2025-07-06

Converting to a Japanese Driver's License (part 2)

This is a continuation of my previous post on getting a Japanese driver's license.

Introduction

The foreign conversion process consists of two tests, a trivial knowledge test and a practical driving test on a designated course. The knowledge test requires 7/10 on true/false questions, which is way too easy. The practical driving test involves technical manuevers and is the same as one part of the Japanese process. However, the overall process is quite different from the standard Japanese process.

Standard Process to Obtain a Driving License

Most Japanese people get a driving license through a driving school. Typical costs are around 300k JPY. You take some classes, and then take a test similar to the conversion process to get your provisional license. The major difference is that the knowledge test is much harder. It's not only longer, but also requires a higher percentage score (45/50 vs 7/10). The practical driving test is the same but instead of a police officer administering the test, the driving school does it. Once you get the provisional license, you take more classes before taking a road + parking test at the school and graduate. Afer you graduate from driving school, you take an even harder knowledge test (90/95 correct on true/false questions + a illustration based multiple choice) at the driving license center. If you pass this, you get your license!

The process at a driving school can be completed in 2 weeks if you do it full time, but most people take longer. The more interesting thing is that the pass rate for the final knowledge test at the driving license center is around 75%. I imagine this is primarily due to significant practice specifically for the test with coaching from the teachers at the school.

Although the standards are the same for the actual driving components are the same as when they are administered by a police officer, I suspect that the driving school teachers are less strict than the police. Many schools are incentivized to have a high pass rate. You can also that you can retry the test a number of times at the driving school with minimal effort (vs my conversion process where I had to wait 6 months to retry the practical driving test).

Alternative Process of Obtaining a Driving License

However, some Japanese people don't opt to go through the driving school route. They go through something called 一発試験 (one-shot test). There are no required classes (though you might take lessons by yourself to prep). You simply take the tests administered by the police. This makes it pretty similar to my conversion process, though obviously harder due to the harder knowledge test. This process is much cheaper (<5k JPY) and it can be done quickly. However, since the tests are administered by the police, and people will naturally have a lot less practice from not taking the classes, the pass rate is much lower. Many Japanese sites say the rate is <10%! However, this guy's blog post says he feels like it's really around maybe 30-40% (and that the course in Fuchu is harder...). For his practical test on the designated course, he said 2/4 people in his group passed.

I'm a little dubious of the <10% number so I did some quick calculations based on publicly available data. The National Police Agency doesn't publish data split for only 一発試験, but they do publish data on related things. I'm going to be looking at the data for 2024 (pg 23)

The driving school graduates are already covered. There is an 75% pass rate there, so we can say they took a total of around 1,351,750 tests. The test exempt people are people who had a license in the past, but it expired recently. For unavoidable reasons such as sickness, being abroad etc, they can renew their license without a test up to 3 years. For under 6 months, you don't need a special reason. They don't have to take any tests, and we can consider them as having a 100% pass rate for the purposes of our calculations.

Here are the numbers for the total number of people who succeeded in the foreign license conversion process.

Since a number of these people like my Washington state friend don't have to take a test at all, we can say maybe 1/3 of these people have a 100% pass rate. Then given the 90% knowledge test pass rate + 29% practical test pass rate, we can estimate the total tests taken by this group to be $$\mathrm{54,054}\times \frac{1}{3}+\frac{\mathrm{54,054}\times \frac{2}{3}}{0.9\times 0.29}=\mathrm{156,087}$$

This is a very rough estimate. Lastly, here's the group of people who I think would be considered as part of the people are attempting the 一発試験. The total number of people is 16,423.

Given that the total number of tests taken was 1,639,270, we can estimate the number of tests taken by this group as follows:

16,423 test takers took 74,378 tests, making for a pass rate of... 22%! This seems approximately what I'd expect since I think a lot of these people used to have licenses, but simply lost it due to circumstances. It's still relatively low, so it makes sense why everyone chooses to go through driving school. This pass rate is for all of the various tests (knowledge, practical, road, parking), so maybe some parts have much higher pass rates than others.

That said, this estimate is quite rough; the biggest source of error is the pass rate of the people coming from the driving school. If the pass rate for driving school graduates is actually 80% instead of 75%, then the pass rate for the 一発試験 would go down to 7%.

In 2018, another person did some estimates on this process. They found a pass rate of 4.4% based on 21,124 test takers having done 496,801 tests. They seem to have assumed 100% pass rate for driving school graduates and foreign conversions, which we know isn't true. So, their estimate is more of a lower bound.

Concluding thoughts

With an approximate 20% pass rate, the test process seems quite hard even for Japanese people who have already driven before. It seems like there is a heavy emphasis on the difficulty of the written knowledge test, so maybe the actual driving part is considered the easier part. That doesn't feel ideal to me as the actual driving is clearly more imporant in my eyes. Just my opinion though; I don't really know what's the best balance.

The foreign conversion test with a pass rate of 29% is clearly in a similar ball park in terms of overall difficulty. With the updated knowledge test for the foreign conversion process that is supposed to be coming soon, the overall pass rate for foreign conversions might go down to the 10% range.

Update (2025-07-10)

It appears that the police have made changes to the foreign license conversion process. The changes are:

• Only residents can apply - You need to have a 住民票
• The knowledge test went from 7/10 to 45/50 to pass (10 question to 50 questions, 70% to 90% correct)
• The practical driving test adds a part where you have to go through a crosswalk (In general strictness as the Japanese test)

These changes will take effect starting October 1st, 2025. Apparrently, the pass rate for the practical driving test was 29% in 2023 and 30% in 2024. I think these changes are all very reasonable and appropriate. Non-residents being able to apply was truly nonsensical. I'm impressed by the speed that the government was able to make changes.

Any error corrections or comments can be made by sending me a pull request.

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