This month we had an additional expense waiting to throw a big curve ball into our budget. 

For those of you who have lived here you are aware of the Japanese car inspection called shaken.  Shaken prices have come down over the past few years but from a Western perspective they are still very high.  The government claims that shaken is in place to assure vehicle safety and to keep a curb on ownership due to space limitations created from having 4 times the population of Canada in a country the size of California.  In fact, to own a car in Japan, you have to prove first that you have somewhere to park it (unless you own a “Kei” car – described below - for which no such proof is required).

Here is a breakdown of the shaken system.

There are 2 types of cars in Japan: regular cars (white license plates) and “Kei” cars that have a maximum engine size of 660cc (yellow plates).  The shaken prices vary for the 2 types with the price for yellow plate cars being about 40% cheaper than that for the white plates (making yellow cars more and more appealing in the middle of a recession – and to cheap guys like me).  Due to market competition, prices for shaken vary but you are looking at about 1000 bucks for a white plate car and about 600 for a yellow plate.  In addition, shaken itself is usually a great excuse for a garage to do the Crappy Tire thing and find all kinds of things on your car that just “have to be fixed”.  It seems pretty average to have a shaken bill of about 1500 bucks for a white plate car.

New cars come with 3 years of shaken.  After that the shaken inspection is valid for 2 years until the car is 10 years old.  After the 10 year mark, shaken is done every year thereby making it cheaper to get rid of your car for one of the new cars with a 150 dollar a month financing option.

Our shaken bill this time around was about 600 dollars (a lot cheaper than it was the last time I had it done for about 1000 bucks so I cant complain too much).  As for the safety check – my burnt out running light went ”undetected” and "unrepaired" – I question what is actually done during this “inspection”.  I think nothing (unless you take your car to an over energetic mechanic in which he will find all kinds of things that need to be fixed).  

As I said earlier, if you have a 10-year-old car that is going to cost you at least 600 bucks in inspections every year, it seems cheaper to get a new one.  And that is just what the Japanese do; you rarely see “old” cars on Japanese roads.  The system itself has the Japanese believing that cars with over 100000 km are ready to be scraped. I look at shaken as the Japanese government’s way of keeping the domestic car market strong and thereby collecting associated taxes from auto manufacturing and purchasing while at the same time collecting the exorbitant taxes generated from the implementation of the system itself.

As you can imagine the shaken system is also a big cash generator for dealerships.  Not only do they have a market that wants a new car every ten years, but the shaken system itself makes for high depreciation and thereby low, very low used car prices.  A friend of mine traded in his 92 Civic, in mint shape with 75000 km on it, and got the equivalent of 400 dollars for it (his other option was to scrap it and pay the 400-dollar plus scrapping fee because private auto sales are pretty much non-existent in Japan).  Trade-ins give dealerships, what in anyone other than a Japanese person’s eyes would call a relatively new car acquired for next to nothing.  They then take this car and deal it on the overseas market where the car has a more realistic value.  Wow, big bucks to be made!  If only Canada would allow us to import the used cars (like the States, England Australia and a long list of other countries allow), I too could get in on the action.