Vehicle Registration in Japan

by Andrew Vestal

Today, I registered my poor little car (a light car, or keijidousha) with Gunma Prefecture.

See if I ever obey the law again.

The adventure starts yesterday (Thursday) afternoon, when I cornered a teacher I work with and had him help me decode the registration forms. There are two large and copious forms that must be filled out: a transfer of ownership document for the car itself, and a second transfer of ownership for the shaken. The shaken is the certification that the car has passed the Japanese government's draconian biannual test that costs a few hundred to over a thousand dollars each time. All the shaken means is that your car is running fine; more than anything, it's an excuse for the government to bilk you for a few man. Think emissions testing under a totalitarian state. Anyways, my friend Tanaka-sensei filled out the two small print, A4 sized forms with the correct and necessary kanji; I put the forms, the copies of the previous owner's forms, and the other necessary documentation aside for today.

Then this morning comes. First, I had to find the keijidousha registration office. In all of Gunma, an expansive prefecture of over 2,000,000 people, there is exactly One place to register your car, in the city of Maebashi. Maebashi is about an hour from Kiryu, and I'm lucky to live so close. I had a map, but it was a Japanese map, which made it next to useless. Japanese maps are like the landmark- laden crayon-drawn masterpieces you made in social studies to give your mother in third grade: entirely not to scale, directionless, and packed with unlabeled streets (though in the maps' defense, many of the streets HAVE no names). They mean well but are unusable for navigation. It's kind of like the representative artwork of the Middle Ages, where an object's size and position on the map reflects its importance in the spiritual world. There was a single street with a name on the entire map: "Nonakacho," or middle-of-the-field street. In retrospect this should have been a clue about the office's arbitrary, middle-of-nowhere location. The street with the registration office, of course, had no name.

The hours are also entirely too cute: 8:45-11:45 AM, 1:00-3:00 PM, Monday through Friday. No weekends, no holidays, no exceptions. Woe betide anyone who buys a car and foolishly has a JOB at the same time. The only reason I could go at all was because this was the last-day of class-free spring vacation. So at 8:00 AM this morning, I left my house.

After that kind of buildup I hardly need mention that I got lost. I overshot it at first and ended up in Central Maebashi; I turned around, found Nonakacho, and then proceeded to embroil myself in a tangle of one-way roads through, fittingly enough, the middle of some fields. When I finally got out of the twisty field maze onto a main street, I had overshot the registation office once more. Third turn around was the charm; I managed to find it this time. At this point, it was about 10:00 AM.

Inside was the usual line of weary-looking government officials and clearly irked drivers in line. It wasn't at all unlike a DMV back in the states, in that respect. I found the line, waited my turn, found a nice person and explained in pidgin Japanese my situation. I gave her the forms and documentation, and she made a little frowny face. You see, the office had changed their registration forms completely on April 1st, 2002 ... this is the old form. The form I received in the mail a few weeks ago, well, they can't accept it anymore. Sorry. I need to go over there to the table and fill out this new, rather different form instead. I stared at her like a deer in headlights. "I have some trouble with writing kanji," I warned her in a moment of particularly dramatic understatement. "Gambatte," she said. Do your best. Remember in Empire Strikes Back, where Yoda tells Luke, "Do. Or do not. There is no try." Japan is a bit like that, without the "Or do not" part. "Gambatte" is considered the universal panacea that makes the impossible possible.

So I did my best. Comparing the old form and the new form helped a lot; though the layouts were completely different, many of the form fields were identical. I could read a few of the others, and the rest I hacked away at with my electronic dictionary. There's a reason I had had Tanaka-sensei fill out the form for me. Japanese is hard enough as is; government-mandated form Japanese is (to me) a tangled mess of terrifying kanji. After half an hour, I finished the form. It was an ugly chickenscrawl and I was only half sure of my answers, but it was done.

I turned the completed form in, triumphantly. The employee looked the form over, nods in acceptance, and asks to see my Proof of Address. I hand over my trebly-holographed, exceedingly intimidating Foreigner Registration Card, uncopyably printed with my Kiryu address. She took the card, checked the address on the front, nods, then turned the card over and looks at the back. Her face grew concerned. "This is no good," she told me. "It's from last year. It needs to be this year." (The date of issue on the back of the card is Heisei 13.09.03; this year is Heisei 14.) I pointed out that I arrived in Japan within the past year, and that the date is less than a year old ... maybe they can accept it? No, she told me, sadly, no good. Do I have anything else?

This was a bit of a shock. As a foreigner living in Japan, there is no higher form of identification than my foreigner registration card; it's suitable ID for buying/selling cars, real estate, and fine art; it serves as proof of age if necessary; any police officer is required by law to recognize it immediately as evidence that I'm a foreign resident who has taken up long-term residence in Japan. It's like someone in the U.S. rejecting your photo ID driver's license as a valid form of identification--what, exactly, more are they looking for?

Well, I asked (with not a little bit of concern--my apartment in Kiryu is over an hour away, each way, and I wasn't looking for an extra round trip), what kind of thing is acceptable for proof of address? "A bill," she said, "something like gas, electricity, with your name and address." Of course, I didn't think I have anything like this on me. I checked my folder of car-related materials for something, anything; no dice. I rooted through all the pockets of my backpack; empty. "Wait just a moment, please," I say. "Maybe in the car?" I went outside to search the seats for some sort of address-proving evidence.

In the car, much to my relief, I found a motherlode of personal artifacts imbued with my address: a bank statement, a credit card statement, my NTT landline telephone bill, and my DoCoMo keitai telephone bill. Laden with proof, I went back in.

As a utility, I offered the NTT telephone bill first. The employee went to consult with her supervisor. After a few minutes, she came back. Do I have the receipt from when I paid the bill at the conbini? she asked. I looked in the envelope and took out a double-stamped stub showing that I had paid the telephone bill. Unfortunately, it turned out the stub was from a different month than the bill itself. Oh, she said. Without the receipt, we can't do that.

I tried the bank statement. She took a quick look at it and shot it down. It has my address on it, I pointed out. Yes, she said, but not your name. But look at the deposit here, I said, singling out a line. It has the number on my Foreigner Registration Card AND the matching profession stamped in my passport: educator. There's no name, she said. No good.

What about the credit card statement, I asked? I unfold the Visa statement and put it in front of her. It has my name and my address, I helpfully pointed out, in case she couldn't read it right there herself. Is this an American credit card, she asked? Well, yes, I said. I had it before I came to Japan. We can't accept this, she said. It must be correspondence from within Japan.

My arsenal depleted, I brought out the keitai bill. I knew she'd have to go check with her supervisor again, as with the NTT bill, so I had saved it for last. I looked at the keitai pay stub, thanked God that it matched the month and amount on the bill, and handed it over as well. She looked at it, went to check with her supervisor, came back a few minutes later. "We can do this," she said. "Thank you," I said. It's 11:35 by this point, and I'm increasingly unamused. "Just let me copy it," she asked. "Of course," I said. She went and did so. She came back. She finished up the form. "That's the end," she said. "Thank you," I said. "The addresses are different," the employee next to her said.

We both turned to look at her.

"Look," said the helpful neighbor. "The card's address is 4-7-50 Miyamoto-cho. The keitai bill's address is 4-9-50 Miyamoto-cho. They're different."

I looked. Sure enough, they were. DoCoMo had been misaddressing my bills for months; since I always received them without incident and on time, I'd never, ever noticed. Until that moment.

The two employees conferred in rapid Japanese for a few minutes. Finally, the first employee addressed me. "The addresses are different," she explained, "so we can't use it. I'm sorry."

I stared at the employee, her neighbor, the employee. I do NOT kill the second, nosy employee, though I thought then and still think it would have been perfectly acceptable. I said in perhaps slightly too emphatic Japanese, "DoCoMo made a mistake in my address. That's DOCOMO'S fault! This is WHERE I LIVE! What am I supposed to do!" They made frowny faces.

I'm had no idea what to do next. I think that they suspsected me of being the world's most incompetent fraud; a perpetrator of identity theft who came packing five separate, mutually consistent, yet individually unusuable pieces of identification. More likely they just thought I was an ordinary gaijin.

So I took out my keitai, called Tanaka-sensei, explained the situation to him, begged him to try to straighten things out, and handed the keitai over to the employee. They conferred. I'm not sure what Tanaka-sensei was suggesting, but the employee kept saying, "I'm sorry, but we can't." Time and time again. Finally, after several minutes of discussion, she handed the phone back to me and I spoke with Tanaka-sensei. He was going to the Kiryu city office to get the master record of my address registration with the city. He would then fax a copy of it to the keijidousha registration office; though not from this year and transfered using a black-and-white, lousy-resolution fax machine, its single entry and unchanged status would be enough to convince them. Whereas an original Foreigner Registration card, bank statement, credit card statement, NTT telephone bill, and DoCoMo keitai bill, for example, were not.

Of course, by this point it was past 11:45 AM, so the office closed down for the next 75 minutes. Sorry.

Lunch, reading, etc.

I came back at 1:00 PM and waited for them to reopen, obtain the fax, check it, and finish the paper work. At 1:15 PM, the long registration nightmare was finally over. I drove back to Kiritaka, got stuck in traffic, arrived at the office at 2:45 PM. Though there were a number of cars in the parking lot, I entered the teacher's lounge to find it absolutely empty. I looked around the building for ten minutes or so and, strangely finding no teachers, stamped myself in the attendance book for the day (saving myself an otherwise- consumed day of vacation for another, less stressful time), marched out, and drove straight home. I had sat around doing nothing enough for one day.

At which point I wrote--am writing--this.