Before going on with the Menkyo Center saga, here's a picture that ties in with cars and licenses a little bit, anyway - the Toyota Hello Kitty.

That critter is everywhere. It has a lot to do with cute in Japan, being both brought into existence by cuteness and perpetuating it. At one time in my early days in Japan, I thought that the Hello Kitty craze was so completely Japanese that it could never catch on in the U.S., but of course you can see Sanrio shops in malls at home now, too, and preteen girls everywhere still seem to love the stuff they sell, for reasons I can't see. Maybe that's because I'm not a preteen girl.

The thing is, in Japan, adults love Hello Kitty, too. Some adults...

When I first saw this, I thought that there was actually a Hello Kitty model car being made by Toyota. Then I saw the same emblem on a Honda and realized it was just an fan add-on. That makes it marginally better than actually having a Hello Kitty car, although I have to wonder about someone who is old enough to drive actually wanting to put a Hello Kitty emblem on their car. And these are made for cars. They are metal and look just like a factory logo on other cars. That means the target market is drivers, i.e., adults. Go figure.

That reminds me of two things - stream-of-consciousness writing again. We will get back to the Menkyo Center, I promise.

The first thing is, coming out of the Menkyo Center (See? There it is right there.) with Mitsuru-san, I saw a car called the Naked. That's right, the Daihatsu Naked. Commercially, you can see where they were going. It's just a cheap, basic car for around-town errands - no frills, no extras. On the other hand, it's an English word, but I can't see Daihatsu trying to market it in the U.S. That reminds me of something else in the brand-name category, but I'll get into that another time.

The second thing has to do with marketing, as well, though.

When I lived in Japan in the '90s, I had to go to a hospital at one point for something minor, I forget what. At some hospitals, as in many places in Japan, you have to take off your shoes to go inside. Slippers are usually provided and are usually sitting there waiting to be used. At this hospital, however, they had a slipper room, with an attendant. You would hand over your shoes and he would hand back a pair of slippers.

When I handed him my shoes, he looked at them and then looked over the counter at my feet and sucked air through his teeth and tilted his head. That's very Japanese and means, basically, "What the hell do I do about this?" I don't think he had that many challenges in his line of work.

He thought for a second and then he took off into the racks in the back and returned with a size 11 pair of slippers - well, to be exact, a size 11 pair of bunny slippers. The rest of the afternoon, I was walking around the hospital in very large bunny slippers, feeling somewhat akin to a fool. I didn't need to feel that way, though, because nobody noticed and nobody cared, which is a little weird in itself.

It was later that this thought occurred to me. Who in the world MAKES size 11 bunny slippers and why? How much of a market can there be?

Okay, back to the Menkyo Center.

It worked out that Yoh-san was able to go with me on the following Monday. That, of course, made it a lot easier to get there and to get through the process of just starting the test. The idea was that he would get me started and then leave me there to spend the rest of the day taking scooter-riding lessons and doing whatever else they would surprise me with. No reason for him to waste his whole day, too. I could probably find my own way home.

What with the train and bus ride and being at the center by 8:30, I had to be up and on the first train by 6:30. Early rising is not my favorite thing, but I did it, met Yoh-san where we changed trains, took that train to where we caught the bus and arrived at the Menkyo Center with time to spare.

The first step this time was to stand in line to buy about $16 worth of stamps to stick on my application. The stamps showed that I had paid the fees and could be allowed to take the test. Then we sat and waited for the license windows to open for business.

In the meantime, Yoh-san found a booklet on the scooter test. Although it was only in Japanese, it showed some road signs that I hadn’t seen before and gave me an idea of what the test would be like. Sounds helpful, right? Yes, but... it also showed me that the test I was going to be taking was nothing like the test I had been studying for. Completely different. Totally different. Just great...

I went through the line to have my paperwork checked, anyway, and went in to take a quick eye test. The eye test was in Japanese, but basically all I had to say was ‘right’, ‘left’, and ‘red’, ‘yellow’ and ... ‘blue’?

This is an odd piece of linguistics that I haven’t quite figured out. It turns out that Japanese and many other languages don’t distinguish between green and blue, some traditionally, some currently. There’s an interesting article on it in Wikipedia on it, if you care to check it out. The weird thing is that there is a word for ‘green’ in Japanese (midori) and a word for ‘blue' (ao), but ‘ao’ is used to describe a green light. Luckily, the guy giving the test knew that English speakers say ‘midori’ for ‘ao’, although he probably doesn’t understand why we would do such a thing.

I passed the eye test and went on up to the third floor of the Center to give the written test a try.

After the test - 30 minutes long, but in English, of sorts - I met up with Yoh-san again and we went back downstairs to await the results, which are shown on an electronic board in the main waiting room. To pass, you need to get 90%. There had been about 7 questions that I wasn’t sure about on the test, but figured that since it was only a true-false test, I should get three or four of those right and would squeak through with a 90. I was wrong.

When the numbers came up on the big board, mine was not among them. After decades of driving in California, I wasn’t able to pass a scooter test in Japan. It was really embarrassing, but more than that, frustrating! It meant that I was going to have to come back to the Menkyo Center a third Monday.

Yoh-san was consoling and told me that actually most people, including Japanese citizens, don’t pass on the first try. The powers that be do not check your knowledge so much as try to trick you with the questions. For example, Question 7, if you’re crossing a sidewalk when exiting from a parking lot, you should proceed slowly, watching for pedestrians. Of course, you say. Wrong. You should STOP and then proceed slowly, watching for pedestrians.

In addition, although I’m grateful for the effort made to accommodate English speakers, the translation often leaves a little to be desired. Question 12 - The scooter requires brake-play. That's not really a question, is it? Anyway, I had no idea what it meant. It turns out that they were trying to say that there should be some play in the brakes. (It’s true.) Question 15 - When you stop at a stop sign with no stop-line on the street, you should stop at the beginning of the intersection. Nope. You should stop BEFORE the beginning of the intersection. They were playing semantics games with me in a second language.

Regardless of the reasons, I was embarrassed to have failed, but I was determined to get my license and immediately started to make plans to come back the next week. Now that I knew the way and knew the procedure at the center, I wouldn’t have to prevail on my friends to accompany me. I could fail just as well on my own. That was something, anyway.

So, back onto the bus, back to the train station, back to the other train station, then off to a different train station (the university stop), 15 minutes walking in the rain, and back to work for the rest of the day. Ironically, that was exactly the type of trip I was trying to avoid by getting my license.

The trains and buses were on me, by the way, since I wasn't going to make Yoh-san actually pay money to help me out, and that added about $40 to the rapidly escalating cost of being a driver in Japan.

It goes on...