A woman in her 90s grabbed a taxi in Tokyo on her way home from a dental clinic and discovered the driver was a non-Japanese man.

“He was a very good driver,” the woman said. “He was gentle.”

The number of non-Japanese cabbies has topped 70. Not only are they preferred by patrons from outside Japan, but they tend to produce better sales.

However, there are few immigrants serving as drivers in the Japanese capital, unlike other major cities in the world, possibly because of the difficultly in passing the professional driver’s license test.

Slowly getting out of the vehicle with her walking stick, the woman said she does not care who operates taxis,

“He understood Japanese, too,” she said. “Some Japanese drivers are scary to me. I do not like scary people.”

OPPORTUNITY FOR CONVERSATION

The cabbie, Hassan Karim, 48, is from Ghana and came to Japan in 2006 in the hopes of finding a job in the soccer world.

He has tried several occupations and obtained the right to stay permanently.

Until recently, Hassan worked at a cellphone store and a computer retailer.

As he longed to drive a taxi to have more conversations with customers under a flexible working environment, Hassan started working at Hinomaru Kotsu Co. in Tokyo’s Bunkyo Ward.

Aware of the labor crunch and the advancing age of its employees, Hinomaru Kotsu accepts a range of people under its corporate motto of “diversity.” It believes this will help secure personnel and cater to the various needs of passengers.

Hinomaru Kotsu started aggressively hiring foreign drivers in preparation for the predicted influx of inbound visitors around the time Tokyo won the bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympics.

WRITTEN-LANGUAGE WOES

The verbal communication skills required for immigrants to take fares in cabs does not greatly differ from place to place.

The complexity of the written language system involving a myriad of kanji characters, however, is posing a high hurdle to becoming a taxi driver in Japan, aside from the difficulty in acquiring permission to work.

Hitting the road as a cab driver in Tokyo entails obtaining a professional driver’s license as well as passing a test on Japan’s laws, regulations and geographical features.

Hinomaru Kotsu provides guidance for those like Hassan at its in-house training center, where apprentices can receive 10,000 yen (about $69) per day before successfully completing the exam.

When it comes to speaking, Hassan proved fluent enough in Japanese, but he was not good at reading and writing, resulting in a succession of failures on the written test to obtain a professional driver’s license.

Every time Hassan was about to give up, his instructors encouraged him. Loger Wolfgang, 56, a driver-turned-teacher from Austria, kept telling Hassan that he would be able to pass the next time.

Over the course of an entire year, Hassan scored below the passing mark on 82 occasions.

When Hassan excitedly called to announce his success on his 83rd test, Hidetoshi Uchida, general manager of the training center, exploded in joy as if he was a soccer player scoring a goal. The education facility’s office broke into a cheer at the news.

TEST ONLY IN JAPANESE

Uchida described the exam as “difficult for non-Japanese people.”

The pro driver’s license test is exclusively available in Japanese. Kanji come with “furigana” phonetic transcriptions, but there are complex legal terms and questions that are difficult even for native Japanese speakers to understand.

“I would like the test to become accessible in foreign languages, too, with pitfalls being eliminated from the questions,” Uchida said. “Spending more time to deepen the understanding of Japan’s traffic manners and customs appears to be much more important.”

Furigana is printed with kanji likewise on the national test for licensed caregivers, as the nursing care industry got a head start in the employment of workers from outside the country.

Non-Japanese test takers are also given a longer exam time, and difficult terms are replaced with simpler ones to the extent that not knowing those words does not negatively affect their daily duties after passing the test.

However, the success ratio for foreign applicants remains significantly low despite all the consideration given to them.

“It would be better if even easier Japanese words are used,” Hassan said about the driver’s qualification exam.

He expressed sympathy for the examiners at the same time.

“Making it extremely easy to obtain the license may lead to an increasing number of accidents,” he said. “I do not say this just because I have already passed the exam.”

Another language-related challenge concerns each passenger’s way of speaking.

Hassan said communicating with customers in Japanese normally does not cause any trouble to him while on duty, as long as a car navigation system and smartphone are accessible to him.

On top of that, “most patrons are kind.”

But he needs a moment to figure out what to do when hearing a kanji-only phrase that turns out to be a simple request such as “turn right.”

“Japanese have not prepared themselves to change their way of thinking and develop easier-to-understand phrases,” said Hiroyuki Furutachi, general manager of Hinomaru Kotsu’s Recruitment Department. “This sort of kindness might be what will prove essential from here on out.”