The driving school EPIC begins! In DETAIL!

You may recall that I had signed up for Japanese driving school, in the hopes that I will be able to operate a car for more than the one year my international driver’s permit will allow. The orientation was this evening. I went in bleary-eyed and expectationless, and came out… slightly confused.

I wandered in 10 minutes before the orientation was scheduled to begin, carrying my hat, a purse, and a laptop backpack like some sort of wayward traveler looking for directions. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do, so I stood around awkwardly and made other people in the lobby nervous for a while. Then I spotted the girl who had helped me sign up the other day so quickly waddled over to get her to tell me what the heck was going on. I got my picture taken, eyes checked (say-the-direction-the-C-is-pointing kinda thing), and then headed upstairs with four other new students.

Then I took the most arbitrary multiple choice test I have ever seen. We were subjected to a battery of continue-the-pattern, which-number-is-bigger, pick-the-random-shape-you-like-for-no-reason, what-does-the-inkblot-look-like tests… all timed. One of the tests was speed-writing the letter “A” over and over again… as neatly as you can. I unfortunately have horrible writing, but I hope a lifetime of occasionally writing a capital A helped me somewhat. Another test asked us to pick one picture we liked and one we disliked out of four… I have no idea what the point of that could be. Maybe people who enjoy angular butterflies are worse drivers than those who like well-rounded butterflies? Anyway, then we came upon the questions that were actually IN Japanese… and I began to use the “I don’t know” option a whole freaking lot.

I guess the whole point of the test was to show that 1) you have some sort of acceptable reaction time, 2) you have common sense, 3) you will not have some sort of emotional breakdown that will make you use the car as a weapon of doom, and 4) you don’t have crazy aspirations to drive through a children’s baseball game while drunk.

Afterwards, we got a fancy box full of textbooks and stuff. We have a “class textbook” and a “driving textbook” depending on whether we are driving or going to class on a particular day. I don’t really understand how we’re supposed to use the “driving textbook” if we’re actually driving, but I guess life is not worth living without SOME mysteries.

The instructor (a jolly looking, sort of rotund fellow) then gave us a run-down of the course. 12 hours on-facilities driving and 19 hours real-world driving, with 26 hours of classroom time. We have 9 months to complete the course, but he said some people have been able to do it in 2-3 weeks (they clearly had no life outside of driving school, jeebus).

Then we got a little tour of the first floor of the place. There’s this whole complex card-reader / punch-card-esque folder system… which I hope I still remember tomorrow.

After that, we went back to the classroom for some class time. Another instructor came in and basically read several pages of the textbook FOR us. Quite a few Japanese people I’ve spoken to talk as if they had stuffed gauze in their cheeks and are too lazy to pick up the slack and enunciate. This man talked like that, so my comprehension rate dropped 10% when he was talking. He spent a very long time explaining the difference between the Japanese words “kuruma” and “jidousha” (sorta like comparing “car” vs. “automobile”). Basically, we’re driving frickin’ jidousha up in here.

We then went through all the responsibilities of driving, how to secure a child into a child seat, what sort of footwear should not be worn while driving, etc. Then we watched a short video about driving that basically repeated everything the guy said, except for the whole car vs. automobile bit. The video is exactly what you’d expect from a driving school video. I guess it is kinda interesting that there is no cultural gap in the incredibly boring and cheesy instructional video department.

Then 8pm creeped up and our 3 hours of having our brains numbed were finally up. The jolly dude from earlier showed me and this other girl how to use the computerized scheduling system, so I scheduled me some drive time Friday and Saturday. Then I tried to ask how the classroom time scheduling worked, but I guess it was closing time, because they just told me to come talk with them tomorrow. So I guess I’m driving tomorrow evening. Sometime before then, I have to learn what everything I may need to handle tomorrow is called in Japanese.