• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

driver's license

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

I've got a Japanese driver's license. It took 18 months.

In all honesty, it took only two days. But I'd read all kinds of horror stories about getting your license in this country, so I dragged my feet. For a year and a half.

In the end, the process was more-or-less what I expected of a bureaucratic affair in Tokyo. It went like this.

1. I had to get my existing (Ontario) driver's license translated. To do this I went to the Japan Auto Federation. It cost ¥3000.

2. The next day, I went to the Samezu Driver's testing facility. And spent hours going from office to office. First floor, second floor, back to the first, up to the second, back to the first, up to the third. Done.

In all, I needed these things:

• original driver's license.
• translation of driver's license.
• statement from a proxy for the Alberta government's department of motor vehicles that I had originally obtained a driver's license in June of 1986.
• all of my passports dating back to 1986, to prove that I'd been in the country all that time (a Canadian passport does not prove this, but that's another matter)
• my gaiokokujin torokusyo shomeisho (gaijin card)
• two tiny photos of myself (which I had taken at the driver's center itself for ¥700).
• an eye exam (again, at the center)
• about ¥4500 in fees
• one spare bicycle headlight, which was stolen at the center (lots of gaijin hanging around that center)

And now I can drive in this country. Mwahahaha. Hahahaha!