OBTAINING A DRIVERS LICENSE

Before I give you some insight into obtaining a Japanese driver's license, I want to add to my last blog about driving. Occasionally we need to go to the Christian School which is less than 7 miles away. The problem is that between here and there, one needs to go through 37 stoplights. Sometimes they are green, sometimes they are yellow, sometimes they are red, and occasionally I would call the color a real deep orange (if you catch my drift).

Now back to the test. First, you have to have your present license translated into Japanese. Then you must go for a written test which consists of 10 true/false questions. Some sample tests can be found on the Internet and here are a few of those questions.

1. If you are in a hurry it is okay if you do not slow down for an ambulance.

2. If you are going to drive a motor vehicle, it is important to know the rules of the road.

3. If you consume only a small amount of alcohol or sleeping medication, but still feel OK, it is acceptable to operate a motor vehicle.

4. When crossing a railway you should gear down so you can accelerate quicker if needed.

5. With a yellow blinking light, you can go through the intersection without paying attention to other drivers.

Some of the questions pertain to road signs. The stop sign is painted on the road and looks like this.

Speed limit signs might be painted on the road or they could be on a pole.

Also on many poles there are mirrors positioned to help a person to see if another car is coming around a sharp turn or a blind curve. This is a picture of the exit from our campus and you can see the one mirror--there are two, one on each corner of the entry to the OMS Campus.

And here is a picture of what I sometimes see as I attempt to leave the Campus.

Of course I have to check the mirror in the other direction as well...but I digress.

If you pass the written portion, then you can schedule a day for your driving test. This is taken on a closed course and 12 people will be scheduled to arrive at the same time to take their test. The order is randomly chosen after everyone arrives. You will know when you complete the course (or sooner in some cases) whether or not you have passed, but all 12 people have to stay until all are done. Also, the next person scheduled gets to ride in the backseat while you take your test, so they can see what the course is like. (No I don’t know what happens if you are the first driver. It seems like a disadvantage but…) Since many Japanese roads are very narrow (see previous blog), part of the test is driving between poles that are hung along both sides of the test road. If you hit one, you have to come back another day to take the test again. There is a charge for each part of the test, and the total cost for obtaining your license is around $75. Of course if you don't pass, you have to pay again for each part of the test that you retake.

To help me get ready for the written part of the test, OMS has a “RULES OF THE ROAD” book in English. One page that I found particularly interesting was the “don’ts” of the road which are as follows:

1) One must not take inherently dangerous actions on the road as indicated below:

· Pedestrians must not stagger drunkenly on the road, or otherwise interfere with road traffic by talking, sitting, or lying on the road.

· Don't rollerskate, skate board, or play catch, etc., where there's a lot of traffic.

· Don't throw or shoot anything into the street.

· It's illegal to damage the road, or to pour wastewater, rubbish, nails, broken glass, or any other item which can interfere with traffic.

· It's illegal to throw cigarette butts, wastepaper, empty cans or any other rubbish out of the car window. One should also refrain from placing any part of his / her body outside the vehicle.

· It's illegal to grab onto a moving automobile or street car.

· One must not flash a light onto the road, as an approaching driver could be blinded.

· Don't pour water on the road when there is a danger of freezing.

2) Don't display goods or place sand, lumber, or other items on the road in a way that can obstruct traffic.

3) It's dangerous when traffic lights, road signs, or pavement markings are difficult to distinguish. It's against the law to erect a neon light, etc., near a traffic light or to post signs which can be confused with traffic signs. It's also prohibited to damage, alter, or otherwise tamper with traffic lights, road signs, or pavement markings.

4) It's a violation of the law to ask a non-licensed individual or person who has had even a single drink to operate a motor vehicle. One should never rush or disturb the driver.

5) It's also illegal to offer alcohol to any individual who will be driving.

6) It's prohibited to ask someone to drive an overloaded vehicle (carrying objects heavier than the legal weight limit), or to sell or deliver objects to a driver that will knowingly overload the vehicle.

Some make good sense. Others bring strange pictures to my mind.

But even if a person thinks they've done everything perfectly, there may still be cause for concern. We were told that one person who didn't pass and asked why, was told,"You didn't do anything wrong, I just didn't like the way you drove."

I'll let you know in the spring how the test went.

By the way, in case you were wondering, the answers to the true and false questions above are:

F T F F F

GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

The good news is—we have a car. The bad news is—we have a car (actually it’s called a Kei-Van) and that means I have to drive. Over here they drive on the left side of the road and the driver sits on the right side of the car. At least the floor pedals are in the right order, but the turn signal and windshield wiper levers are reversed so occasionally when, at the last moment, I put on the turn signal, the windshield wipers go. Actually I had been driving a borrowed car that our neighbors had let us use and it’s really not too bad, although the roads in Japan can be described with 3 words: narrow, curvy and unmarked. In the US every little alley has a name; not so here, as only the major roads are named.

Many roads here would be a narrow one-way street in the U.S., but many of them are 2-way (as you can see below),

and all cars have side mirrors that fold in if things really get tight! The other problem with the narrow roads is that I am told (although officially unconfirmed) that in our area there is no such thing as a right of way for the utility companies. So since a land owner would not have to allow the company access to their poles, the poles are put out on the road.

Also the shape of a homeowner's lot can be irregular so the road width may need to change suddenly.

And you always must be alert for bicycles and especially motorcycles which do not wait their turn. Motorcycles will pass on either side, and they always go to the front of the line when waiting at a stoplight or for a train. Sometimes on the major highways, they may decide to ride between cars, thereby creating a very narrow third lane.

Getting gas here is somewhat like getting gas in the States in the early 1960’s. When you pull in, an attendant tells you exactly where to stop, and if they aren’t busy you may have two people washing your windows and checking your oil.

Afterwards, someone will stop traffic so that you can safely leave the station.

From the picture, you can see that gas is 142 and that would be in yen. At today’s rate of exchange that would be about $1.45.

Now before you get too excited and think how easy we have it, let me point out that over here they charge by the liter and since there are 3.87 liters per gallon, our gas costs $5.63 per gallon. SO STOP YOUR COMPLAINING about high gas prices.

Probably some time in the spring I will need to get a Japanese driver's license which will require both a written and a driving test. I'll give you some information on how that process will go in my next blog.

HAPPY DRIVING.

ONLY IN JAPAN

When we were in Japan before, we had dial-up service for our internet connection which made it very hard to send out newsletters containing pictures or to download pictures that friends and family wanted to send us. Knowing that we didn’t want that again, we asked around and were told that J-COM was a good company, and that they had the same type of setup as the States where we could bundle our phone, Internet and TV. We called and a man came out to take our application, and fortunately he spoke very good English.

For various reasons, we were unable to include the phone but got high speed Internet and cable TV and agreed to a minimum six-month term. About a week later the installer came (who didn’t speak English), and a friend of ours was able to be here and do some translating. The remote and manual were both in Japanese, so even though they explained various functions to us, we failed to take notes and soon forgot.

We did remember how to use the remote to turn things on, so everything worked fine until one day Daisy watched a video in the VCR connected to our television. After that, we could no longer get many of the cable channels we’d gotten before, but strangely enough we were still able to get some channels whether or not the J-COM box was turned on!

I called J-COM and asked for an English-speaking person but was told that they would call me back. After various intervals of time, I talked to two different people who had no idea what the problem might be, so they said they would need to call back to schedule an engineer to come to our house. Finally an engineer and interpreter were scheduled to come sometime Friday morning Oct 10.

Friday morning the phone rang and Daisy answered. An unusually jolly Japanese man’s voice said, “Hello, this is Nishioka. I want to come to your house in 30 or 40 minutes. Is it okay?” Daisy was startled and said, “I guess so. Who did you say this is?” “Just call me ‘Nori,” the man said. “It means ‘seaweed!” he added with a rather loud laugh. Daisy hung up with a puzzled expression and told me, “Someone named ‘Seaweed’ is coming to our house, but I have no idea why!” I assumed it must be J-COM since we weren’t expecting anyone else.

Around 10:00 they arrived, the two we knew about and a third in a separate car who was there for the purpose of traffic control (we live in a walled-in campus which has no outside traffic). After about 2 hours of a lot of Japanese and our interpreter saying, “he says…,” they had determined that the problem was in our VCR, which was needed as the TV is an older model which doesn’t have the game inputs that could have been tied directly to their box. So their solution was that we would need to buy a new VCR or buy a newer model TV. Since we didn’t want to do that, we tried to ask whether we could drop the cable but still keep the internet, and therefore meet the six-month agreement. Our interpreter was having trouble with our question, so he made a phone call and then told us that the original person who had signed us up (Tetsuko Tatemichi) would stop later that day to talk to us. They finally left about 12:15.

After they left we discussed our options. Buying a new VCR or TV was not a good option as they are very expensive, and we really haven’t been watching much TV. There are American movies but they aren’t edited at all for language or content, so most of the ones we have started to watch, we gave up on early in the movie. I do watch some sports but we decided that if we could drop the cable portion we would.

Daisy left for class which I was also supposed to help teach, but we didn’t know when Tetsuko was coming and we wanted to get this resolved (rescheduling takes forever). He soon showed up and he knew about our problem, so I asked if we still kept the internet could we drop the cable—he shook his head. I thought that maybe he could tell me in English what each of the remote buttons did, but he quickly said that there was an English version of the manual that he would be glad to provide.

Then (and we’re finally getting to the “only in Japan” part) Tetsuko said he would be glad to go home (about 50 minutes round trip) and bring us a TV that he wasn’t using that had the necessary inputs. It’s rather small but will work fine until we decide what to do when our six-month agreement is up. I’m convinced that in America the person would have said “Sorry, maybe Walmart is having a sale,” and they would have been gone.

We have no idea if all customers are treated this way, but we are thankful for the kindness of so many Japanese people whether or not they know us. I hope that foreigners receive the same kindness in America but…



Cockroach update:

Two more dead, one living but walking with a severe limp.

Faces of Japan

Not much to say. Just a lot of pictures of some beautiful children.

This is my favorite.

Unwelcome Squatters

In the 38 + years that we have been married we have lived in 12 different apartments or houses. We've never at any time had a problem with cockroaches--bedbugs yes, but that’s another story--until now. We were surprised when we encountered our first one about 2 weeks after moving in since the house had been empty for 2 months, and therefore no food had been left around. I don’t know the standard size but ours are about 1 ½ inches long.

As they are quite fast and can change direction in the blink of an eye, the battle has been quite a challenge. However, great hunter that I am, I have been up to the challenge. Seven have checked into the “roach motel” and never checked out. One sat still long enough for me to bop his (or her, how do you tell) head with the handle end of a butter knife. One I hit with a hammer, after spraying him (or her, see above) with furniture polish. One was on the kitchen counter and the only weapon I had available was a hand towel. Since my long term memory is still functioning, I recalled the high school locker room days of towel snapping and I stunned him enough to flip him into the sink and quickly turned on the garbage disposal.

The cockroach in the picture below, I trapped in the fridge. Well actually it was the old fridge that we had moved into the "monooki" which is a storage area about the size of a 1-car garage that is attached to our house. I had left the fridge doors open so it wouldn’t get moldy, and as I walked by one day I noticed the roach, so I shut the door. A few days later I checked and discovered that he had passed on. An autopsy was never performed to determine if death was caused by asphyxiation, starvation or heart attack.

I’d like to think that I am winning the war, but I’m not that naïve. I read that they can produce thousands of offspring a year so we’ll need to come up with some other methods, but the experience thus far does make for a good blog.

Donn

P.S. Well I guess I have to add a PS. I was ready to post this but last night as we were getting ready for bed, Daisy noticed that we had a visitor in the bathroom. As the weapons from my arsenal (see picture above) were all downstairs, I was in a bit of a dilemma but Daisy came to the rescue and handed me a washcloth that had become a rag. I entered the bathroom, closed the door and prepared for battle. He darted left...I smacked him. He feinted left and darted right...I smacked him again. Actually after about 10 smacks from the dry rag, he pretty well gave up the fight and I threw him outside. Another job well done.

Recycling

Living in Japan gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “paper or plastic?” For those of you who live in a big city, this would probably not be a big deal, but we lived in the small town of Sandy Lake where recycling was not a priority. Every week the garbage bag filled with paper, plastic, food, cans, small appliances and every other whatnot was set out on Sunday night and Monday morning it would disappear. Even when we started to recycle about 2 years ago, every “recyclable” thing went in the same cart.

But not so in Japan. Here we have a 16 page booklet which we affectionately refer to as our “garbage Bible.” We have many categories and many subcategories.
And it’s not just getting things in the right bags (blue, peach, and gray), we also need to know what day they will be picked up. The schedule is as follows:

Burnable Tues. & Fri. (blue bag)
Plastic bags/Wraps Thur. (gray bag)
Non-burnable 1st Wed. (peach bag)
Bottles/Cans/Hazardous materials 1st Mon. (bins at a different location)
Newspapers/Magazines/Cardboard/Clothing 1st & 3rd Mon. (bundled)
Pet Bottles 2nd & 4th Wed. (semi-transparent bag)

Yard garbage, leaves, twigs etc. are set out with the burnable as long as they’re placed in the transparent or semi-transparent bags; or the twigs can be bundled if the bundle is less than 60cm long and 30cm wide.

Sometimes it’s hard for us “gaijins” (foreigners) to know for sure whether something is plastic or paper (burnable) so the Japanese have symbols on almost everything. However, here’s where it gets REALLY complicated, some items require more than one symbol! For instance, PET bottles (bottles which usually contain water or some carbonated drink), may require three symbols: the PET symbol, for the bottles themselves which must be put in a transparent or semi-transparent bag to be picked up the 2nd and 4th Wednesday, the plastic symbol (on the right) for the lid which must be placed in a gray bag to be picked up on Thursday, and the paper symbol (on the left) for the label which must be placed in a blue bag and picked up on Tuesday or Friday...so if you think you got it all figured out, please come and help clue us in.

Some older things don’t have the symbols mark, and its not always easy to know for sure into which category it falls. When that happens I usually make an executive decision and put it in the burnable bag. After all, anything will burn if you get it hot enough!

Donn