Driving License Renewal

During my first two years in Japan I didn’t have this blog up and running, and so I never wrote about the hassle of getting my Japanese drivers license. But it was a huge pain in the neck. Nothing is ever easy in Japan. Last week I had to renew the same Japanese driver’s license.

Renewing your license in the US is relatively painless. You just show up, get a new photo taken, and leave. In Japan it’s a bit more of a process.

For starters, they only do it from 1 to 1:20 on Monday thru Thursday. How is that for a convenient time? I showed up the previous week at 2 in the afternoon, only to have the lady say, “We already finished doing this today. Too bad for you.” At this point the other customers started laughing a bit, and I felt like everyone was taking advantage of this to have a good laugh at the foreigner. I said that I have work at the scheduled times, but they couldn’t care less.

So the following week I rearranged some of my classes so I could take the afternoon off, and went down to take care of the license. After filling out the usual forms, going through the eye checks, and getting our pictures taken, everyone went into a classroom for a two-hour class on driver’s safety. And here I thought I would be getting my picture taken and out the door. At least now it makes a bit more sense why they are so strict on the time.

The one cool thing about driving license renewal is it’s one of the few times you get packed into a room with people from all walks of life. Everyone has to renew their license at one time or another, so there are old people, young people, businessmen and construction workers and people with punk hairstyles. And then there is me, the only foreigner in the room. We have assigned seats, so I’m sitting in the middle, but barely fitting into the Japanese size desk, and when they showed the video I was pretty sure I was obstructing the view of the people behind me.

“This is going to be pretty confusing for you if you don’t understand Japanese,” the instructor said to me.

“I understand a little,” I said (indeed, we were saying all this in Japanese, so the fact that I was a somewhat proficient should have been self evident.)

Nevertheless, it was a long couple hours trying to follow the class. If you thought these kind of things were boring when they were in your native language, well, just imagine.

But there was one thing that was almost funny enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. At one point during the class, the instructor said, “Okay, everyone turn to page 8 of your text. There is some special advice printed there for woman drivers that you women in the class should take note of.” The page listed all the weak points of women drivers. I kept waiting for the instructor to point out the page for male weaknesses, but it turned out there was no such page. There was a page, however, for young drivers, and another one for old drivers, but no page for male drivers.

I took the textbook with me to Japanese class that night, and the other Westerners and I had a good laugh trying to read what they had written about women drivers. “Many women don’t understand the rules of the road,” said one point. “A lot of women don’t pay attention to what is going on right in front of them,” said another point.

“In America you could never say this,” I explained to the Japanese teacher. “People would get real upset.”
The Japanese teacher found our reaction to the textbook more interesting than the text itself. “I guess when you’re all laughing, it does seem a bit strange, but I would never have thought twice about it otherwise,” she said.