I made an appointment to get my home country’s license converted to a Japanese license, but the soonest appointment available is 5 months from now. I’m worried that if I fail the test when I go in for that appointment, I’ll have to wait another 5 months to try again.
Does anybody know if you’re able to schedule multiple appointments before the date of your first one? Or if I go to the office as a walk-in, will they let me take the test that day?
I’d love to try, but the closest driver’s license center is over an hour away and I’m always at work when they’re open anyway (meaning I would have to take a day off to do this). If anybody knows particularly about the Mie branch, that’d be great.
EDIT: Fixed where I accidentally said JAF instead of driver’s license center haha
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I think you’re mixing up a few things. JAF is only needed to translate your home license into Japanese. IIRC, this can also be requested by mail, so you don’t even have to go there. They don’t have anything to do with the actual testing procedure.
The test will (usually) be done at the driver license center for your prefecture. This is what you probably have the long lead time for on setting an appointment. I’ve never heard of them allowing you to schedule multiple tests in advance, and I can damn near guarantee you that they wouldn’t accept a walk-in. If they did, everyone would just walk in instead of scheduling an exam 5 months away.
For JAF translation, you can do that online [here](https://english.jaf.or.jp/driving-in-japan/drive-in-japan/foreign-nationals-license). You don’t have to physically go in anymore.
if your test card 受験票 has a phone number on it, call and ask for a reschedule. you can fill up cancelled slots that way. I shortened my 3 month wait into 2 weeks. (Tokyo – Samezu)
What I did was to hire an instructor to teach me how to run the course perfectly. They used to be an examiner so it was really helpful. We did the practice on the real course, near the date of the test, which also gave me some time to get used to driving on the opposite side of the road (turn signal and turns out the right were tricky for the first few laps)
If you don’t do this, it’s possible you can fail for some silly reason like “not looking under the car for children”, or not staying the right number of centimeters from the side of the road, or not stopping the car with the front aligned to the pickup number or always driving too slow or not understanding what’s an instant fail vs just looks bad in the difficult sections.