Not Just Ninjas

Normally I would start with some kind of clever lead-in, but frankly I’m not in the mood today. I’ll just say it: today Steph and I both failed the driver’s license test. For the third time.

This is an unholy tradition for Americans spending more than one year in Japan. International driver’s permits are only good for one year, after which you’re required to convert your home driver’s license into a Japanese license. Most civilized countries have agreements in place with the Japanese government so that all they have to do is fill out some forms, take the easy eye test, and go on their way. Apparently this isn’t sufficient for Americans until all 50 states fill out some questionnaire and submit a bunch of statistics so that the Japanese govt can verify that they meet all the guidelines, etc, etc. At the end of the day, these governmental relationship “irreconcilable differences” mean that normal people like us have to go through this extremely annoying ritual at least once.

The first annoyance of the whole thing is that foreigners can only conduct this process at the prefectural capital’s licensing office, which is more than an hour’s drive from Noshiro. At least we don’t have it as bad as some other places in the ken that have to drive 2-3 hours for the privilege.

Once you get there, the Japanese bureaucracy is a wonder to behold. First of all, the licensing process stretches over two days. The first day you have to show up and be interviewed to determine if your driving history is good enough to even be considered for a license. Our wonderful and long-suffering friend Yumeko accompanied us on this trip as a translator. Of course, before you can start your interview you need to fill out all the forms. And they need to photocopy your home driver’s license. And the blank back of it. And again at a larger size. And all the stamps in your passport. Somehow this photocopying process always takes more than an hour. (We had been warned by friends to bring something to read.) Finally it came time for the interview, which wasn’t all that bad. The only particularly absurd question was “Do you have confidence in your driving?” I suppose an incredibly honest and timid person might say no, but I can’t imagine why they think it’s necessary to ask that.

So that’s the first day. But then the fun really begins. Your next visit gets to the meat of things. You show up at 8:30 in the morning, fill out some more forms, then wait around for an hour until the written test. That test consists of ten of the easiest true-false questions I have ever seen. Of course it takes them over an hour to tell you whether you passed, even though we were the only people taking the English test that day and we finished it in three minutes. Then it’s time for the eye test, which is done in a minute and a half and takes some more time for them to think about. Then you get some time for lunch, but you spend that memorizing the course.

Oh, the course. No real-world driving test here. Instead you have a maze of loopy streets on a course behind the license office, complete with stop lights, railroad crossings, and unworldly S and L curves that are a bit wider than the chunky taxi-like car that they provide you. Each day they post a different route through the course, which you have an hour to memorize before driving it at your appointed time.

The course really isn’t that bad. Yes, the S and L curves are annoying and arbitrary (and certainly unlike anything you’ll actually encounter on the road) and caused us both to fail once. But the real pisser is the arbitrary nature of the final judgment. Unlike American DMVs, there is no point system for keeping track of what you passed and failed; the ultimate decision is based on the whims of the instructor. Each instructor has his own (sometimes contradictory) hangups and obsessions, and you never know which instructor you’re going to get. Fortunately the instructor at least tells you what you did wrong so that you can fix it next time. But sometimes even this won’t help you. Last week there was another American guy taking the test with us, and he told us that he had failed his first time because he went too fast through an intersection, and then failed the second time (with a different instructor) for going too slow through the same intersection.

So that brings us to today. We were both feeling good coming out, agreeing that we couldn’t have done any better. Our previous screwups were nowhere to be seen. The instructor had criticized each of us for a rather silly lane-change technicality that we had never heard of in our studying of the drivers’ handbook. But we weren’t particularly worried about that, because we had heard from friends that even if you do it perfectly, they will find something to nag you about just for good measure. We had also studied many former JETs’ experiences on their reasons for failing and we had never heard of this one.

Well, too bad. To our amazement and humiliation, we failed once again. To add insult to injury, we watched another guy walk away with a license after not even looking at the course and making a couple of wrong turns along the way. Just to be sure and properly righteous, I looked at the handbook when we got home, and lo and behold, the “rule” that we we had been failed on was nowhere to be seen.

The absurdity of the whole system is that thanks to the international permit, each time we fail the test, we climb into our car and drive, legally but obviously unsafely, the hour and a half back to Noshiro.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Culture Shock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.