Renewing My Japanese Driver's License

Today I renewed my license. First there was the long, inconvenient drive to the DMV. It was worse than usual because a combo supermarket/mall was holding grand opening sales a few blocks down the road and the multitudes were out looking for bargains. I finally got to the DMV parking lot. There were no parking spaces in sight, so the wife dropped me off and headed off for the shopping mall. I got in line, paid the renewal fee and passed the eye test. The worrying thing is that I have marginal vision in one eye, need industrial strength glasses, yet almost passed the test without corrective lenses. Only had to go to a 30 minute lecture because I have a gold license, i.e. I don't drive much and haven't racked up any speeding tickets or traffic infractions over the last 3 years. Our instructor wrung his hands and bemoaned the lack to time--there were so many things to talk about, but he was forced to limit himself to a general summary of the state of traffic safety on a national and local scale. He came out from behind the podium, took off his sport coat, folded it neatly, and we off. Here's the highlights.

• Most traffic fatalities in my part of Japan involve hitting old people who wander out into the road. Constant vigilance is the only recourse.

• Rear-end collisions at intersections were the most common accidents in the prefecture. People, when the light turns green, look before you press down on the accelerator.

• The bane of traffic safety is cell phone use by drivers. Violations continue to rise despite stricter laws. And don't even think of using some kind of microphone/earphone system. You won't be able to hear those ambulances coming up behind you carrying the old people who've been hit because they suddenly veered into traffic, and earphone use while driving is illegal anyway.

There was something else about not being able ball the jack in medium-sized trucks without a new, special, medium-truck-driving license. My eyes were glazing over and mercifully a woman arrived and handed out our new licenses. I won't have to renew again for 5 years.

Trouble at High School

We all know that Japan has an exam-oriented high school curriculum. What we didn't know was that a lot of high schools were ignoring the compulsory education ministry course guidelines to prep students for the university entrance exams. Schools were spending extra time on subjects covered on the exams: English, Japanese, science, social studies and mathematics, while not giving students required courses in subjects like art, health, civics, and world history. Many educators feel this is unavoidable, but the education ministry has decided that seniors will have to take extra classes before they can graduate.

More on Changing Carriers

There's also trouble in the mobile phone free-for-all. Japan recently introduced number portability, meaning you can change your carrier while keeping your phone number. Au, Docomo, and Softbank immediately came out swinging with new phones and pricing plans. Softbank seems to be the early loser. The company was swamped with new sign-ups and cancellations and had to shut down because its computer system couldn't take the heat. Now it's being investigated by the government because of misleading ads and promotional offers. Softbank stock is also reeling.

Changing Carriers

Yesterday a new day dawned in Japan for cell phone users. Yes, the Age of Portability is upon us. One can now keep his or her phone number when switching mobile carriers. Docomo, AU, and Sotbank have all come out with a slew of new phones and price plans to induce users to switch. Yours truly was tempted to sign up with Softbank to get a Bluetooth phone with a high-resolution digital camera and music player. Softbank will also throw in an iPod Nano at half price when you sign up for their service.

Pricing plans are a mess. I was in the market for some sort of family plan, but the sales rep refused to recommend anything, leafed through a thick pamphlet of pricing options, and suggested that I pick my own. She then told me that Softbank would be announcing new pricing plans on the morrow, but that present plans were available if I signed up now. I then told her where I lived and belatedly found out that my neighborhood was outside the Softbank pale, rendering the whole conversation moot. Softbank may have slick phones and iPods, but they also have lousy coverage in certain parts of Japan. I'll stick with AU, but I still want a Bluetooth phone with a decent camera and a music player.

Google Finally Makes the Top Ten

It's taken six years, but Google finally made it to Number 10 in the list of popular Japanese web sites, hard on the tail of 9th place Amazon.co.jp. The English article is at Digital World Tokyo. The Japanese press release is here. Yahoo! Japan leads the pack, followed by Rakuten, Microsoft, NTT Communications, and GMO Internet. Nifty, NEC, FC2, Amazon Japan, and Google follow in the 6th through 10th spots.

YouTube Purges Japanese Videos

One of the interesting things about the YouTube phenomenon is all the video content from Japan and Korea on the site. The other night we fighting over who would select the next YouTube video. My wife chose installments of a Korean mini-series, My Lovely Sam Soon, a variation on the Bridget Jones theme. She pulled up a version with English subtitles for my benefit. My son watched Ultraman clips. Then we watched a couple of music videos from the '80s. The picture quality wasn't that great and the viewing area was small, but, as my wife said, "I guess we don't need TV anymore. We can watch everything we want to on YouTube." Don't cancel your SkyPerfectTV account yet. The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC), pulled 29,549 videos off of YouTube because of copyright infringements. Read about it here.

Lingerie Industry to the Rescue

Yamada gave us a ride down to the harbor for the mandatory yearly physical exam. He was complaning about the students again and his problem was panties. One look this fall is jeans worn low on the hips with short tops that show a few centmeters of naval. He cited girls squattng down to smoke in the parking lot or leaning forward in their desks. The jeans ride down exposng a bit of panty-waistline real estate that Yamada found offensive, another sign of the level of students he had to put up with in his business classes.

There was a TV in the waiting room at the health center. As I was waiting for a chest x-ray, a panel of TV personalities were discussing the fashion issues of the day. Suddenly they brought up the panty problem. and announced a solution: the low-rise panty. Models appeared and leaned and squatted in various postures to show that these panties did their stuff. I looked around for Yamada, but he was off in another room having his eye sight checked. Low-rise briefs are also available for men.

Everything Comes with TV

Last weekend my wife's mother was out of town. Her father came over for dinner and we feasted on chicken nabe with the neighbors and washed it down with Beaujolais nouveau. I'm amazed at how big Beaujolais nouveau has become in Japan. Every supermarket, liquor store, and mom-and-pop grocery seems to be selling the stuff. About a month ago I walked into a supermarket in a small rural town in Shikoku and was greeted by a banner proclaiming, "Only 28 days until Beaujolais nouveau!" Part of the excitement is tied to the time difference meaning that the Japanese are the first in the world to taste the new wine.

The next day we were all up early as we had to take my father-in-law to a Buddhist memorial service downtown. After we dropped him off, my wife, 3 year-old son, and I decided to go out for breakfast. On our way to the restaurant we walked through a cell phone store. AU had cell phones playing TV programs. A monthly fee allows you to turn your cell phone into a TV. These phones had rotating 2.4 inch QVGA LCD screens, 2 megapixel cameras, an FM tuner , 4MB of internal storage and other goodies. I also saw phones that doubled as universal TV and DVD player remote controls. I presume the advantage lies in never again having to search for your remote control.

TV tuners have also become a standard feature on desktop and laptop computers from all the major Japanese manufacturers like Sony, Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu. Even Dell Japan runs a lot of promotions for TV-equipped computers. This means you can record TV programs and movies on the hard drive as well as watch your favorite TV show as you go through your email. Next step is feed the audio and video through a wireless network to your big-screen TV and speaker system.

ETC

We drove up to Kobe on the the national toll road system, the Japanese equivalent to the U.S. Interstate system. Tolls are wildly expensive. My wife mentioned that Japanese toll roads cost 23 times as much to build as their American counterparts. There are miles of mountains to bore through and monumental bridges were required to span the Seito Inland Sea and Tokyo Bay. The Japanese language trip calculator informs me that the four hour trip to Kobe covers 271.41 kilometers and costs 8350 yen, or about $71.00. One way to reduce the cost is to buy a pre-paid highway card. The lower priced cards don't save you much money, but the 50,000 yen card ($426) buys you 58,000 yen ($494) worth of tolls. Unfortunately the highway system stopped selling the 50,000 and 30,000 yen cards last Friday. We tried to snap up a final 50,000 yen card, but trips to a shopping center and a convenience store and a few phone calls revealed that the cards had long ago sold out.

Sales of these cards were halted because of a problem with counterfeits and because the Japan Highway Public Corporation (JH) wanted to push people to use the ETC system. For years I've been driving past empty ETC toll booths thinking that ETC stood for etcetera, in this case, exotic cars that did not fit the criteria of normal toll booths. Surprise--ETC stands for Electronic Toll Collection. A machine in your car broadcasts your highway usage to a machine in the toll booth and the money is automatically deducted from your bank account or charged to a credit card. This system not only does away with the necessity of stopping at toll booths, it lets drivers buy the electronic equivalents of the discontinued 50,000 and 30,000 yen pre-paid highway cards. So far the ETC system has been as popular as taking a salary cut, or raising the national sales tax. First use of the system requires that you plunk down 15,000 to 20,000 yen ($128 to $170) for the transmitter that goes in your car. Secondly there re no transmitter available for motorcycles and a lot of people seem to feel that, "If you can't use it on bikes, I don't want any part of it."