Dante Carver arrested for unlicensed driving

[Kanchou]

American 'talento' Dante Carver was apparently arrested for driving with an invalid international driver's permit, claiming he "didn't know the rules."

If you've been in Japan that long, you should know you've gotta get a J-license... it's a pain, but not as bad as getting busted.

And apparently he had been in an accident this August.

[Yokohammer]

Agreed.

Pretty piss-weak excuse, especially since the information is freely and widely available.

[Sarutaro]

Do you have a source? Seems ignored by J-news so far...

[Coligny]

Do you have a source? Seems ignored by J-news so far...

You're missing the 'foreigner bashing' or the 'insipid news to cover important issues' part ?

[Kanchou]

Do you have a source? Seems ignored by J-news so far...

I saw it on TV but couldnt find a link.

[Doctor Stop]

I guess it's better than him being arrested for driving with an invalid international driver's permit and driving while playing with his iPhone, simultaneously.

[Netherlander]

Dante Who??....

[6810]

First post friend, first post. Let your eyes toosu it!

[Kanchou]

Dante Who??....

The black guy from the Softbank commercials.

[Coligny]

Sooo, they also have DWB here...

[Netherlander]

The black guy from the Softbank commercials.

Oh! That guy! OK Thank you.

[Taro Toporific]

[Taro Toporific]

Softbank star in driver's license flap
Japan Times | Dec. 12, 2011
Tokyo police said Monday they have turned over to prosecutors their case against actor/model Dante Carver...
...Meguro Police Station pulled the New Yorker over after he executed an illegal U-turn in Shibuya Ward on July 2, and then presented an international driver's license that they determined to be invalid under the Road Traffic Law.
Under the law, someone who lives in Japan but obtains an international driver's license during a less-than-three-month absence from Japan is not permitted to drive in Japan with the document, as Carver was doing, the police said.
The law was revised in June 2002 to prevent foreigners from habitually driving in Japan on an international driver's license, which is valid only for a year. Before the revision, foreign residents and Japanese could leave the country, obtain an international driver's license cheaply overseas and return and use it, repeating the pattern yearly.
Obtaining a Japanese driver's license sometimes takes weeks and costs around 200,000yen.
The police quoted Carver as saying, "I didn't know the law very well."

----
Also view the Japanese news report on Youtube

[matsuki]

Under the law, someone who lives in Japan but obtains an international driver's license during a less-than-three-month absence from Japan is not permitted to drive in Japan with the document, as Carver was doing, the police said.

I thought it was something along the lines of you need a J-license if you're on anything other than a tourist visa for over a year? (maybe I'm confusing it with California License Law?)

Obtaining a Japanese driver's license sometimes takes weeks and costs around 200,000yen.

It also sometimes takes a day or two and costs less than 10,000yen when you have a valid NY license...

[Kanchou]

That's only if you pass on the first time...

It took me five tries (apparently Fukushima license cops are among the most anal? Is what I heard anyway) and that's 1000 KM worth of driving, and five days of my vacation time.

Word to the wise, spend 4000-8000 for 1 or 2 hours of lessons at a school. They will teach you how to pass the exam. Actual driving skill is irrelevant.

Also request the same guy every time... I didn't pass until I got the guy I had just failed with the day before, and after I took one lesson that morning.

[matsuki]

That's only if you pass on the first time...

It took me five tries (apparently Fukushima license cops are among the most anal? Is what I heard anyway) and that's 1000 KM worth of driving, and five days of my vacation time.

Word to the wise, spend 4000-8000 for 1 or 2 hours of lessons at a school. They will teach you how to pass the exam. Actual driving skill is irrelevant.

Also request the same guy every time... I didn't pass until I got the guy I had just failed with the day before, and after I took one lesson that morning.

Took me 3 times and almost getting killed by some crazy Egyptian guy that couldn't drive manual to save his life....but still not weeks and 200,000Yen

[Coligny]

That's only if you pass on the first time...

It took me five tries (apparently Fukushima license cops are among the most anal? Is what I heard anyway) and that's 1000 KM worth of driving, and five days of my vacation time.

Word to the wise, spend 4000-8000 for 1 or 2 hours of lessons at a school. They will teach you how to pass the exam. Actual driving skill is irrelevant.

Also request the same guy every time... I didn't pass until I got the guy I had just failed with the day before, and after I took one lesson that morning.

Amateur, For the closed course test it took me around 12 tries, at the end I was considering it a hobby like anyother... friended with some of the cops there. One is the son of a former imperial navy submariner who was based in Lorient (france) during the war crew of an I400 sub... fascinating stuff, never heard of imperial navy activity from the french harbours before...

Got the road test at 2nd try only though... (1 week before expiration of my karimen license)

[Kanchou]

Some foreigners take 30+ tries before they just give up. At that point you'd be better off going to drivers school.

[GomiGirl]

For me it just took up an afternoon of my time waiting for the paperwork, an eye test and a few documents translated. Australians just get to show proof of a valid licence back home and a clean driving record and they get a J-licence without the need to take the test.

[Coligny]

For me it just took up an afternoon of my time waiting for the paperwork, an eye test and a few documents translated. Australians just get to show proof of a valid licence back home and a clean driving record and they get a J-licence without the need to take the test.

French toos...

But Parisian usually don't have cars... or driver license... making translation impossible...

[Greji]

For me it just took up an afternoon of my time waiting for the paperwork, an eye test and a few documents translated. Australians just get to show proof of a valid licence back home and a clean driving record and they get a J-licence without the need to take the test.

I think it's been posted before, but Japan recognizes and will reciprocate for any country that has a national driver's license and what the Gomi Gal did is all that is required. However, countries like the US that have differing driver's license by states, hence different traffic laws, represent too much work to determine if the license is compatible to Japan. i.e. each state DMV Code would have to be translated and applied. Therefore, Yanks and similar countries get to test....

[matsuki]

I think it's been posted before, but Japan recognizes and will reciprocate for any country that has a national driver's license and what the Gomi Gal did is all that is required. However, countries like the US that have differing driver's license by states, hence different traffic laws, represent too much work to determine if the license is compatible to Japan. i.e. each state DMV Code would have to be translated and applied. Therefore, Yanks and similar countries get to test....

T'was a shortened test. All I remember is them heavily focusing on "pumping break!" before cornering...and "SAFETY DRIVING!"

[wagyl]

I think it's been posted before, but Japan recognizes and will reciprocate for any country that has a national driver's license and what the Gomi Gal did is all that is required. However, countries like the US that have differing driver's license by states, hence different traffic laws, represent too much work to determine if the license is compatible to Japan. i.e. each state DMV Code would have to be translated and applied. Therefore, Yanks and similar countries get to test....

I've never worked out the reasons for easier tests for Australians, since licences are a state matter not a federal matter, and do differ between states in Australia too. Maybe driving on the left gives Australia some bonus points. And I don't know about needing a clean record either: when I did it there was nothing to check my slightly tarnished record at all.

[damn name]

I understand that the US doesn't get reciprocal, no-test treatment because each license issuing government had to provide accident data that showed an accident rate to be not greater than the Japanese accident rate.

Australia has only 6 states. They provided the data, so they don't have to take a test in Japan, like Canadians with 12 provinces.

Some US states didn't cooperate (or even respond, I believe) so US drivers have to take a driving test. Also, I believe they are supposed to be given a "severe" test (it's even on the form), as perhaps a passive-aggressive rebuttal to the refusal of some US states to cooperate.

Perceived and real slights don't go over well here, for those of you who haven't figured that out by now...

One contributing factor to WWII was the League of Nations snubbing Japan after the end of the war to end all wars. Japan was on the Allied side, but its navy was restricted in tonnage below the level of other Allies from WWI.

Japan felt snubbed because all the white boys were dividing up the planet as colonies and said there were racial reasons behind the limitation, so they presented a racial equality resolution for approval before the the League of Nations. The US and England combined arm twisting to have the resolution defeated and Japan realized that the goal was to eventually colonize Japan, one of the last non-colonized nations in Asia. One look at a map told them that they were surrounded and that veto was perceived as a stab in the back by the Allies. It contributed to the chain of events leading to the war.

Korea was colonized as a rebuttal to a perceived insult to the Japanese emperor by the Korean government.

To be fair, the planet is filled with similar pig-headed, unrelenting cultures feuding with other cultures because of old slights.

[omae mona]

damn name, I'm a little confused. If the U.S. states did not bother to submit the paperwork that all other foreign goverments are required to submit, isn't it most likely that is the sole reason US drivers need to take a driving test? I am not sure I understand where all this WWII emotional baggage fits in.

Are you saying that otherwise the NPA would have said "ah, we like the U.S. so much that we'll bend the rules and not require the paperwork that everybody else has to submit"? This does not seem very typical of Japanese government operating procedure to me...

[Taro Toporific]

damn name, I'm a little confused. If the U.S. states did not bother to submit the paperwork that all other foreign goverments are required to submit, isn't it most likely that is the sole reason US drivers need to take a driving test? I am not sure I understand where all this WWII emotional baggage fits in.

U.S. drivers did not always have put up with all that crap.
Twenty-five years ago, getting my Japanese licence at Samezu Driver's License Center (Tokyo) was easy and all I had to do was:

Fill out a short form in Romaji (with engrish translations of the form provided)

Take an eye test

Show my Illinois drivers licence

Wait 60 minutes while clerks did the paperwork

Pay somewhere around 2,000yen

And, collect my new Japanese licence

I didn't have to take any paper or behind-the-wheel test. Hell, nobody even offered me a Japanese rules of the road booklet in engrish (it took me a couple of months to figure out why Japanese drivers were stopping like school bus drivers at railroad tracks).
I was in-and-out of Samezu in 90 minutes.

[matsuki]

Twenty-five years ago....Hell, nobody even offered me a Japanese rules of the road booklet in engrish

That hasn't changed

[Mike Oxlong]

I got gifted one of those English rulebooks when I changed my license over by one of the law-abiding Japanese lady-friends whose driving is the worst of all I am acquainted with. She was terrified I was going to run into trouble without the benefit of my International License, which granted me nothing but warnings when transgressing while driving her car. She always got the bad end of things when we got pulled over, as the cop would brusquely tell her to interpret his tirade on the way of driving in Japan. Good fun!:hehe: It was always the young cop in the pair that would want to radio HQ for instructions on how to write a ticket to one driving on an International License, while the senior cop would say it was too much trouble, and to just make his woman impress upon him the sternness of the warning in Engrish. I'd just pretend to be shocked by her "revelation" that I'd broken some traffic regulation or other, and give the obligatory exaggerated "Oh-kei...Sankkyu!" to the officer who'd done the scolding to be passed on.

[Coligny]

That hasn't changed

You have to buy it... learn it... fear it... lust... ... well I might stop here...

(no mine don't have strangely stuck together pages...)

(BTW, people still try to make sense of these bullshit ? For fuck sake, Japan left the league of nation in 1933 because she was condemning their attack in Manchouria.)

And I forgot the cutest part... them amurikuns were not part of the SDN (LoN)

[damn name]

damn name, I'm a little confused. If the U.S. states did not bother to submit the paperwork that all other foreign goverments are required to submit, isn't it most likely that is the sole reason US drivers need to take a driving test? [color="Red"]That is the sole reason they take the test.[/color]

Are you saying that otherwise the NPA would have said "ah, we like the U.S. so much that we'll bend the rules and not require the paperwork that everybody else has to submit"? This does not seem very typical of Japanese government operating procedure to me...

[color="Red"]No, I'm saying that they are small minded and vindictive in general about perceived slights. They thought the US failure to cooperate in the driving information was rude, so US licensed drivers will fail the driving test while someone from another country will pass, both drivers driving the exact same way.

If someone had two licenses, one from the US and one from say, Canada, and they went to two different locations to take a driving test. The person will most likely fail using the US license and pass with the Canadian license. Why not just have everyone meet the same criteria to pass? They're just being petty and vindictive.[/color]

Speaking of petty, Coligny, go wash the dishes or play in your room.