Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

And after an entire day of faff, I got my Japanese drivers license.

Lets rewind to 8 hours before. International licenses are no longer valid after a year in Japan, even if you renew it at home. The rule now is that all foreigners MUST get a Japanese license before their International one expires. For all countries except for America, this involves a theoretically simple transfer of documents and the filling in of various forms - no practical driving test is required. Americans cannot simply transfer their international license and must pass the practical test (It’s a scientific fact that Americans maim more Japanese people on the roads here than any other foreigner. There is no REAL evidence, but it’s still a scientific fact).

Thankfully, I fall into the previous bracket, coming from the UK. So utilising a day off, I left my house at 8am and set about trying to find the Kumamoto menkyo (license) center, along with a Canadian JET friend who was also going to transfer her license that day. The first hurdle was finding the place and even though I had done literally minutes of research in the night before, the 5-year old kanji-riddled roadmap that I owned was only slightly more than completely fricking unhelpful as we weaved our way through the city. You will find that things like this achieve a sort of ‘myth’ status with other JETs. No one has any concrete information about it, either because they blindly followed someone else’s lead when they did it or the experience was just so mentally exhausting that merely thinking about it causes their ears to bleed milk. Thus, you get really naff, cryptic instructions from other JETs like, “uhhh yeah, like, theres a steak shop, then you turn left” or the equally helpful “its east of the city”.

Anyway, with the kanji for ‘menkyo’ burned into our brains like a kind of fiery- word, we drove around the outskirts of Kumamoto looking for signs. After a while we came across the sign for the menkyo center which eventually directed us to a grim-looking building with about 5 cars outside it, all the time alarm bells ringing in my head to the tune of an imaginary song called “this is all totally wrong and I know it boom shaka laka”.

Our footsteps crashed around this near-empty building, which had been more or less abandoned by many of its tenants. It had the same kind of atmosphere as a third world airport, or a hospital whose entire staff had been eradicated by a killer brain-eating plague. Half expecting a zombie to groan from round the corner at any moment, we eventually found the single, blandly-labelled door to the menkyo office.

After knocking and receiving nothing in the way of a response, I simply opened the door and- was greeted with a totally bare room. It became apparent from this revelation that this was, in fact, the OLD menkyo center. I talked to a random guy who was walking about (the ONLY other person we saw in the building) and he told us that this was now the “Kumamoto Incubation Center”, whatever the hell that means. For a second I wondered if he was an evil criminal mastermind, incubating a genetically enhanced army of terror on the 2nd floor, but I concluded that he looked too stupid for that.

On our way out we noticed that along side the huge confusing sign that said both “Menkyo Center” AND “Incubation Center”, was a map showing the location of the new Menkyo Center - a 10 minute drive down the road.

Promptly after arriving at the correct place, we were told that we needed to get our license officially translated at an entirely different building across town before they would even LOOK at us, all the while talking in a mix of teeth-sucks and mumbles at the fact that neither of us had booked an appointment which I’m sure was a huge internal struggle in their minds - on the one side the desire to follow the Japanese modus operandi in a typical borg-like fashion and on the other the fear that if they turned us away, they would actually have to deal with us again at some point.

So what was naively perceived to have been a simple 2 hour max procedure slowly transformed into an epic human ping pong game of passing responsibility from one department or building to another. Several forms, one eye test, two sets of photographs, a LOT of waiting and about 5000-yen later, I was the proud holder of a Japanese drivers license. I drove home wielding the power of my new license the whole way. It felt sort of the same as before.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2003 at 10:57 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.