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...

The picture here has nothing at all to do with the Menkyo Center. I don't have any pictures to go with that, but I want to put up some kind of illustration with every post, so here's today's.

If you look at it for a moment, you'll get it. I'll wait...

Yeah, the dog is asking the boy to remember to clean up after him, with attendant vocabulary. In case the written message isn't clear, there's the graphic in the bag. That ain't soft serve...

Everything in Japan seems to be made cute. Both of these characters seem to be very happy with the situation. It's an anime-like tradition, I think. I tried to think of an equivalent in the U.S., but there isn't one, just "Curb Your Pet" signs once in a while.

This sign is at the entrance to a cemetery.

Back to the Menkyo Center...

So there we were. Mitsuru-san was providing translation, but this was, again, fairly straightforward. The only problem I had was that in Japan on a true-false sheet, X means ‘no’ and O means ‘yes’. There were a couple double negative problems. Number 23 - “I have not had any vision problems diagnosed in the last three years.” I marked ‘X’ for “No, I haven’t”. The answer needed here is O for ‘Yes, I haven’t”. You can see the confusion. I hope it’s not just me.

So after a while, the paperwork is taken care of and I’m okayed to take the test. So, I ask, where do I go to take it? The man replies the test starts at 8:30 every day. This, of course, is one hour BEFORE one can start to get the paperwork for the test done, meaning that every single person caught up in the licensing process must make two trips to the Menkyo Center and, it follows, take two days off work. In addition, I’m told that after the test that second trip out, I have to stick around and take a scooter driving lesson in the afternoon of that day, making it a full day’s outing. Whoever Yoh-san had talked to when he called up to get the information for me the week before had not thought it necessary to mention those little points.

Well, I was a bit upset, but tried not to show it. Unfortunately, I’ve come to expect things like this whenever I try to get things done here. I’m sure a lot of it is because I don’t understand the language well enough and miss some of the explanations, but some of it is definitely cultural and that’s just the way it is.

For example, I wanted to get a table for my office for work-related purposes - grading, sorting papers, etc. I went to my department head office and made the request. A 10-minute discussion between staff members ensued, followed by a five-minute phone call, followed by me being told I already had a table in my office. By this, they meant a small coffee table that goes with a sort of lounge suite of chairs that were furnished with the office - not a work table in any way.

I think they were all wondering why I hadn’t noticed I already had a table. When I said that table was too small for what I needed, they told me to use my desk for sorting papers and grading, like I hadn’t thought of that, either. I explained that with a computer and printer on my desk, there was no work space left. Didn’t matter. I already had a table and a desk and I didn’t need another table.

Mitsuru-san finally cut through the red tape and introduced me to someone in charge of tables and we all went down into the basement and chose a nice, functional unit, put it on a cart, and trundled it across campus to my office.

I now have a table, but I was told not to mention it to the other instructors because they’ll all want one, too. True.

So, anyway, the Menkyo Center...

Well, there was nothing that could be done about it, so I just had to make plans to go back there the following Monday. It was a long trip by car, but at least Mitsuru-san knew the way. Now I was going to have to figure out how to get there by train and bus by myself. On the plus side, I had another week to study before taking the test. Stay tuned...