Impossible mission

Status: Accomplished

For the last few months...like 6, i've been joyously and completely illegally careening around the streets of tokyo in my little car. i decided that the time had come, something must be done about this. i began to ask around, and found that it is indeed possible for me to get my american driving license "transferred" to a japanese one, provided i jumped through all the little hoops that japan seems to love so much. SO MUCH. i, the asker, was encouraged by the not-too-difficult sounding hoops the askee was telling me about. show up, take a written "test"- 10 true/false, and in english, no less- take a driving test, take a picture, get a license. no problem!

Not so, my friends, not so. in japan, they have these imaginary boundaries that liniate between "prefectures", which act and sound and smell much like the american version of "states". on a side note, in the near future i will further explore the very real possibility that these lines were created by putting a GPS tracker on the back of a drunk dog. while driving down the same road in a straight line, it is possible to leave saitama prefecture, thereby entering tokyo prefecture, then enter saitama again, then enter tokyo a final time. again, this is all while driving in a straight line. i am not making this up. *edit*- that link expired somehow...

At any rate, were i to have gotten the gumption to get this all taken care of while living in tokyo prefecture, all would be well. it would have been a pain to get my address transferred and to register at the city hall, but it would have enabled me to engage with a much more "forigner friendly" licensing center. not to mention one that was not on the other side of creation. but, since i did not get this all taken care of until the very last minute (my american license expired on the 4th, and you can't get an expired license transferred now, can you?) i would now have to deal with the dreaded saitama licensing center. i now know that this place is somewhat infamous in the american crowd for being impossibly difficult- far, FAR more difficult than its tokyo brother. it is also, as previously mentioned, very far away geographically speaking as well. not only that, but it was very highly reccomended that i bring a translator- which seems silly. if they're going to have a process to transfer foreign licenses, it seems they'd make it at least somewhat possible to do on one's own, especially with a degree of japanese under one's belt. however, at one point in my day, a nice-ish japanese man instructed us for well-nigh an hour on how to drive on the test course, all in japanese. and not just any japanese, but some of the most difficult, formal japanese that there is, to the point that not only was unable to understand the vocabulary, i was hardpressed to have any idea whatsoever as to even the subject he was talking about. let it be said that translators are not needed for the one in tokyo.

My translator and i got to the center at 8:30 in the morning, on monday, my day off. in order to accomplish this feat, we had to leave at 6:30 in the morning. this is a travesty. there are about 14 forms that i needed to bring with me (american license, official translation of said license, alien registration card, passport, proof of residence in america, etc.) all of which i had. or so i thought. as of 30 days ago, they started "cracking down" on a form that up to this point had been deemed "nice, but redundant". it now seems the powers-that-be had decided that redundancy is good as a hobby, on rice, on a boat, on a coat, in a car, both near and far...you get the picture. so this form was no longer negotiable. they had not bothered to tell anyone this, of course. this form took me about 30 seconds to get from my city hall- about long enough to write my address out. can a form this easy to obtain really be all that important? survey says: no.

That was the only hiccup in our carefully laid plans. by the time we had gone all the way back across saitama, spent 30 seconds getting the form, and getting back, it was about 1:30. i managed to take the written test and pass, although they never bother to tell you what your score is. if you get at least 7 out of ten, you go to the next hoop. if you didn't they send you home. it was at this point that the instructor talked at us for almost an hour in very technical japanese about what would be required to pass the driving portion of the test. becuase nobody on the real streets actually follows any of their rules, they have a 10-ish acre driving course, complete with traffic lights, train crossings, crosswalks, and even some of those rediculously tiny japanese roads.

This driving test was one of those tests where you are required to know exactly what the tester is looking for, and do it, in order to pass. it has very little to do with driving in the "real world", and very much to do with them having as much power over you as they want. for all that, my tester was a fairly nice man, and i did do my very best to pretend like i thought his way was the best way, but he still failed me. as far as i could tell, you get 1 freebie. make 2 mistakes, and you're out. i know what my first mistake was (not stopping far enough back from the stop line), but i'm not really sure what got me my second "batsu". maybe not being japanese enough. or at all.

So, i returned to the dreaded konosu licensing center this very last thursday to re-take my driving test. i showed up early, like they said i should, even though i had an appointment, i then sat around for 2 hours, which was 1 hour after my appointment. i then took the test, and passed it without a single mistake! (well, i did turn the wipers on instead of the blinkers, but it seems there wasn't a slot for that on his paper). all the "passers" were then herded from place to place, seemingly at random, for undisclosed amounts of time and for unknown reasons. i suspect that even though we had passed the test, they still wanted to break our wills. but, 6 hours after i walked in to take a 5 minute driving test, i walked out with my license. and nobody can take that away from me.

As long as they can't catch me, that is...