日本文が後ろに続きます。
I’ve made up my mind to have my own car again. Two years and nine months have passed since I parted with the last car in May 2008 and then moved to a house much closer to central Tokyo after I did it. The place where I currently live is so convenient that you can live without owning any car. Nevertheless, without a car, it’s difficult to go on a slight outing late at night, to buy bulky goods from Costco, or to drive a car aggressively to get rid of your stress! 🙂 To do them you can hire a car at the nearest rental car shop, but it’s less convenient than having a car you can do as you like. That’s why I’ve decided to get my own car even if it’s much more costly.
To find an appropriate car, I checked Yahoo! Japan, Goo-net, or other websites listing up used cars and shops after I got a bonus last December. Of course, I had no choice to have a brand-new car. I wanted to have a small-sized, 5-speed stick shift car instead of a large automatic saloon because I wanted to do as Englishmen did (most of them drive stick shifts rather than automatics). I thought that manual transmissions were better for small cars giving more pleasure to drivers and that it would be the last chance for me to drive a stick shift as almost all cars to be released in future would, petrol or hybrid, have automatic or continuously variable transmissions.
At the end of last December, I found a car that I felt to be nice at a small used car shop in suburban Tokyo. It was a 2002 Peugeot 307 Style (1600cc petrol), costing just 380,000 yen! I decided to buy it without hesitation.
It took much time from the purchase to the pickup. In Japan, you must register a car you buy to the government before owning it, and before the registration, you must settle a parking space and have the garage certificate from the nearest police station. To have a garage, you must sign a contract with a local real estate company offering car parks in the area where you live. The trouble is that the real estate company and the police station open only on weekdays, so I had to take a day (or some hours) off to do those things.
The average parking space rate in the area I live in was about 30,000 yen per month, but I found a car park renting a parking space for 26,500 yen per month.
Anyway, all of the procedures to have the car had been done and I picked it up today.
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