Japanese Driving Test III: Investigations of a Dog

I sat down to look at the form a bit more and decide how to proceed.  I considered my options: (1) I could go home and drag my 8-months pregnant wife and young child out in the 100-degree heat of the Fukushima summer to serve as totally unnecessary translators and my symbolic Japanese masters.  And, for foreigners living in Japan, if you have a Japanese master, it's almost always best to bring him or her to any sort of application process, because the rights of foreigners are (politely) shat all over by immigration and city hall officials here when no Japanese people are watching.

My other option (2) was basically to resort to a strategy that had been successful so many times for me in the past - but which I really didn't enjoy - which was basically to (politely) be as big a pain in the ass as possible and not leave until I got what I wanted.  This strategy has always worked for me in the past, but it's a huge time commitment, and for the sake of the image of foreigners in Japan, I'm only really willing to initiate it in the most extreme of circumstances. 

The time my own bank refused to let me close my own account because I was moving to another city, I argued with them for three hours until they finally just gave me the balance in exchange that I leave a few hundred yen in the account, which I obviously haven't used in three years.  The time I wanted to buy a phone which ran on Windows Mobile but was refused it required five full afternoons spread over five weeks. (I found out later this was because the operating system was in Japanese, one of the world's "three most difficult languages" and, as a foreigner, I obviously couldn't hope to comprehend the Japanese language, which is objectively more difficult than English - an "easy" language spoken by simpletons - and would accordingly call and complain repeatedly, and frankly no one wants to deal with that.)  The last time I was given a visa, I had to argue two days for a grand total of six hours, (and this was after the city hall lost my tax records and required six weeks to replace them) during which one government official whom I dubbed "The Cooler" actually bullied my wife to tears and threatened to expel me from the country.

So I wasn't surprised when, while waiting obliviously at the license center, I suddenly got a call from my wife who said that the license center people had actually gone around me to call her on her cell phone to tell her she needed to put her gaijin in its place and call me to tell me to go home.  Meanwhile, I was still sitting in front of the window like a moron being ignored by officials who will do absolutely anything, it seems, to avoid actually talking to a foreigner.  (If your job description is "deal with foreigners" and you don't like dealing with foreigners, I would suggest getting a new job.) 

I decided finally to (3) call the Fukushima International Center for advice.  Basically the Fukushima International Center is a Shaq-Diesel coalition of righteous Japanese and foreigners who counter the official bullying which foreigners receive from the Japanese government.  It's indicative of an absurd waste that there needs to be a public service to combat public services.  

A woman at the International Center told me she'd try to straighten it out, and would call me back if there were any problems.  I never got a call back from her, but ten minutes after I hung up the phone, a nice police officer came out of the office behind the window and apologized for old bitch's rudeness, said he had called my wife to apologize to her as well and to explain the situation, and introduced me to a young girl who had apparently spent time in America and could answer my questions in English if need be.  The International Center had come through in the clutch again.  I was sure the official point of reckoning was that "these foreigners just don't understand Japanese culture." as opposed to "stop being a cock."  But, that is another battle for another day.

After the intervention of the International Center and the assistance of the Japanese girl who had studied abroad in the U.S., the form was quickly finished, and I entered stage two of this second day of driving test bullshit, which consisted of a detailed interview on how I had obtained my license.  I understand that America has fifty states and fifty standards, and so fast-tracking or burying this stage of the process may not have been initially feasible, but I wouldn't think it'd be too difficult to gradually create a database of results, write a computer program, and eventually eliminate the wasteful interview part; but then again I'm still loosely operating under the assumptions that actions have reasons behind them and people aren't complete morons. 

The next stage was the eye test, which was the only straight-forward, reasonable part of the exam, and this was followed by the written test.  The written test contained ten questions which consisted each of an illustration, a passage in Japanese explaining the illustration, and a passage in English explaining the illustration.  I was instructed by the nice police officer that I had five minutes to answer the ten questions.  This written test was shockingly easy: a young child with no driving experience could have answered every question correctly simply by employing the smallest dose of common sense; each picture would show someone passing at an intersection or stopping in the middle of train tracks and then I had to decide whether or not that was okay. 

I was on to stage something or other.  I forget what stage I'm on at this point, and if you don't like it well sir you can rot in hell.  At this point I received my yellow card, which anyone who's undergone the Japanese driving test would be familiar with: it's a card that is yellow.  There's a bright red stamp on the left side.  One stamp.  Indicating that the particular cardholder has passed the written test.  Because nobody fails the written test.  It's effectively pointless.  And then on the right side of the most cards, in the driving test section, there's a column of black "no pass" stamps.  There are five or six lines on the card, and that is exactly how many tries it seems to take the average person to pass, so I wouldn't consider it unreasonable that somewhere along the line, someone figured out that the marginal cost of the paperwork required to produce a second card for an invidual gaijin exceeds the marginal cost of simply passing said gaijin.  I don't know, because by the end of this process for myself, I had witnessed 11 driving examinations, only one of which had been successful, and had seen 25 black stamps on six yellow cards.

I was now ready to fail the driving exam firsthand.  I had prepared excessively by scouring the gaijin enclaves of the Internet.  There were many long, detailed explanations, but a few main points or cardinal rules to keep in mind.  The first was to go slow, especially around curves.  The second was to keep to the left, because one girl actually drove on the right side of the road and failed for that.  Dumbass.  The third was to look around constantly for invisible or imaginary ghost cars that had somehow made it onto the course, using your neck and not your eyes, really, really hamming it up.

Today there would be three foreigners taking the test, and we were instructed to assemble at 1:00 in the cathedral-like main room on the first floor of the license center.  I made my way downstairs.  It was only 11:30, so I had plenty of time before the test.  From 12:00 we were allowed to walk the course, which sounds ridiculous but is completely advised.  They had given me a map with the course charted, and I was pleased to see that the obstacles (since the Japanese course is designed or contrived and not on an actual road) were not especially difficult.  After walking the course, I decided to eat the sandwich which my wife had made for me before I went, but my stomache was upset from being so goddam fucking angry that I wasn't hungry, and actually had to fight gag reflexes to fill my body with nutrients.  This is something which would recur throughout the following weeks. 

Comments

[Kevin Kato]

Chris, I have been living in Japan for 9 years, Fukushima for 7 of those, and I have never gone to the International Center for assistance with anything. There are two reasons for this: one, it never occurred to me, and two, my wife seems to have a thorough and grounded understanding of how (unpleasant adjective) Japanese people, particularly public servants, can be. Whenever I need anything (i.e.driving records from the US to prove that I have been driving an acceptable length of time, whatever that may be this week), my wife gets on the phone and goes to work in her polite, sweet, don't-BS-me voice. This, I believe even more now after reading your post, has saved me hours and hours of aggravation not to mention a most certainly impressive amount of money when you consider the incidental costs of destroying public property in fits of rage.
By the way, if you like I can pass on a few pointers I picked up when I took my driving test. These of course from people who had failed before and failed again that day.

[James]

Phoning home to get your wife to speak to you is unacceptable. That's god awful.

Looking forward to part IV!