The Trials and Tribulations of a Wannabe Licensed Driver in Japan

You know, I like Japan. I really do. The people are polite and friendly, the food is great, the language is fascinating, the public transportation is excellent, and there's a very high cultural value placed on my profession. But sometimes, culture shock rears its ugly head, and I can't help but look at the Japanese way of doing a particular thing and say, "Well that's just silly."

Getting a driver's license in Japan is one of those things.

A List of Things That Have Little To Do With Driving Safely, But Can Still Hurt Your Chances of Getting A Japanese Driver's License:

• Renewing your home-country passport or license too close to your arrival in Japan.
• Not living in your home country for at least 84 days after the issue of your license.
• Not renewing your international driver's license within 3 months before your arrival in Japan.
• Being American. (Canadians don't have to go through this crap.)
• Wearing shorts or open-toed shoes.
• Having brown skin.
• Driving in the middle of the lane, as opposed to driving in gutter.
• Having a job that won't let you skip out of work for a week.
• Failing to check over your left shoulder before turning, just in case a scooter has magically teleported into the four inches between your mirror and that ten-foot wall. (Remember, if you're doing it right, you're driving in the left gutter!)
• Failing to check over your right shoulder before turning right, just in case someone's barreling down the wrong side of the road (?!).
• Failing to check over your left shoulder before turning right (?!?!).
• Not knowing enough Japanese to greet your examiner politely.
• Failing to understand road markings that are intentionally designed to look nothing like the official markings on actual roads in Japan.
• How busy the driver's center is (passes take longer to process than failures).

The process for getting a driver's license in Japan is, in short, a nonsensical and bureaucratic nightmare that, for most (white, male) Americans eats up about 12-20 hours over the course of 3-5 days, at a cost of about $75 per day. Seriously, it borders on mild psychological torture. In Fukuoka, it goes like this:

1. Get your license translated at the Japanese Auto Foundation. There's one office in Fukuoka, out in the suburbs. Fortunately, it happens to be in my suburb (Muromi). Unfortunately, my suburb is an hour away from the testing center, by public transportation. Even more unfortunately, if the examiners forget to return your official translation with the rest of your documents, you have to go back and pay the translation fee again.

2. Go to the testing center between 1:00 and 1:30 on a business day. No joke. Applications can't be processed outside these 30 minutes.

3. Wait. Usually 30-60 minutes.

4. Take a 10-question written test and a 10-second eye exam. Luckily, they're both in English!

5. Wait. Usually at least 60 minutes.

6. Take the "practical" exam. This is five minutes of pure hellish stupidity spent behind the wheel of a decommissioned taxi cab--an experience which deserves, and will receive, its own post later.

7. Fail the "practical" exam.

8. Lather, rinse, repeat. Almost always once at least, more commonly two or three times. We have a co-worker who went through this ordeal seven times before passing. And when I say repeat, I mean everything: the license translation (they failed to return it to me, which I didn't notice until I looked through my papers at home), the written test, the eye exam--everything. (Ed: Turns out this wasn't true--you only had to repeat the driver's exam and its associated costs.)

Anyway, I made my first attempt at running this gauntlet on Friday and failed miserably. I was so fixated on keeping left, checking over my shoulders, and glancing frantically at my (six!) mirrors, that I confused a stop sign for a yield sign (both inverted red triangles with kanji, incidentally, though one has more white), which resulted in a much-deserved instant fail.

I'm a little miffed that the examiner didn't let me finish the course, though. For $75 a pop, I think I was entitled to the practice! At least I got to ride in the back while my coworker failed his test, so I did see the course from the car once through.

I will say this, though: our examiner was very polite, did us the courtesy of using as much English as he could, and made absolutely sure we understood what we had done wrong at the end of the exam. He even offered us a hearty "ganbatte!" (roughly "Good luck!" or "Go get 'em!") before he tossed us out on our backsides.

Stay tuned for more on the driving course itself, plus my second attempt on Monday.