I bought a bicycle off my housemate who’s going back to his home country, but it wasn’t registered under his name. How can I go about transferring the ownership to myself without a previous registration? All the documents I’ve seen require there to be the previous owners registration number included and I don’t have that. I also don’t have a bill of sale/receipts to register it as a new bike. Thanks!
3 comments
You can’t. That’s the point of the registration, otherwise someone could steal a bike and then saying he just bought it from someone.
You could try compile a 自転車譲渡証明書, but since the bicycle is not registered in your friend’s name, I think you are out of luck.
EDIT: registrations have an expiration date (usually 5 years), check if that window passed and you can do a new registration.
You can’t. You have to find the original owner of the bicycle or yolo and just ride the bicycle without registering it. You’ll be in trouble with the police when they decide to randomly check your bicycle registration or when you get into an accident but otherwise, you’ll be fine. It’s also good to know the name of the bicycle’s owner so you can just tell the police “I’m borrowing my friend’s bicycle. His name is xx” They can see it in the system. That’s what I told them when I got caught riding my friend’s bicycle. The police just let me go. They were more interested with my zairyu card than the bicycle.
Just find a small enough bike shop that doesn’t care. I bought a used bicycle online, but he didn’t have the papers. First shop we went to refused to make a new registration, but the second shop wrote one up without any hassle. (edit: I did go together with the seller who explained the situation, so it’s better if you both go just incase)