A Practical Guide to Obtaining a Japanese Driver's License in Tochigi

Converting your American license to a Japanese license (外国免許証切替) at the Tochigi-ken Driver’s license Center (栃木県運転免許センター) is a cakewalk, consisting of four simple steps

1: Present your American license, residence card, passport and related documents

2: Pass the eye exam

3: Pass the written test

4: Pass the practical driving test

Sarcasm off.

Prepare for the fruitcakewalk from hell, and what I consider the second most incompetent pile of bureaucracy I have ever encountered (US immigration being #1 by a long shot, but that is another story).

Day 1: The only thing you are going to do on day one is Step #1, present your documents. Yes, that is all you can accomplish on the first day. Get a set of photos taken in the booth on the ground floor, then head up to the second floor. That’s where you will be spending all your time. According to their internet site and what is posted inside the center, the time to apply for foreign conversions is between 8:30 and 13:00. However, this is deceitful. They do not begin processing conversions until 13:00. The only advantage of showing up before 12:59 is that you will be earlier in the line at 13:00. Like half a dozen others that day, I showed up at 8:30. Given that the center is literally as far as possible from all of Tochigi-ken’s major cities, none of us could leave once we found out we had nothing to do for four and a half hours because getting anywhere and back again would take too long.

At 13:00, they will begin calling people. Wait your turn. It seems to take about 20 minutes per person, and they usually can do two at a time. There has been around ten people applying the days I was there. When your turn comes up, they will bring you to the back room and start pouring over your documents. Remember, the key thing they are trying to prove is that you have had a valid license for 90 days while residing in the country it was valid. They are going to record and dig through your passport, counting every day in which you were in the US, in Japan, or anywhere else. If you either received OR RENEWED your US license recently, beware. Proving the 90 days may be difficult. Also note that in many states, your license does not have an “issued” date, only an expiration date. I had recently renewed my US license, so I brought an official and a translated copy of my driving record, which I obtained by phoning the BMV in my home state.

Eventually they will boot you out of the room and your documents disappear into the back. A while later, someone will call for you, hopefully indicate that all is in order, hand you some forms to fill out….and you are done for the day. Go home.

Day 2: Come back a bit before ten with all the forms from last time, preferably already filled out. Put them in the box by the first window on the second floor. Around 10:15, they will start calling people into the eye exam room one at a time, in the order people showed up in the morning. Going first really has no meaning, as you will wait just as long in the end either way. When your name is up, head into the room, where they will check your documents. They you will do the eye exam, and then you will sit and wait. Around 11, those that need to take the written test will be called into the classroom for the ten minute test. There are ten questions, and you can take them in English, Chinese, and a few other language other than Japanese. About five will be comically easy. Three more would be equally easy if not for the poor translations. The last two actually will test something tricky, like signage or rules such as left turns on red (not allowed!). You need 7/10. Nobody really fails unless there is a language problem, especially if you make any effort to learn the signs. From there, you are done until 13:00, when the driving test begins.

During the interim, you should head out to the course, which is on the other side of the sky bridge. In the classroom at the far end, there is a book of course maps. You will be told which map is valid for that day, and have until one pm to memorize the map and walk around the course. During the test, the instructor will speak in Japanese, telling you “turn right at #11”, etc, so you literally do not need to memorize the map if you speak even minimal Japanese. However, having it memorized or close to it will give you one less thing to focus on during the test, so after having a quick bite to eat, walk the course twice, and then go back upstairs and trace the course in your mind until you know exactly where to turn without thinking about it.

At 13:00, one of the instructors will give a little speech about safety and how important it is to learn the “Japanese rules”, even if you were a safe driver in your home country. After that, you go downstairs, and the tests begin. Unless you are the first person to go, you get to ride in the back seat during the test of the person before you. This gives you one more chance to nail the course pattern. Note that there are generally two cars and one motorcycle on the course at any given moment in time, so you will have a bit of traffic to deal with. It is absolutely insanely important to cede right of way to those other vehicles if they deserve it. If they are at all coming anywhere near you, do not engage in aggressive turns or get close to them or anything. This is insta-fail territory. Even if you are sure you could make the turn, put it in reverse and go backwards, and then repeat the turn a second time before the other car made it to the intersection, WAIT. Do not go.

So what happens during the test? You fail. Period. End of story. Everyone fails the first time. I have never heard of anyone who passed it the first time in Tochigi. No one I know of has heard of such a person either. In fact, the fewest failures I have heard of is four. Plenty of fives, sixes, and sevens. A nine. A twenty-two….and counting! Why will you fail? Because the instructors are looking for details that mortals cannot understand, such as the seven-step mirror-checking and signaling process before making a lane change. Wrong order? Points off. Wrong order a second time? Double points off. Third time? You fail the test. Go home. Or perhaps you manage to do the mirror check dance properly on all twenty or so turns and lane shifts you will make during the test, but bump the curve on the crank or the S-curve. Or perhaps you didn’t hug the outer or center line tight enough on a couple turns, or turned your head too far when checking your blind spot, or checked it too early or too late or too long or too short. Or perhaps you didn’t signal when heading out of the starting parking area (yes, you need to), or you didn’t check for a baby under your car before you got in, or didn’t check for a bicyclist before you opened your door at the end of the test, or didn’t (pretend to) adjust your seat and mirror when you entered the car, or perhaps you forgot to set the parking break before exiting (even though it is flat), or perhaps you went too fast or too slow at some point, or took a turn too wide, or perhaps the instructor just makes stuff up in order to fail people. Or perhaps you signaled too long or too short or too early or too late or perhaps you bumped the wipers instead of the blinker, as is easy to do for an American as the controls are reversed. Or perhaps you are an actual honest-to-goodness inexperienced driver who needs practice. You never know. Anything is possible.

After you fail, you wait until everyone else finishes failing, then head back to the second floor. Around three, they will announce the results (you failed, get over it), give you a little slip of paper stating such, let you pick a new date to try again (which will be in about two weeks, depending on the backlog), and send you home.

Day Three: On your appointed date, bring your little slip that says you passed the eye and written tests but failed the driving test and enough money to pay the re-test fee. Pay at window 13, then put your documents in the box you have lots of experience with. Yes, you have to show up before ten. And yes, you will have to wait until 13:00 for the driving test. Why do you need to be there at 10? Because it’s Tochigi, and they like to waste your time. Repeat the test as before, fail as before, and weep.

Day Four/five/six/seventy: Repeat day three until the gods shine upon you.

So how do you actually pass the test? At this point, I don’t know, because I haven’t done so yet. But it certainly involves heading off to driving school, so you can practice the test. Most major cities have such a school. Unfortunately, outside of Tokyo, you are unlikely to find someone who speaks English, so I hope your Japanese is decent, and that you don’t get a little old guy who speaks thick Tochigi-ben like the last guy I had. For $50 or so, they will take you around a mock test course for an hour and tell you what they guess you are doing wrong. Expect to fork over $50-100 every time you fail at these driving schools. Need I even mention that they are usually owned and staffed by ex or moonlighting cops – the very same people that judge your real driving tests? Oh, and they are typically booked about two weeks in advance, so each time you fail your test, you better run straight to the practice school (located, of course, as far away as possible) to book your reservation before they fill up.

Oh, and as a final kick in the nuts – if your Japanese license is ever to expire for more than six months, you get to do all this again. Because you know you love it! So there you have it, folks – a simple guide to converting your American license into a Japanese one in Tochigi-ken. Best of luck to you, and may you only fail thrice!

Update: I passed in late September on my sixth attempt, five months after starting this miserable process. I can't really say that I got better. It felt more as if you simply got more points for proving you were stubborn. Just follow the guide here and keep plugging away.

Smaug lives!

First, if you need a spoiler alert for The Hobbit, stop whatever you are doing, take the day off work or school, send the kids to grandma's, and read The Hobbit now. Twice. Or 133 times, like I have.

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That being said, I like to put my predictions on the table for all to see, so here goes.

Smaug will not die in the second Hobbit movie "The Desolation of Smaug". Instead, he will die in the beginning of the third installment, "There and Back Again", to be released in December of 2014. I have believed this ever since I heard the book was to be split into three, and despite conventional wisdom on Tolkien-related websites such as TORN. Why do I believe this?

The first reason is material balance. The first Hobbit movie, "An Unexpected Journey", covered six of the nineteen chapters of The Hobbit, plus background material that covered about two chapter's worth of material. Each chapter received about 20 minutes of screen time on average. For Smaug to die in DoD, eight chapters would have to be covered, finishing simultaneously with Not at Home (the dwarves capturing Erebor) and Fire and Water (Smaug razing Laketown, then being slain). There is also the Dol Guldur plotline following Gandalf and other miscellaneous side material which will again consume about two chapter's worth. The third movie, TaBA, however, would only have five chapters left to work with, two of which are short and post-climax. Likewise, for both stylistic and coherence reasons, the Dol Guldur plotline will end in the second movie, so it is hard to see where Jackson will pull a lot of secondary material from that fits within the story arc.

In contrast, if the movie ends where I think it will - at the beginning of Not at Home and Fire and Water, about 20-30 minutes of material can be shifted from the second movie to the third, creating an approximate balance between the two. Specifically, I think the movie will end with Smaug beginning to raze Laketown, highly contrasting scenes of the elated dwarves reclaiming their treasures, both interwoven with the climax of the Dol Guldur plotline. Not only does this ending provide balanced material for the two remaining movies, but it is also a much better ending to a mid-series movie. It is all Empire, no Ewok: some plotlines going well for the good guys, others disasters, others ambiguous. Rather than finishing off the two main antagonists, leaving one alive at the peak of his sound and fury would be something to draw people back to the theatre again next year.

A third reason I believe that Smaug will not die this year is the new teaser trailer for DoS, which contains precisely zero scenes from either Not at Home or Fire and Water, but plenty from all the rest. Enough said.

Smaug will live...until December 2014.

Substitution Effect, meet Income Effect

Assume for a moment that you have the complete ability to adjust your hours at work to any degree you want, with your pay rising or falling proportionately. Then one day, your boss walks in and tells you that you along with everyone else is getting a 20% pay cut.

After the change, do you work more hours or less hours?

The answer is non-obvious. You now have a lot less money, and need to work more to maintain your current lifestyle and have "enough". On the other hand, the lower hourly pay means that alternatives to work (such as leisure or spending time with your family) are now more attractive relative to work, and hence you might work less. These two effects are called the income effect and the substitution effect, respectively. Note that in this case, like almost all others, they are in opposition to each other: one causes people to work more in response to an economic change, the other less.

These two effects also occur due to changes in government policies, such as tax rate changes, welfare benefits, or pensions. Raising peoples' taxes, for example, is similar to the pay cut - hourly take-home pay drops, discouraging work, but having less money causes people to work harder. It is not clear at all which effect wins under which circumstance. Peoples' responses to such policies are extremely complex and cannot simply be summed up as "higher taxes cause people to work less". They might under some circumstances, they might not under others, due to income effects.

A simple way to see the power of the income effect is to imagine a scenario where your pay was absurd, perhaps $10,000 an hour. Would you work less over the course of your lifetime, or more, relative to what you would with your current pay? The answer is almost certainly less, as after a few years you would have more money than you would ever need. At least in this extreme case, the income effect is dominant. It is likely that a lot of high earners, such as medical specialists or corporate executives, actually work LESS over their lifetime than they might with lower pay (or higher taxes!) because by the time they are in their late 50's or early 60's, earning more money is superfluous.

It is also impossible for conservatives to argue that income effects are trivial, as they constantly invoke the income effect when they assert that giving out welfare or unemployment benefits discourage work. However, it is illogical to assert a priori that with respect to benefits and pensions, that income effects are very powerful and cause large changes in behavior, but with respect to tax policy changes, income effects are minimal and dominated by substitution effects. Yet this is ultimately what conservatives are claiming. The reality is much more complex.

Moral Hazards and Capitalism

A common critique of the TARP bank bailout by conservatives was that the bailouts created a moral hazard - the situation where people take excessive risks because others will shoulder some of the burden if they fail. The American Conservative magazine even went so far as to entitle an article "Moral Hazard, Everywhere", which is rather ironic because they only place they seemed to find moral hazard was in places where the government was involved. These self-same conservatives then go on to blame the economic collapse of 2008 on the moral hazard created by potential bailouts of banks during a crash, which allowed banks to take undue risks prior to the collapse. In essence, they are arguing that a hypothetical second-order chance of a bailout in an extreme situation was enough to cause the global economy to wilt like a daisy in the desert sun as soon as punch-bowl was removed. They are also implicitely arguing that only the government can cause moral hazard, as they are completely blind to moral hazard that exists in its absence.

This is far from the case. In fact, there are very large moral hazards at the very heart of every corporation - limited corporate liability, the principal-agent problem between management and ownership, and externalities such as pollution, for example. Any form of insurance, public or private, creates moral hazard. Any situation where one purchases from someone with more knowledge than oneself (a doctor, an auto mechanic, a home contractor, etc) also creates moral hazard. Even things like the rampant mis-labelling of fish arises from information asymmetry-driven moral hazard. In fact, it is pretty hard to think of a market that ISN'T riddled with moral hazard.

There are non-market moral hazards as well. Personal bankrupcty laws create moral hazard, as does any potential "bailouts" by family and friends. Very fundamentally, there is also a zero-lower-bound moral hazard as well - no matter how badly you screw up, the most you can potentially pay back is the sum of your future earnings less whatever it takes you to survive.

For a corporate executive, there are at least SEVEN layers of moral hazard affecting his or her decision: corporate limited liability limits the corporate risk, corporate malfeasance laws that shift consequences of bad corporate behavior to shareholders, principal-agent problems regarding corporate pay, opportunities to externalize costs, and in the case that the executive is actually held liable for something personally, personal bankrupcty, bailouts by friends and family, and the zero bound.

In other words, the corporate structure is literally riddled with moral hazards that have nothing to do with government beyond the very existence of the corporation itself, which of course cannot exist without government, as you can't create limited liability with a private contract. Non-corporate portions of markets have only slightly fewer moral hazards, lacking the limited liability issue and some of the principal-agent problems, but markets with few moral hazards are rare beasts indeed.

If the moral hazard created by potential bank bailouts was enough to collapse the economy, then the very idea of capitalism is a failure, as it is hopelessly wrought with moral hazards built into its very heart.

Coal Mining Moratorium

There are stupid policies. Then there are really stupid policies. Then there are ignorant policies. I doubt there is any policy in our nation that is as collosally ignorant than selling publically owned coal resources.

For example, the Bureau of Land Managment recently leased 400 acres of land in Colorado to Peabody Energy for a price of $800,000. The land is expected to produce 3.2 million tons of coal, so we are selling it for a whopping $0.25 a ton. The market price for coal from that area is around $35/ton, so right off the bad, it looks like we are getting a bad deal, only capturing a fraction of a percent of the final sales price.

However, the real issue is that both coal mining and coal burning wreak havoc on public health and the environment. Each of those tons of coal will result in about 2460 kilowatt hours of electricity, and the most comprehensive estimates of the fully externalized costs of coal (including mining, power plant emissions, etc) are nearly $0.18 per kwh! That implies that each ton of coal causes almost $440 of damage to the public for each ton burned, in terms of destroyed land, fouled water, toxic chemicals and fine particles released into the air, and climate change. We are literally selling something for pennies that will have hundreds of dollars of costs blow back into our faces. The $800,000 we received for leasing those 400 acres is trivial relative to the over $1.4 billion in damages that mining and burning that coal will cause.

I have seen governments implement a lot of bad policies over the years, but I doubt I have seen any that fails cost-benefit by three orders of magnitude. Not only should we place an immediately place a moratorium on coal-related leases on public lands, we should take back any we have already issued and compensate the lease-holders justly. It would be much better for us to hand Peabody $5 million and renege on the lease than let them mine the coal, which would cost us hundreds of times more.

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Post-analysis: What about jobs?

First, the coal industry does not employ many people, 134,000 at all levels across the US. With over a billion tons produced per year, that's about 8000 tons per worker per year, implying about 400 man/years to mine the 3.2 million tons noted above. That would imply a cost of well over $3 million per man/year even assuming this 400 figure was true. However, it is not, at least if you believe in free market economics, which would not leave the capital and workers idle but rather shift them to the next best resources, which would likely employ about the same number of people. "Counting jobs" has always been an exercise which I find to be totally pointless and no more accurate than counting pinhead-dancing angels. If anything, it is pretty clear that coal employs fewer people per kwh than other forms of energy, which is one of the main reasons it is "cheap".

Guns, Booze, and Automobiles

A comment I often hear from gun advocates is a variant of "Why don't we restrict access to cars and alcohol, as they get a lot of innocent people killed as well?".

This is actually a good argument, qualititatively. Where it breaks down is quantitatively. In other words, the numbers just don't add up. I have posted the wonky details here, but what I have calculated or discovered is that:

Americans make 233 automobile trips per year, killing approximately 21500 third parties, or 10.7 million trips per third party fatality.

Americans drink approximately 28 billion times per year, killing approximately 7400 third parties, or 3.7 million drinking events per third party fatality.

Americans use long guns (rifles, shotguns, etc) approximately 840 million times per year, resulting in 950 third party fatalities, or one fatality per 1.15 million uses.

Americans use handguns approximately 500 million times per year, resulting in over 7600 third party fatalities, or about one fatality per 67,000 uses.

It is very clear what item stands out here: handguns. Long guns seem to be only marginally more dangerous than drinking or driving, and probably safer than drinking AND driving. However, handguns are in a league of their own, with well over a hundred times the third party fatalities per use as automobiles and around fifty times the fatalities per use as alcohol. This is why they are not remotely compariable, and why is it perfectly reasonable to call for the abolition of handguns, but not necessarily long guns.

Guns, Booze, and Automobiles - Wonk Version

This is the wonky details of my post found here for those who like to quibble.

Note that throughout this exercise, I have focused on "externalized" fatalities: deaths to parties other than the drinker, the driver, and the gun owner. Matters such as suicide, single-car auto accidents, etc are excluded or explicitly accounted for. While obviously these are still a matter of public policy, they are on a different level than harm inflicted upon innocent third parties.

For automobiles, there are approximately 233 billion trips made per year in the US, and bit over 32000 traffic fatalities. However, roughly a third are self-inflicted and only involve the driver. This can be inferred from the facts that about half of all fatalities occur to a driver and that about a third of fatal accidents are single car, thus implying that roughly two thirds of the half of fatalities that occurs among drivers happens to the at-fault driver, while the other third of a half occurs to an innocent driver in a two car accident. Thus, there are approximately 21500 externalited traffic fatalities each year. This leads to the conclusion that with respect to driving there are approximately 10.7 million trips per externalized fatality.

For drinking, the average American drinks 9.4 liters of alcohol per year. If you assume that the average drinking session involves three ounces of alcohol (about three drinks), that implies the average American drinks 88 times per year, or 28 billion drinking events per year among all Americans. There were 10228 drunk-driving related fatalities in 2010, but approximately 45% of them are likely self-inflicted, resulting in 5625 externalized drunk driving fatalities. Additionally, approximately 28% of violent crime is alcohol related. There were 12664 homocides in 2011, and assigning 50% of the responsibility of "alcohol related" homocides to the alcohol results in 1773 externalized deaths. Combined with the traffic fatalities, this gives alcohol a total of 7398 externalized fatalities, or approximately one externalized fatality per 3.7 million drinking events.

The data for guns is a little more sparse and I have to make some assumptions. One is to look at ammunition use. The domestic ammunition market is $1.9 billion dollars per year according to a recent industry report. At $0.20 per bullet wholesale, that is 9.5 billion bullets. Of those, the military uses 1.8 billion, and other federal agencies 400 million. I could not find data for state and local police use, but considering there are more than five times as many state and local law enforcement officers as federal ones, my assumption that their bullet consumption is the same at 400 million is probably conservative. Thus, there are approximately 6.9 billion bullets available for civilian use annually. For a rough estimate, the assumption that people shoot six bullets on average when using a gun would lead to 1.15 billion uses per year. Of course, "using" a gun could range from no shots fired (an unsuccessful hunt, brandishing it in order to scare off an intruder) to a few boxes full at the gun range. The figure of six per use is literally made up but probably reasonable. Note that since there are about 64 million gun owners in the US, this would imply the average gun owner uses a gun 18 times per year and expends and annual total of 110 bullets. That seems very reasonable to me based on my experience.

We can attempt to look at this from the bottom up as well. There are 13.7 million active hunters in the US. Assuming 30 hunts per year, that is approximately 400 million hunts. As for shooting ranges, their annual industry revenue is about $560 million, so at $30 per trip, there are about 19 million visits to gun ranges. However, these would disproportionally add up to a lot of bullets fired, as most people shoot a fair number each time they are there. Even the wildest estimate of defensive gun uses is 2.5 million per year. Assuming the average gun owner uses their guns about ten times a year in addition to the aforementioned uses puts us right back at about 1.1 billion uses. To be generous, I will overweight the (likely exaggerated) defensive use estimate 100-fold, just for good measure, resulting in 1.35 billion gun uses per year.

Hand guns make up a bit under one third of all guns in the US. I will assume they make up no portion of the hunting uses, 80% of the 100-fold overweighted defensive uses, and a proporitionate 1/3 of the remaining miscellaneous uses, resulting in 510 million uses per year, with the remaining 840 million uses being long guns (rifles, shotguns, etc). According to the FBI, there were 8583 firearm deaths in 2011, with 6220 from handguns, 776 from long guns, and 1587 from "unstated". Assigning the "unstated" deaths to handguns and long guns proportionately, this results in 7631 hand-gun deaths and and 952 long-gun deaths in 2011. Thus, 1.15 million uses per externalized fatality for long guns, and 67200 hand gun uses for externalized fatality.