The Moment of Truth Has Come

One of the last steps before the actual driving test was to take a 10-question written test. The test was in both Japanese and English. Despite the poor English translations, the questions were pretty straightforward and, even though I have no idea what my score was, I passed. (A passing score is 7 out of 10.)

The final step before the driving test was a vision test, which I also passed easily.

(What's funny about the Japanese vision test is that all the letters you see are the letter "C." So rather than saying which letter you see, you have to tell the examiner which direction the "opening" of the "C" is facing. A couple of months ago at school when the students' eyesight was being examined, I covered one of my eyes, pretended to be taking the test, and said, "C, C, C, C, C, C...")

Finally, the moment of truth was at hand. Normally, from what I heard about the test, you find out about an hour before your test whether you'll be driving Course A or Course B. I found out about 5 minutes before the test, probably due to the delay regarding that infamous certification form.

Nevertheless, I had gone over both courses in my head several times and was confident that I would remember the route I had to drive. And as soon as I found out I was driving Course B, I deleted Course A from my memory banks.

The course starts next to a small waiting room. Rather than head over to the waiting room as I was instructed to do, I decided to relax for a couple minutes just outside of that waiting room. At some point, I looked over at the waiting room and noticed about five guys inside the room stand up and face toward one of the walls that was out of my view. "Oh, crap," I thought to myself. "Those guys must be greeting the driving instructor. I'm late for my own driving test! This won't be good."

So I crept over to the room, stood at attention like the other guys, and hoped for mercy.

After a few seconds, I looked outside and saw a huge bulldozer parked at the starting area. Oops. "Falscher Film," as the Germans would say. (Wrong movie.)

What a relief!

A moment later, a white four-door automobile pulled up.

The instructor got out and came over to the waiting room. I tried to size him up quickly, since Taura-san had told me that some of the instructors were rather nice, while others were fairly strict. My guy looked like he was all business, so I tried to act as serious as possible.

The instructor asked me if I understood Japanese and if I had practiced for the test, and then he briefed me for about a minute. I didn't understand everything he said, but I understood enough to know that my test was about to begin.