Got my car garage certificate from Police!

Praise th Lord! My wife and I got our car’s garage certificate from the local police station without fuss today! 😀

In Japan, if you want to own a white plate car (big car above 800cc if I am not mistaken), you need to prove that you have a garage/parking space for it before you are allowed to own the car. Yes, you can’t buy a car if you do not have a parking space, even if you have the money. You must first prove that you have a space to park your car.

Here’s what you need to do (sharing my experience now):

1. Find a parking space around you (Normally the house/room you rent should have a parking space offered, if not then you will have to rent from private parking space). Monthly rental can be from JPY2,000 to JPY15,000, depends on the location of where you are staying. For mine, I paid JPY2,000 for a urban area space.

2. Buy the needed documentations from the local police station. Cost is JPY50.

3. Bring the documentations to the parking space land lord, ask him/her to fill in the some of the needed informations. You might need to draw the map of where you live to the location of the parking space, cannot be more than 2km. You will also need to draft out the size of the parking space, making sure that your car can fit in (some Japanese parking space are very small, only for small car).

4. After filling in all the information stamp (inkan) from the landlord, you can now bring the documents to your local police station.

4.1 Oh…before I forget, you need to make sure that you have your own inkan (stamp) as well, if not then you will need to register one from the City Office. You must make sure that the inkan is having the name/alphabet same as your registered name as in your Alien card (yes, Japanese calls all foreigners “aliens”). I have bought a Kanji (Chinese character) inkan and got rejected. Have to make a inkan with “コー” sounds as “KO”. Inkan registration is easy, only takes 10 minutes.

4.2 Now assuming you have all the documents filled up, your inkan, JPY2000, now you can go to the police station and register your parking space.

5. You can’t get your parking certificate on the same day. You will need to go back to the Police Station on the 3rd day after you submitted your documents. Eg. submit on Monday, go collect on Wednesday. Prepare another JPY500 when collecting your certificate.

* There is no minimum period of rental for the parking space. You can rent it for a month, or two, or 3 or a year…as long as you can get the landlord fill up the form for you, then you are fine. Police will not require you to rent the same parking space for long. However, some landlord will require you to rent for a minimum period of time.

That should be it, not very difficult and you can actually do it yourself fairly easy. 🙂 My next mission…get the car name changes to mine!

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