The picture here is of my view to the west from my balcony. It can be very pretty and transcends the often tacky-feeling urban landscape.

The view of the town is actually interesting to me. With the overhanging wires and the houses crowded together as they are, if I were in California, I would consider it much differently. The novelty of the Japanese urban landscape, to me anyway, gives it charm. It won’t let me forget the corresponding novelty of just where I am in this world.

The second picture is looking down on the street in front of my apartment building. The streets in Japan can be, often are, very narrow. Even in Tokyo, they can seem more like alleys to North Americans. In addition, sidewalks are often lacking. This puts life right in the streets. It’s not unusual to have someone walking on each side of the street, a car going each way, and a scooter or bicycle threading its way between them. I don't know why the streets aren't littered with wrecks and bodies, but everyone seems to know what everyone else is doing - everyone except me, that is.

All that activity is something that I have to get used to in addition to driving on the left. It’s much more complicated than it seems. No one reacts in a manner that one used to driving elsewhere would expect.

Just the other day I was waiting on my scooter to make a right turn. There was someone coming towards me in the opposite lane and he made a left on the same street that I was going to turn on. There was a car following him and I waited for that one to pass and then accelerated into my turn only to find that the car that had turned before me had stopped 10 feet up the street, in my lane, to let someone out. This put me in the position of having to go from acceleration to a dead stop in about 1 second flat. I did it, but I had some choice California driving expressions for the guy.

I’ve adopted the Japanese habit of riding scooters in the rain, too, at least on occasion. I’ve mentioned before that it’s done all the time here. Yesterday, on my way to work, I saw three different people riding their scooters in the rain carrying umbrellas. I don’t even know how that works. You have to keep one hand on the throttle, of course. How can you brake? I learned the hard way when I was in 6th grade that you don’t hit your brakes even on a bicycle unless you have both hands on the handlebars. I’ve got the scars to remind me of that particular lesson.

Another thing I can’t get used to is the attitude of pedestrians.

Today I was driving along, rather slowly because there were pedestrians, and a university student started to walk into the street in

front of me without even looking to his right - the direction I was coming from. I thought, “Wow. How did he get to that stage of his life with a lack of a sense of self-preservation like that?” As he stepped in front of me, he turned and looked me in the eye and I thought, okay, he sees me and he’ll stop. Nope. He looked at me and continued to walk right in front of my moving scooter. Apparently, he expected me to stop, and I did, but it seems to me that a pedestrian would not count on a driver and vehicle being so obliging. He’s the one that’s going to suffer if it doesn’t work out the way he hopes.

That particular kind of incident has happened to me before. When I told my Japanese friends these stories, they agreed that the actions were dangerous and said that they, personally, wouldn’t do anything like that, but that they are common occurrences.

It’s culture again. Somehow, the people in the cars and on the scooters and bikes and those walking along the streets anticipate what all of the others are going to do. The constant movement in the streets, as well as the overall crowding, seems to give people almost like a sixth sense.

I’m sure it doesn’t always end happily, but I’ve only seen two accidents in my time in Japan, and I was in one of them. The first time I lived here, about 15 years ago, driving a scooter on an international permit, I got run off the road by a woman in a car coming towards me who looked me right in the eye and made a turn in front of me anyway. We were obviously working on different signals.

It makes me worry about Japanese students and tourists visiting the U.S. They have to unlearn quickly what they know about traffic in Japan in order to stay safe and it goes well beyond just driving on the opposite side of the road.

By the way, did I mention that I’m now living over a pachinko parlor? Stay tuned.

I’ve mentioned convenience stores in Japan before. Let me add a little detail.

For starters, they’re everywhere, in great variety. There’s Lawson Station, Daily Yamazaki, New Days, Familymart, Sunkus - which is part of Circle K, of which I’ve also seen a couple - and still others, including, of course, 7-Eleven.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the picture. 7-Eleven in Japan is now known as 7&iHoldings.

Why would they do that? The name 7-Eleven is short and clever, even though an anachronism since the advent of the 24-hour store, and it’s a world brand. With its subsidiaries, 7-Eleven is now the largest distribution and retailing business in Japan and the largest chain store in the world. 7&iHoldings sounds just like what it is - a holding company.

It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? “Honey, could you run down to the 7&iHoldings and get a quart of milk?”

I trace this change to language cultural differences. When business people in the U.S. start something new, one of the biggest things they consider is the name. It has to be catchy, it has to be clever, it has to be memorable.

Now I agree that 7&iHoldings is memorable, but not in a good way. I think that when the company got taken over by Japanese owners, the American penchant for creative brand names was not understood, language-wise.

Japanese companies go by different rules. They’ve got a chain of convenience stores called Sunkus and a gum called Xylish, for crying out loud. Those words don’t mean anything in any language.

I believe this is the same process at work as the one that puts nonsense English phrases on t-shirts and names cars Naked. There is just not the feel for the language that comes with being brought up in the culture.

As I’ve mentioned before, this isn’t so much criticism as observation. I am well aware that I can’t convey the same feeling in my Japanese that a native speaker can. No matter what languages we’re speaking about, it’s extremely hard to get to the point where a person sounds like a native speaker. When you add culture to that mix, it becomes even more difficult.

On the one hand, in Japan, it doesn’t matter if 7&iHoldings sounds and looks odd to English speakers. Most of the people who see the signs don’t have the feeling for the language, either, so it makes no difference to them. On the other hand, it’s a world-wide name and I don’t think it will fly in English-speaking countries.

My prediction is that the name will revert to 7-Eleven before long or at least that 7&iHoldings will never be on any stores in countries where English is the first language.

Names aside, however, patronizing a convenience store in Japan is a different experience from going into one in the States.

The first thing you’ll notice is that when you walk in, all of the employees will greet you, often at the same time. The greeting is “Irasshaimase”, usually said rather loudly, and since you’re not the only one entering the store, the greeting is echoing around the place the entire time you’re shopping. (Actually, this will happen in all stores and restaurants.)

Being naturally polite, I have the feeling that I should be walking around the store and saying ‘Thank you. I’m glad to be here’ to everyone.

It’s a stronger feeling after I make my purchase and the entire staff thanks me on my way out (Arigato gozaimashita). I have a hard time not saying ‘You’re welcome’ to each person I pass.

There’s a little bit of insincerity in this because while the employees are walking around doing their jobs, every once in a while they just suddenly come out with the greetings and the thank yous. If someone says ‘Welcome’, that’s a cue for everyone to echo it. The same is true for thank you. When the first clerk says thank you, everyone jumps in. You get the feeling that they don’t really mean it after a while. Still, it’s a polite insincerity.

I can’t help comparing it to clerks in the U.S. saying ‘Have a nice day’. Can you imagine all of the workers repeating that as you’re walking out the door? For me, it’s annoying enough for one person to say it. I’ll be glad when that expression dies a natural death, although I don’t think it’s going to be any time soon. It’s been around for going on 40 years already.

Embarrassingly, I remember having a ‘Have a nice day’ sticker on my backpack when I first went to Europe in 1973. I was only using it to cover up the insignia on my Official Boy Scout backpack, which I felt was more embarrassing, but even then it was getting to feel overdone. In my defense, it was not a Smiley face sticker, but had a more artistically designed smiling sun. That’s at least marginally better, but there's a reason that I still remember it after 36 years. I'm embarrassed in retrospect.

I know the phrase is trite and has outlived it’s usefulness and original intent because when I go to stores in the U.S., the checkout people always say ‘Have a nice day’ no matter what time it is. To me, it’s blindingly incongruous, as well as annoying, to say this to someone at six or seven p.m. That’s an example of insincerity if ever there was one. My response is always “Too late for that”, but no one ever seems to get it.

Now, even though the call-and-response in convenience stores here seems a little overdone on occasion, the clerks are unfailingly polite and helpful, even to one of the non-Japanese speaking persuasion. It’s a pleasure shopping there and I wind up in one or another almost every day, often to buy another umbrella (see my earlier postings). They’re very... convenient.

This is another picture from a bathroom. I’m not really sure why bathrooms have become a recurring theme in this blog...

Anyway, in some stalls, they have these baby seats that allow parents’ hands to be free. The idea would seem pretty self-explanatory, but, just in case, there are instructions.

1. Never turn your back on your baby. This woman is in a MUCH larger stall than I was. I had trouble turning my back on the stool.

2. Beware. Babies will make a break for it at the first opportunity.

3. Of course, there’s the obligatory finger-pinching warning for the mechanically disinclined.

4. And finally, never ever let your baby smoke while sitting in this chair.

Well, in the continuing saga of the Japanese driver’s license, I got to the right place at the right time and more incomprehensible lectures, to me anyway, followed, interspersed with scary video tapes about what can happen to careless gentsuki riders and then it was time to be taught how to actually ride a scooter. When I later mentioned this process to my friend, Jim, he said this seemed to be a bit backwards. Shouldn’t you learn how to ride and THEN get your license? I must be adjusting somewhat to Japan because that never occurred to me. At this point, our group had all passed the written test and we were entitled to our licenses, but apparently, besides for me, no one knew how to ride a scooter.

Also at this point, I realized that the rest of the people in the class were about 17 years old. The person checking us in looked at me and said “How old are you?” Her tone added ‘anyway’ to the question. I’m getting a little tired of that question.

In addition to being the oldest, by a long shot, I was also the biggest, by far. They had to send back to the main building for a larger helmet, which was handed to me with the English sentence, “You have a big head.” Hey! We needed some work on comparatives there - not big, just bigger.

A couple lectures - or instructions, I don’t know - and several videos later, we were ready to ride... and it was raining. Out with the rain suits. On with the rain suits. They come in sizes up to 3XL and that’s what they managed to find for me. Just to be clear, 3XL in Japan is about L in the U.S., but it fit fairly well and out we went.

The Menkyo Center provided each of the dozen or so of us newly licensed riders with a scooter and for the next hour or so, we rode around an obstacle course in the rain as instructions were shouted at us and demonstrations were given.

Now, to me, the first instruction for riding a motorcycle should be, ”Don’t ride in the rain!” It gets a little slickery out there. I think that’s a general rule in the U.S. There are lots of sites online with advice about riding in the rain, most saying just don’t do it.

It was never even mentioned in this class. They just put us out in it.

Thinking about it, I realized this. If you don’t ride your motorcycle in the rain in Japan, you’re not going to spend much time riding your motorcycle. It’s always raining or threatening to rain. Everyone rides in the rain and no one seems to worry about it. High school students and grandmothers and office ladies and postal carriers and pizza deliverers all ride in the rain, though the pizza people are on three-wheel bikes with windshields. There’s one more thing that is unexplainable about cultural differences. Why would it be safer to ride in the rain in Japan than in the U.S.?

The end of this part of the blog is pretty anticlimactic. We finished our training, went back inside, took off and returned our helmets and rain suits and were handed our licenses and that was it. Finally, I thought, and I'm sure you're thinking, as well.

Of course, I still had to do the reverse trip back home by bus and train, but the next day, I rode my scooter to the university and legally only almost got killed twice.

It’s that dang left-hand side of the road thing.

I think the people are around here are becoming aware that there’s a foreigner in town.

Well, I’m back again.

I had a nice, long summer break back home and just returned to Japan a couple of days ago. I’d tell you more about the break, but it seems like when I talk about it, everyone tends to get a little upset. I don’t exactly brag about it, but somewhere in the conversation, the person I’m talking to begins to realize that I have a lot of time off. Yeah, you, too, right? Well, it’s the Japanese university system. There’s even more time off than for American teachers and that’s all I should say about it.

Let's start with the photo(s) of the day. Here's a contradiction that I've always wondered about in Japan.

There are a whole lot of abandoned bicycles at most train stations in Japan. These are actually pretty orderly, set up in a line like they are. Sometimes the bikes just piled up by the door. The bike in the second photo looks like it was abandoned about 1956.

I have a couple questions about this.

First, where do they come from? Who takes their bike to the train station and forgets where they left it - forever? One theory I heard is that these bikes weren't left by the owners. They were 'borrowed' for a quick trip to the station and never returned. However, if this is true, why woudn't you go down to the station and look for your bike as soon as you saw it was missing? These bikes never seem to be claimed. Witness the one from 1956.

Next, why do the owners of the parking lots (yes, there are parking lots for bicycles) just leave the bikes there? After a certain amount of time, you'd think they'd be junked. In the U.S., they be in the flea market within a couple weeks.

Ah, the mysteries of the Orient.

Back to my original theme...

I was actually pretty busy most of my break. When I came to Japan at the beginning of April, I left a lot of unfinished business in California. I spent a good deal of my break this time catching up with stuff from last spring - insurance, taxes, car registration and repair, and other stuff that I couldn’t seem to take care of from Japan.

Not one thing that I attempted to accomplish before leaving California worked out. You may think that’s an exaggeration, but I’ve got documentation.

For example, I took the liability insurance off of my car because it wasn’t going to be driven for the time I was in Japan. My insurance company says okay, got it, no problem. Liability insurance off.

Then in May, I got a letter forwarded to me from the DMV that said my registration would be suspended for lack of financial responsibility unless I reinstated my insurance by May 25. That was, of course, the day before I received the letter in Japan. I guess I can understand that the state would require insurance and not care about my particular circumstances, but wouldn’t you think that my insurance company would mention the fact that my registration would be suspended if I took off the liability insurance?

Anyway, that involved several overseas phone calls to get straightened out and just when it was taken care of, it was time to register my Rialta - a little RV that’s just sitting in the driveway in California while I’m here but still needs to be insured and registered.

The problem this time was that even though, technically, you can register vehicles online, you need the internet registration number on the new form in order to do it and my mom, who’s taking care of my mail for me, insisted the number wasn’t there. The DMV, another overseas call, insisted that it was and wouldn’t register the vehicle without it, even though I had the license and vehicle identification number. It turned out my mom was right, the number wasn’t on the form, but it didn’t matter because by the time I got back to California, the registration was late and I had to pay a fine on it. I spent some pleasant hours at the DMV in August.

I mention all this to show that it’s not just the Japan DMV that has things going on. California can give them a run for their money.

Actually, it’s probably all bureaucracy everywhere. They’re all difficult to work with. They all have problems. The thing is that the problems I had in Japan had a cultural overlay - and here we go, back to the Menkyo Center.

Well, my thought on the test was that I would continue to take it on Mondays, when I didn’t have any classes and could make up any office time I was missing, as I continued to find ways to study and gather more information. Then, if I did pass, even if just by luck, I could forget about the damn thing. This idea was as opposed to taking two or three weeks for study and research and then failing anyway.

So there I was, at 8 a.m. the following Monday back at the Menkyo Center, with all that entailed - getting up really early, trains, buses, money, etc. [see previous].

I stood in line, bought my $16 worth of stamps again for the privilege of taking the test, and stood in another line to have my papers checked.

Something I forgot to mention - you have to provide your own picture for the test documents, two, in fact. They had kept one picture the first time I had taken the test. Why, I don’t know, unless they have a gallery of failures in a back room somewhere where the staff all have a good laugh comparing pictures and test scores. Anyway, I had to provide another picture. Add one more expense.

I was able to bypass the eye test this time, them (they?) probably figuring how bad could my eyes go in one week? Little do they (them?) know. And back to the third floor.

The test was the same format, different questions, but exactly the same problems as I had had before. Some questions were obvious, some were a little unclear, and some were just go ahead and guess because you’re never going to figure them out. But this time, an hour later, when the test numbers appeared on the big screen, mine was amongst’em. I passed.

You might be thinking I could now pick up my license and go home. If so, you weren’t paying attention earlier.

The next step was to sit through a series of lectures, in Japanese only, that made me despair of ever understanding the language and then following the rest of the passees around to see what to do next, presuming that they, at least, had understood the lectures and instructions. Basically this consisted of having my picture taken again and buying $65 worth of stamps that, I think, was the license fee. For all I know, I could have been contributing to the Society for Making Getting a Driver’s License Really Difficult, Especially for Foreigners.

After that, I was made to understand that the scooter driving class would begin after lunch sometime. I had a quick lunch and managed to find my way to the correct place by following some of the others that I thought I recognized from the morning. Luckily, I was following the right people. Otherwise, I would have just been a kind of creepy foreigner following people around the Menkyo Center and there’s probably a law against that, as well there should be.

Next - I learn to ride a gentsuki... again.

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...