I finally graduated Japanese driving school around mid-September. I’m sharing my notes in case it’s helpful for others considering doing this.

Second stage

The second stage consists of ~15 lectures and ~20 more driving practice sessions, making it around twice as long as the first stage. Most of the practice sessions are on actual roads with an instructor, and a few are on-premises sessions dedicated to special topics like parking.

Tokyo roads are quite crowded and naturally produce a lot of opportunities for practicing good judgment. Overall I found the second stage material to be extremely useful and I am much more confident in my skills as a result.

Graduation exam

Once I finished all of the course material I was able to reserve time for the graduation exam. The school I was attending conducted graduation exams nearly every day. I was able to reserve one on a national holiday.

Students who reserved the same timeslot are split up into different cars with instructors. I was in a group with two other students. Students take turns driving pre-determined courses and are evaluated on the safety and correctness of their driving. The final part of the exam is on-premises where students are tested either on parallel parking or reversing out of tight corners.

During my turn I screwed up at the final moment by driving into the opposite lane, but thankfully this didn’t count against me because my exam finished the moment I successfully parallel parked. Perhaps I was just exceptionally lucky.

The results were announced soon after the exam. However, I had to come back to the school in the afternoon to receive the graduation certificate. This was the last time I would set foot in the school.

The exam itself took up most of the morning, and finished between 11AM - 12PM. I received the graduation certificate at around 2PM.

Written exam

The graduation exam did not earn me a driver’s license. In Japan, graduating a government-recognized driving school is merely a way to bypass the driving exam at the DMV. I still needed to take the written exam.

Unfortunately the DMV’s schedule is much less flexible and I had to sacrifice some work hours to reserve an exam slot in the morning. Most slots for at least the next couple weeks were completely filled. On top of that, I had to reschedule once due to a conflict with a company event. So the exam ended up being a month and half after I had already graduated driving school.

Each day there are only two possible slots, morning and afternoon. I reserved a morning slot. The entire appointment looked like this:

I arrived at ~8AM on the day of the exam.
8AM - 9AM was spent on submitting the official application for the driver’s license. ~50ish other people were lined up with me, so it really did take almost the whole hour.
9AM - 10AM was spent taking the written test. The test was conducted on a tablet, and was a slightly easier version of the practice tests I took online via the driving school’s online portal.
10AM - 11AM was spent announcing results and taking photos for the driver’s license.
11AM - 12PM was spent waiting for the driver’s licenses to be made.
12PM onwards was spent receiving the driver’s license.

The entire process was run like a well-oiled machine. From what I could tell on the order of a 100 or more drivers were being produced by this building every day.

Test taking

While I do not recommend it to others, as it’s a shallow way to study for something as serious as driving, my test study method consisted of practicing test questions online through the online MUSASI system. Each test is 95 questions and I took (and retook) all 6 of them, and also practiced the “difficult question” compilation.

Scheduling discipline

8 months passed between signing up for driving school and receiving the license. I took my classes at a fairly relaxed pace, and when I started at a new job with real salaryman hours I had to do a lot of hours on weekends or the rare weekday when I could reserve the earliest slot. It took some discipline to make sure I would graduate with some buffer, so as not to blow the school’s 9 month time limit.

Language hurdles

Compared to many other non-natives I’ve met, I do not consider myself to be particularly amazing at Japanese. However, in order to not be completely lost I would still recommend to others considering Japanese driving school (in Japanese) that they have fairly high listening and reading comprehension of day-to-day Japanese.

It’s worth noting that having high language comprehension does not necessarily indicate having high language fluency. For example, while I can read most day-to-day Japanese I still read at the speed of an elementary school student, and speak with even lower fluency.

Going forward

Even though it’s nothing special for most people living here, getting a Japanese driving license is probably my proudest accomplishment since moving to Japan. It exercised my ability to tolerate discomfort, being in an environment intended for Japanese natives, on top of having a brain not particularly suited to driving nor irregular schedules. 16 years after getting my USA license, I feel one step closer to graduating from “paper driver.”