The Menkyo Center, cont.

But first...

The picture to the right is a little out-of-focus. Sorry about that. I'll try to get a clearer shot and replace it. It's just that it's a little hard to get, since it's in a toilet stall. Actually, it's in a lot of toilet stalls. Add to that difficulty the need for privacy when taking photos in a toilet. Imagine hearing the click of a camera shutter coming from a public restroom. There's someone out there thinking, "What in the world is he taking pictures of, anyway?"

If you haven't figured it out yet, it's instructions for using the toilet. Many toilets in Japan are so high-tech that they need to paste the instructions on the wall to make sure the toilet is used correctly. Even then, it can be really confusing.

I don't know what I think is the funniest. The company name, Toto? I am NOT in Kansas anymore. Press to wash bottom? You even get to choose the water pressure. Powerful deodorizer? Yeah, that's it. Especially the powerful part.

This sign can be found in public restrooms everywhere. This particular sign is in the restroom at a 7-11. Pretty fancy for a convenience store, huh? A lot of homes have these toilets, too, AND the instruction signs on the walls. When I lived here before, I was in an older residence and there was an older sign on the toilet wall with instructions - stick figures and all - on how to use a regular western toilet. At one point, the sit-down toilet was new enough to Japan that instructions were considered necessary.

The Japanese have since overtaken us on toilet technology. I remember my friend Doug Bowen telling me about going to a tech convention in the 90s when these new devices were being introduced. The slogan touting the innovations was, "Because your ass wants to feel clean, too."

I was with my friend, Hisami, at her mother's apartment for dinner the other night. During the course of the evening, I needed to use the facilities. When I was leaving the toilet area, I pressed the light switch on the wall, thinking, of course, to politely turn off the light. It didn't turn off, so I pressed it again. I then became aware of a beeping in the other room and realized that the light didn't go off because I was pressing an emergency button cleverly camouflaged to look like a light switch. Oh, yeah. That was embarrassing. At least it was only sounding in the apartment and not dialing the Japanese equivalent of 911.

I got off easy. Hisami told me about another non-Japanese friend who was staying at the apartment. He did the same thing I did except that it was in the middle of the night and the alarm, which has been recently replaced, at that time was more like a klaxon. That made me feel better because I had at least been spared that.

Remember the Menkyo Center?

So, as I said, the only books available to use for study for the scooter license were of very little help, other than for identifying road signs, Yoh-san checked several places online and by phone and it appeared that there was no book in English to help study for the gentsuki test. I had heard that the Menkyo Center Bookstore had one, but they didn’t on the day we were there.

Yoh-san, who has been endlessly helpful, as you may have noticed (as has Mitsuru-san), finally came up with a booklet issued by a private driving school. It arrived in the mail on Thursday - $20 more into the pot.

He brought the book by my office and was immediately apologetic. He said he wasn’t sure that the English in the book was very good and didn’t know if it would help me that much. Oh, says I, it can’t be that bad. I’m sure there’s a lot of useful information in it. Even if the English is a bit off, I’ll be able to figure out what is meant.

How many times can I be wrong, anyway?

Here are some examples of the test questions in the book. These are exactly as they are in the text, with no exaggeration.

Q25. The parking and stopping in the place where a parking and stopping is prohibited makes prospect at the road bad in addition to making traffic nearby be crowed and causes the rushing-out accident.

True or False?

Actually, using the correctly hyphenated ‘rushing-out’ as an adjective is something that many English speakers would not do correctly. Unfortunately, it didn’t help me understand what the hell they were talking about.

Q24. Saying calling slightly only, it left the car as it started an engine.

Excuse me? Even if I had two chances on a True-False quiz here, that’s still going to come up wrong.

Q45. In the place where there is this Pavement Markings (+ picture of road sign), it isn’t possible to stop.

Oh, it’s possible, all right. It’s just not legal. Does that make it true or false?

Q9. The width of the road that traffic control isn’t done makes not hinder the moving of the car which comes from the the left side at the intersection at the similar road.

Oh, come on. I’m not even going to try for that one.

I could go on for 26 pages, just like the book, but I won’t.

It was like Mad Libs for Drivers, minus the grammar.

At the end, there was a section on road signs and you’d think that that would be helpful, at least, but they seem to have gotten tired at that point and just explained the road signs in Japanese.

Yoh-san was a bit embarrassed by it all and called the company to complain. They offered to refund my money, but I’m holding on to the book so that I can prove that it exists. It’s going to be a great conversation piece.

While talking to the book publishers, Yoh-san found out that the translation was done by a software program. He asked them if they had had other complaints. No, they said. This was the first time it had come up.

That boggles the mind. Someone at sometime MUST have complained about the book or the software program. I think Yoh-san asked them the wrong question. He should have asked how many of the books they had sold. The only thing I can figure is that this the only book the program has been used for and I’m the only person who bought a copy.

Obviously, that book wasn’t going to help and the books in English that I did have were for cars, not scooters. I studied what I could - some information on road signs, a motorcycle question here and there - and did a bit of online research. What I found was that no English speakers in Japan who had tried for their driver’s license knew exactly what was going on, either, even after they had passed.

There were several reasons for this. One is that there are different requirements for drivers from different countries, as I mentioned before, although the reasons for this depend on who’s doing the talking. If there’s an opinion online, there’s always someone around to say you’re wrong. Part of the confusion was that the different prefectures in Japan, similar to states in the U.S., or maybe a better comparison is like counties in a state, seem to have different rules.

The results are that, from online discussion, you either can just exchange your license for a Japanese license or you absolutely can’t, you can take an easy 10-question quiz or you have to take an impossible 50-question quiz and you definitely do or don’t have to take a physical driving test. It’s either so easy that only an idiot would fail (thanks very much) or so difficult that you should expect to take it three or four times. All of this information is given in the semi-literate written language which we have come to expect from online contributors, which only adds another level of confusion to the process.

I’d better not get started on THAT topic. Maybe another time.

One thought, though... The worst thing about reading the postings on English problems in Japan is that many, many of the English speakers here are English teachers and they still can’t manage to put together a clear thought or a coherent sentence or are not even able to spell, or at least use a spell-checker.. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure I’ve made a couple of errors here or there in this blog, but I’m not talking about occasional errors, I’m talking about not knowing that they ARE errors.

Okay, later on that and more to come on the Menkyo Center next time.

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...

Okay, here’s a rundown on the process for getting a license in Japan. It varies according to what country you’re from. It has something to do with international agreements on license exchange and the U.S. loses out for reasons unclear to me. There are several theories online of why this is, but each one seems to be canceled out by another one. All I really know is that it made my four decades of driving in the U.S. insufficient experience for driving a motor scooter in Japan.

First, I had to get a paper from my city government office that showed that I lived where I said I lived. No matter that I had just gone through the two-week process of getting an official alien registration card with the same information on it. Couldn’t use that... The official paper costs about $2.

Next I had to get my California license officially translated at a JAF office (Japan Automobile Federation) - $30. Because of my work schedule and general ignorance of where to go and what to ask for, my friend Yoh-san took care of that for me by taking a morning off from his experiments and riding the train to some faraway city where said office is conveniently located. He also picked up a book for me called Rules of the Road, a well-translated English version of Japanese driving regulations - another $10. Yoh-san also ordered a book online for me that had several practice tests in English - another $20.

I had a weekend to study the tests before Mitsuru-san took a Monday off to drive me to the licensing building - hereafter called the Menkyo Center. I had read online that the gentsuki (scooter, remember?) test was 50 questions and the first three practice tests were 50 questions, too, so that’s what I spent my weekend studying. (Actually, I had also read somewhere that the test was only ten questions. That’s what I was hoping for).

The books were pretty straightforward, except for a couple of things. For example, overtaking and passing are two different things. Overtaking is passing something slower without crossing into oncoming lanes.

This happens quite a lot here, with lots of bicycles and scooters as well as pedestrians on the road. Outside of the big cities, sidewalks don't always exist. I think this is a holdover from the past. The streets are actually for pedestrians. The vehicles are just allowed to use them, too.

Passing is the crossover into the other lane. There are just slightly different signs prohibiting each. Also, there are three different signs that mean 1) road closed to all vehicles, 2) road closed to vehicles, and 3) no entry. The book did not do a good job explaining the difference, or the need, for that matter. In addition, the English translation for these signs on the practice test was a bit garbled. True or false - this sign means cars cannot enter. False - it means ‘No entry’. They throw little technicalities like that at you for no other reason than trying to trick you.

Well, the weekend just flew by with me trying to figure out things like that and bright and too early Monday morning, Mitsuru-san showed up at my apartment to take me to the Menkyo Center, conveniently located in the middle of nowhere about an hour’s drive from my town. That’s not really fair, I guess. I’m sure it’s very convenient for the people living in the town in which it’s located. That just doesn’t happen to be my town.

So we drive the hour and arrive in plenty of time to start the process of converting a foreign license, which takes place only between the hours of 9:30 and 11. We found the correct office and sat down to wait our turn. Next - the Menkyo Center.

Here's the graphics posting for today. An interesting use of English... We can get the idea, anyway, but kind of creepy, isn't it? It's got a Rolling Stones feel to it, but why? The thing is, what is this stuff called? Can you go down to the store and ask if they've got any Xylish in stock? Another example of English that isn't really.

As far as living in Japan goes, what can I tell you today? I eventually managed to get a real contract at work. It took a while. If you remember, I came to Japan on a tourist visa and couldn’t get paid until I had a contract and couldn’t get a contract until I got a work visa and couldn’t get a work visa until the paperwork came back from I don’t know where, and THEN couldn’t get a work visa incountry and had to go to Korea for a few days to get that done. When I came back, now that I had a visa, I had to register with my local council, I guess you’d call it, city government, anyway, and get my gaijin card - an official driver’s-license type card that tells the government exactly who you are and where you live and even who you work for. Very 1984. That took another couple of weeks. In the meantime, I bought that scooter I mentioned earlier, just for getting around a little more quickly and easily.

Well, that was my plan. I bought the scooter, yes, with a lot of help in translation from another friend from the university, Mitsuru-san. It’s all registered and licensed and insured, BUT they won’t let me drive it. Turns out that the driving license process is a lot more complicated than you would think it should be. I’ve got a lot to say on that next, but basically, I can’t drive on my California license, understandable, I suppose, and I can’t use an International Driver’s Permit because I’m now registered as a resident. I have to take a driver’s test in Japan, also understandable, but not even close to easy. That process is going to be a whole nother day’s writing.

The thing is, I decided to drive the scooter anyway the day after I got it - just to the university and back. I thought, well, if I get stopped, I’ll just show them my CA license and explain the situation and they’ll let me off with a warning. No big deal.

When I got to school, I checked the internet to see just what the penalty was for driving without a license in Japan, and it is actually a very big deal indeed. The penalties are, and this is true, a $3,000 fine, a year in prison, and deportation. I suppose those are imposed at the discretion of the judge, but, oh, wow. I drove back home very slowly and carefully and the bike has remained parked outside my apartment house for a month now while I try to get a scooter (gentsuki) license.

I will try to describe the level of hell they put you through next time.

Well, I started out on this blog with good intentions. I meant to write something every day, but that trick never works, as Rocky used to say to Bullwinkle. If you understand that reference, I’m afraid that really dates you. (When I write, I seem to go into a stream-of-conciousness mode fairly often, but stick with me. I get back to the point eventually.) And the point is... Oh, yeah. I didn’t even come close to writing every day, or every week for that matter. I’m going to try again, but don’t let the time-line throw you. It’s no longer April or even May. I’ll put in some time references in the future when appropriate, but other than that, it’s going to be just day-to-day stuff.

So, anyway, from the first day back, it has seemed like I never left. I don’t mean that in just a poetic sense. I actually wake up in the middle of the night, thinking that I had only dreamed about being back in California. Of course, the feeling doesn’t last long, but it’s pretty intense for a while and actually rather spooky. When I got back to my old university after 10 years absence, I was given the same office that I had in 1999, there were still tape marks on the wall where I had put up a poster, badly, and I found one of my old tie clips in a drawer of the same desk that I had made so many lesson plans on. I’d been wondering where that had gotten to.

The truth is, I hadn’t missed it that much because I don’t think I’ve worn a tie more than two or three times in the last 10 years. That’s something I’ll have to be getting used to again. I still manage to wear Levis to work, something I’m happy about. Not blue jeans, but black or gray or brown that can camouflage quite well with a suit coat and tie. My Japanese counterparts are almost all in suits and ties, although I have one friend, Yoh-san, the aforementioned professor of physics, who manages to get away with casual clothes as well since he spends a lot of time in his lab. He has a an office similar to mine except his has a home-made particle accelerator in it...

Yoh-san has tried to explain his experiments to me before, but I haven’t got a clue what it is he’s doing. When I see his apparatus, the only thing I can think of is that tunnel in Switzerland where they might be making a black hole that will swallow the universe. My friend the professor scoffs at that. He says if a black hole is created, it will only be a small one. That’s reassuring to him, maybe...

The language lesson for today, children...

In Japan, English has a certain cachet, [I may have said that before - sounds familiar] that goes beyond the actual meaning of the words. Think about it. The people here who make all of the things with English words on them are usually looking for design and thinking about style, not actually sending a message. Their audience, for the most part, doesn’t understand the words anyway, so technically, it doesn’t matter what they say. The t-shirts and other clothing with English slogans on them are cool in Japan and often hilarious to English speakers. [As a side note, I’ve often wondered what Japanese and Chinese people think about the use of their alphabet on American items, including tattoos. I’m sure mistakes are made there as well.]

I saw a young girl the other day wearing a t-shirt that said ’Brigands demand your money or your life’. Yeesss, but why put it on a t-shirt? At least it was grammatically correct and that doesn’t happen often. I have a student in one of my classes that wears a t-shirt that says, on both sleeves, ‘Knowledge and recommendation, my ass.’ Again, correct English words, but I have no idea what it means. I do think it’s very funny, however.

The sign here is a good example. I saw it and thought, "None of those words go together”. Still, I guess it achieves its purpose. It's hard to see, but the photo on the right side of the billboard is of a beauty shop. Go to Fresh Salad Emotion for all your clinic and design needs.