remember all the steps required in the last paragraph? Now add driving time to and from the capital city and you can see what I'm so miffed when I need to take time off work just to travel all that way and back again. Even the workers at the driving center were shocked when they heard where I lived. Would it kill them to open other driving centers? Even the state of Wyoming has seven DMV locations!! Outrageous.

4. Strict judging. The stories are true. The judging for this test is serious stuff. You can not be sure who will be your driving proctor or what mood they will be in. Some take off if you aren't far enough left, if you stop too much, if your turns are too tight, if you look too far over your shoulder, if you don't look over your shoulder, if you take too much time to look over your shoulder. It is craziness disguised as having a system.

5. Pricy alternatives. There are ways to sidestep this whole process. You could walk everywhere (my farthest school is two hours one way by walking - said the girl who did so on Monday). You could cab everywhere, which is super expensive! You could take a bus, if there even is one, if you can even find the bus maps, if they even go out where you want them to go at a decent hour. You could become an extreme bicyclist. Or you could attend drivers school. "Now, Alexandra, I went to drivers' ed when I was younger. It wasn't so bad." No, no, I'm sure it wasn't. But did it cost you hundreds of dollars? Did it practically guarantee you a license if you went with them? Did it have its own professional-grade practice course? No, no, I'm sure it didn't. But if you want to go those options, power to you. Let me know how that works out and if your wallet thanks you afterwards.

Something I can't argue about is their honesty. Most "how to get your Japanese drivers license" sites and blogs are all plain and clear about all the rules and different points you could possibly fail. These other sites give personal accounts of how the writer and other people the writer tested with or knew did. The stories may seem far fetched and odd but they are real. However, none of thyme can prepare you for the frustration of actually being in the process. 

All of these factors equals a pain-in-the-rear, red-tape-gallore, too-much-work-for-too-little-reward experience that motivates many foreigners to become extreme bicyclists or to move to the cities and avoid driving at all costs. Quite honestly, I would rather just renew my American license forever and ever and never take the Japanese one. But, if I can't drive, I can't get to work. If I can't get to work, I don't have a job. If I don't have a job, then I can't stay here. That's how they get 'ya. With all this complaining and moaning and gnashing of teeth, I'm sure that after all of this, I'll be grateful that I stuck it out until the end. I'm sure that I'll feel fulfilled. I'm also sure that I will tell EVERYONE AND THEIR BROTHER to start the Japanese driver's license procedure as soon as they start their job assignment, too. Better safe than sorry, and I'm feeling pretty sorry right now.

To all the foreigners out there (who can read English and have stumbled upon this blog entry), start now! Start while you still have 11 months left on your international drivers license! Start during the off season so that there will be fewer people to take up space in the lines and the testing spots! Heed my words~~~! You have been warned!!!



Today's title inspired by a quote from  Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad :)

Going to Guam With the Girls! Part 1

The translator for the water sign in our hotel
may have been a pirate. Argh!

This is the cautionary tale of poor planning and travel mistakes.

My friends Ao and Lucy may be leaving for Canada soon, so we all decided that before they left we should have a girls trip somewhere sunny and beautiful. It would definitely be a change from the gray, Japanese winter. At first we thought Okinawa would be a good pick, but because I waited too long to confirm on the trip, the ticket prices skyrocketed. In retrospect, though, Okinawa isn't THAT much warmer than Shima in February, so we set our sights on a new location: Guam! Lucy and I could travel there easily since she is Canadian and I'm America. Ao had been there ten years before, but she was interested in a second visit. With our hotels and tickets booked, I was super excited to go traveling again. Sure, I visited the US last summer and lots of places in Japan in the fall with my boyfriend, but this a "never have I ever been there before in my life" place! The best kind!

Say goodbye to snow, girls!

Unfortunately, I had been apartment hunting for about two weeks and had hardly any extra time to help with the planning. I didn't know ANY of the schedule or locations and had entrusted all of the preparation to the girls. All I knew was that we were going to try scuba diving and to pack summer clothes. 80 degrees weather was so hard to fathom! Was anywhere really that temperature outside? Could I really walk outside without a jacket? It is odd what distance from an experience will do. I was hard to image any of this having been in the cold weather for so long.

We all had work on Friday, but decided to try and catch the train to Nagoya together. We were able to get train seats next to each other and used the ride to catch up about recent events, schemes, and dreams. This is also the time when I found out that we wouldn't be in Guam for as long as I was expecting. Oh, well. I could always layer on the summer stuff I brought to make more outfits.

You look a little chilly, sir.

Our first night in Nagoya was spent dancing in the biggest club. I was really impressed with the different vibes each floor had (about five floors in all), but Lucy was shocked that they even had separate floors! I guess stairs in a night club back home are too much of a liability, so all of them are one story or have elevators instead. Also, the Japanese clubs have coin lockers to store your things. No coat checking here. I had seen this sort of set-up in Tokyo, but after she mentioned that difference, I thought of Paris, Greece, and Cleveland - those were usually one story and didn't have lockers either. Definitely a different mindset due to space limitations and lower crime rate here.

My friends trudge on towards the train station.

Personally, I was more impressed with how EVERYONE KNEW ALL OF THE SONGS IN ENGLISH!! Seriously! How was it that everyone in the club knew the words to all of these songs so perfectly and I had a hassle teaching my students Auld Lang Syne? Ugh. As we moved through the club, people we passed were singing along with the music and smiling as they completed long rap segments. Really now? Wow. Sadly, some very happy guys ended up buying us some drinks that I had not anticipated on receiving and I got sick. At this point Ao got stuck dancing with a Brazilian boy that was following me around the whole night. Sorry, girl! But she was able to get a great line out of him that became one of our catchphrases for the rest of the trip: 最高の夜を見せ上げるぜ (Saikou no yoru wo mise ageru ze)。Translated, it is the same kind of super cheesy pickup line that any guy at a bar or club would give: "I'll show you the best night ever." But grammatically it is super showy, totally over-macho, and only ever found in TV dramas or cartoons. No one talks like that in real life! When she told me that line, I cringed and we had to fill Lucy in on how oily and gross it sounded in Japanese. He was very kind and seemed like he would be really funny in any other situation. But a "ze" as a final particle? Bleh!

Look at all the pretty pictures!

The next day was super snowy - a good send off to our island paradise. After much searching, we found coin lockers at the station that would fit our suitcases so that we had our arms free to do some shopping in the city! We had all purposefully left extra room in our luggage for the gifts, presents, and personal things we were going to buy on the trip, and Nagoya was part of the trip, right? Of course! While walking around one of the malls, we stumbled upon a Disney "Fine Art" collection. Different themes, characters, mediums, and styles covered the walls. Tucked in the back corner was an artist drawing Daffy Duck over and over for people to buy at a cheaper rate than the more expensive and larger works. He was an America, so I spoke to him about how he started, when he got here, and what he had been doing since Disney moved away from 2D art before we moved onto the Pokemon center. When I came back, he was giving a speech to the visitors of the collection. The Japanese love Disney so much, and the guests seemed blown away to have him there. It made me really happy they they could all enjoy it together.

Salad on a waffel. So Japanese!

After a lunch of salad waffles (that is right, no breakfast food is safe from the Japanese), we made our way to the airport for a bath before the flight. Bath? Yeah, the airport has a bath house on the second floor, so we stopped in for a soak! It was a great way to kill time before our late flight and my hair still smelled of smoke from the club. We had arrived there earlier than we expected, which was good because it gave us enough time to get lost amid the second floor shopping town, have the bath, make a guy pack up some mochi treats only to realize that we couldn't take them, find out that there was an extra "a" in my name on the ticket, and that I might not be able to go on the trip after all. Spoiler: I was able to go after an hour wait to get clearance.

Anpanman and I have a smile contest

We found an interesting shopping center along
the way. Shonen Jump, anyone?

A very Nagoya style noodle dish for dinner.

Last time I came to the airport, they had ninjas instead of
winter sport mannequins.

Phew! That was just to get into the heart of the airport. More later. I'm tired just remembering all of that.