Japanese Red Tape, lol

So, today Kasuga and I went to get my Insurance taken care of. I didn't think it would actually work out, because I hadn't really taken care of lots of the other stuff I assumed was needed in order to get my insurance, but Kasuga said we should just go and have the insurance agent tell us what else we would need to do.

So we went to the store, and began talking to the insurance lady. She rattled off the laundry list of things that we'd need to take care of, and left Kasuga reeling from it all.

Things included:
transfer of ownership
travelling 60km up to Matsumoto to get new plates
going to Komagane to get a police officer in Iijima to verify I have a parking space
The actual insurance
verifying the cars condition for transfer of shaken
and 1 or two things i'm forgetting.

of course, she offered to take care of everything except the transfer of ownership for a fee; I said yes due to the amount of travel, time, and lack of japanese I posess. :-P it actually isn't too much more expensive than it would be trying to do it on my own.

So next we made our way over to city hall to get the transfer of ownership taken care of. We filed out the form there and were then promptly informed that they wouldn't accept it because my inkan (name stamp) had kanji. *

* OK, so time for a tangent on that: In some asian countries, Japan, Korea, and China, as well as others maybe, it's common for people to accompany signatures with a stamp of their name. This stems from a couple of centuries BC in China as a way to verify orders and such.

So anyway, when I first arrived in Iijima, Kasuga and Matsuzaki-san, my Board of Education rep who works at city hall, were asking me what I wanted for my name stamp; DG, 'du-wa-i-to' in katakana, or kanji. I said I would love kanji becuase it would look cool and the kanji they would have to use is never used in conjunction for Japanese names, so it would be obvious i'm a foreigner. They said yes, and I'd been using it ever since late August.

So here I am, 5 months later, being told that they won't accept my stamp becuase it has kanji instead of english letters, because then my name would be listed as 'kanji-for-dwight' donald glinsmann, and apparently japanese people's heads would explode upon seeing a name with kanji and english letters.

Kasuga tried to explain that it would be obvious it was me, i'd have my english signature there, and I'd already been able to open a bank account using it with no issues.

By the end of dealing with this red tape, kasuga was face-palming at the whole stupid situation, and we had to leave with it unresolved while we tried to get a new inkan.

so we got back to school and luckily one of the old teachers has a friend who makes them in Iijima or something, and was able to give him a call for us. Given that it must be the slow season for inkan making 'is there ever a fast one?', it was actually done early in the afternoon.

It was unfortunate that I had to spend 15$ on the new one, but we were then able to go get the transfer of ownership, go back to the insurance place and take care of the inurance stuff, which included the husband (it was actually a local mechanic / moped store where I had borrowed my first bike from, and I believe the wife did the insurance work) came by my place to sketch out a little map to help the police officer find the place here in the next few days.

So in the end I was able to get it all taken care of and should have insurance in a couple of days.