The Car Situation

  So, after finally getting through the schools, I suppose I should mention the transportation.  Only one of my schools is what I consider walking distance for a daily commute (less than an hour on foot).  So rather than bike over an hour occasionally in the snow several days each week in winter, I had to get a car.  In Japan, there are two types of cars that you see on the road every day which you can differentiate by the license plate.  Normal sized cars get white license plates while smaller “kei cars” get yellow plates (Different prefectures do not get different plates like states in the US).  The main difference in the actual cars comes down to engine size.  A kei car’s engine must be smaller than 550 cc to be classified as such.  The advantage to having a kei car is pretty much restricted to cost.  Buying price, maintenance, taxes, and shaken (we’ll come back to this) are all cheaper for a kei car.  So I was looking for one until I found this car advertised on the Yamanshi English Teachers International (YETI) forum.

In the end, I bought this Honda Civic on the cheap from a guy who was about to return to the states.  It was only \80,000 which is pretty cheap for a white plate (normal car) and it drove well if you ignored the slight rumble it occasionally gave you as it changed gears.  After driving this car for a few months, the rumble was less slight and less occasional but as it happened slowly I didn’t really notice how bad it had gotten.  Eventually, it was pointed out to me by a friend who I was giving ride to.  After consulting a mechanic, he said that it might last a couple months or it might last a couple years, though it was “the worst he had ever felt.”  Then in July, it was time to have shaken, the government inspection that every car must undergo every two years.  The shaken for a white plate is around 80,000 yen.  Also, the vehicle tax which is around 30,000 yen for a white plate does not transfer owners, so to my understanding if two people own a car in a year both have to pay for it.  So, keeping my car would have cost 110,000 yen.  I mentioned the possibility of just getting a new car to my mechanic, and he told me he was trying to sell a kei car for 130,000 yen.

Note:  10,000 yen is roughly $130, though it was more like $125 last July and more like $120 last March.

So, I opted to pay a little more for a car that was not dying the death.  This new one is a Suzuki Alto, a popular model here in Japan though most don’t have a turbo charger.  The nice thing about said turbo charger is I don’t notice that I’m driving a car that would fit easily in my apartment, which is pretty small itself.  So, now I have this tiny car which I barely fit in that I love.  Hopefully it will handle ok in the winter, but I guess there is no way to see about that until December.

That’s all for now.  I’ll talk about the driver’s license process for foreigners at a later date.  Next week, Undoukai.