BOB'S FEARLESS DEMENTIA DRIVING TEST

They have this new thing here in Japan that I just found out about when I got a multipart sticky postcard saying that since I'm over 70 and my drivers license is expiring, I have to take the Dementia Driving Test. That's my name for it.

They don't call it that, of course, they call it something like the Silver Driver Autumn Leaf Test with Hello Kitty, something more euphemistic, the card has all sorts of unnecessary information on its eight sides, with no map or directions for location or anything, just lists of fees and degrees of senescence plus some phone numbers. I had to phone them to find out where I actually had to go, in the physical form that embodiment imposes.

The card said come on Thursday Sept 13 and bring a lot of money with your imminently useless license and a bunch of other stuff, maybe a collapsible bicycle in case I had to pedal home if I knew where that was ha ha, but I use my dementia to perform complex tasks on Thursdays in the big city, so when I called them I said - exerting optimal coherence, which I can still manage at times, even at my advanced age - that since I was working on the 13th, Wed Sept 12 would be good, that was my day off, they said We don't have the test on Wed, (there's that old naivete again, thinking that public convenience was a factor) so we sumoed some dates around and finally settled on this coming Monday, which is good because usually Mondays are when I'm least demented.

If they asked me - but bureaucracies never do, for some reason - it would be a sufficient test to simply see if I could find my way to the Motor Vehicle Bureau on my birthday and stand in each of the many long lines in correct sequence, fill out all the complex forms, answer all the questions, sign my name, read the numbers, pass all the other tests that the younger, less experienced drivers have to pass and that I myself have successfully done many times, without strangling a single bureaucrat or even babbling upon exit, before I was as richly experienced at driving license obtainment as I am now.

However, the mandatory driving schools in Japan are big business, and the bureaucracy-tempered cynic in me figures that with fewer and fewer young people being born in Japan, and the expanding proportion of elderly Japanese simply renewing their licenses every 4 years or so (for a fortune each time!), the driving schools, once a cash cow for legislators' relatives (what a cynic), are no longer pulling in the cash as hand-over-fistly as they once were (a driver's license requires many hours of formal driver training at a government-licensed school, for a minimum cost of 300,000 yen (ca. $4000), and if you don't pass - like so many don't - you gotta do it all again, with instructors I suspect are retired drill sergeants. It's a tough few months.

So on Monday I go to take my DDT, with lecture, virtual driving test, actual driving test and discussion, 3 full hours in total, the whole morning shot, and if I don't run over any virtual grandmothers or try to convince the tester of my Napoleonhood, I should get permission to continue driving until I turn 75, when I'll have to do it all over again, at a higher price. 

Maybe I should emigrate before they come out with the Deceased Driving Test.

DEFENDERS OF WILDLIFE

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Perspective on heartstring-tweaking eco-orgs...

I WAS ONLY GOING ONE WAY

The other day I went to the police station around the corner down the road, finally getting around to renewing my driver's license between my birthday and a month later as per the cryptic instructions on the postcard they sent me, one of those secret postcards, that said that between the aforementioned dates I had to go either to this large police station between 2 and 4 on these afternoons with these exceptions, that large police station between 9 and 11 on those mornings with these exceptions, or this other smaller police station on my side of the big toll bridge at one time a week only but since that possibility was so remote it didn't say when so I had to call the microprint number to find out the secret information, all because I drove south on a one-block street between 2 and 4 pm on a Wednesday (see Smiling Bob's Extra-Special Police Adventure). Go figure.

In a room filled with guys in uniform sitting at desks where they arm wrestle with sheets of paper, now and then going outside to hassle law-abiding citizens taking their usual Wednesday afternoon shortcuts, the polite lady clerk took my personal seal and a bunch of money, stamped the back of my old and now disgraced license about 42 times with various sizes of red-, blue- and black-inked rubber stamps so as to eradicate all semblance of validity while yet verifying to future generations of clerks and policepersons that I had indeed been here to a confirmable degree on this day and date long ago with fees in hand, bearing my personal seal, at this official desk in this official building, town, county, country, in person, with the correct face and what not - imagination is in short supply amid the nitgrit of bureaucracy - then she blinded me with an eye test and stopped me from putting my shades back on so she could take my picture without warning in a corner with a flash that made me look like Julius Caesar falling off his horse on my driver's license.

After that I had to watch beige walls for 45 minutes made up of those widely spaced ticks and monotonous tocks that drip like cold molasses out of bureaucratic clocks that hang above steel-legged benches upholstered in cold gray prison vinyl decorated with little triangular rips and old cigarette burns until as a hard-driving criminal locked into the police data base I could sit for a week-long lecture compressed into less than two hours by an about-to-retire police officer who also would rather have been just about anywhere else in the country than here now repeating this lecture to an audience of tired eyes for what looked and sounded like the thousandth time about the meaning of red lights and stop signs and the paragraph on page 66 and so many other priceless memories, e.g., about how going 60 is like your car falling off a building I forget how many stories high, like that will ever happen, all because last year I drove in one direction.

Wonder if I could erase my record if I drove backward...

SMILING BOB’S EXTRA-SPECIAL POLICE ADVENTURE

There I was - as I've been doing a couple of times a week for over 10 years now – tootling down the little street behind the train station on my way south, when I passed a watchful policeman standing by the roadside, which was ok because my seatbelt was on, I'd come to a complete stop, used all my signals properly, paid my taxes, possessed a proper visa and hadn't done anything felonious within the statute of limitations, so all was cool...

The first thing I thought when the several nice policemen at the other end of the street flagged me down was that the street must be blocked at that end for construction or something, maybe a local festival, but no, it wasn't that at all, it was something much more stimulating and informative. The police helpfully explained that, as of an uncertain time ago, the street was no longer a street on some days between 2 or 3 to 4 or 5pm and 6 or 7 to 9 or 10 pm or was that am, while pointing out, by way of proof, a sign that was not a traffic sign.

On one end of the cyclone fence that parallels the street, someone with a delightful sense of humor had hung a sort of banner featuring a smiling cartoony grandmother and some cartoony smiling schoolkids, kind of a peripheral vision safety poster that careful drivers would observe only out of the edge of their eyes since, in the interest of public safety, careful drivers turning into the street wouldn't dare take their eyes off the road - or the de facto grandmothers and schoolkids thereon - to read the detailed print at the bottom of a delightful cartoon sign that didn't, after all, say Drivers, Watch Out for the Elderly and the Schoolkids around the Station, and Have a Nice Day! Believe me, I could only grin from ear to ear!

I took particular delight in the fact that nobody at all had informed anybody at all about the change in the standard way, for example via the internationally recognized round red street sign with the white bar through it that is posted in prominent visibility at each end of subject streets everywhere else in Japan, indeed the entire world, with below that sign a smaller rectangular white sign where, forewarned, you look to find out the particulars; charmingly, they did nothing like that on either end of the half-block thoroughfare. So I couldn't help but smile at the nice policemen and their cute sign, while radiating goodwill.

Stopped in the middle of the street where I could actually read the entertaining cartoon, it informed me that the street was not a street not every day between 2 or 3 to 4 or 5pm and 6 or 7 to 9 or 10 pm or was that am? I had to chuckle at the acute wisdom and broad generosity all this involved, taking comfort as well in the judicial economy and select forethought that had gone into it, what with the waning tax base and the need to sustain essential boondoggles while somehow coming up with a way to maybe cover the salaries of the nice policemen as they stand around on little back streets and flag down the citizenry to share in the public joy.

I thought the whole thing was a knockout of an idea, and immediately made my 70-dollar contribution so that the law's eager minions can keep on with such approaches to safety, the better to preserve us all from the many problems that come with having finally got a little money in the bank. But I frowned at having to break the law once more by driving the rest of the way down the little street so as to become legal again, when I could smile heartily once more.