About Japanese Car Number Plates
Cars in Japan have license plates. In Japanese they are called namba- pure-to.
The top left has a screw. Next to the screw is the ken (prefecture)’s name. In this case 福井 fukui . According to Dean, a surfer kind enough to drop me a note, the numbers to the right may be the class of vehicle, small car, big car, taxi, truck, etc. for example, in Osaka, a taxi is 500.
The bottom left has a hiragana, in this case み . This along with the numbers to the right are the car’s number.
- There are two main types – Yellow plates (as above) and White plates.
- YELLOW PLATES – smaller cars (called 軽自動車 kei ji dou sha in Japanese)
- WHITE PLATES – bigger cars
- Needless to say, Yellow plates are much cheaper than White plates. shaken is also much cheaper. ( shaken is the mandatory car inspection one must do every two years.)
