Ambling around

I was looking through a magazine and came across an advert for the driving school I went to for my bike license. In Japan, a driving school is an actual place, with classrooms, blackboards etc, and outside there is a set of dinky little roads to drive around, since you can't use public roads. The other way to get a license is just to go to the testing center and sit their (insanely difficult) test, but I had no choice but to get mine at a school since:
1. I didn't know how to ride at all.
2. I had no bike to practise.
3. There is nowhere to practise even if I had a bike.
which pretty much settled it. Unfortunately the process was a royal pain in the ass, and consumed an incredible lot of time and money. The prices you can see in the pic on the left (set of six) is the cost of getting a normal car license, with slight variations depending on auto or manual transmission, and whether you want preferential treatment when making bookings for your lessons to get the course finished quicker, but on average the cost is about NZ$3800 at the current exchange rate. Yep, that's three thousand eight hundred dollars. Howd'ya like that eh?

The prices on the right are for 'medium bike license' (up to 400cc) and are: NZ$2200 if starting with no license, or NZ$1300 if you already have a car license. So that would be NZ$5100 if you want both bike and car! The cost for a 'big bike' license (no cc rating limit) is not mentioned there, but typically costs a bit more than the medium, usually about NZ$1800.
Fortunately I managed to get my car license converted from my NZ one, so I skipped the $3800 fee, and got away with only with 110,000 yen, which at the time was NZ$2000. Lucky me.

The course was still a pain in the arse though. It consisted of 17 one hour lessons, but because of the ever abundant numbers of people in this damn city, it was pretty much impossible to get a lesson booking more than once a week at times that are convenient for the average person. That would have taken 17 weeks which I didn't really fancy, so I opted to take time off work so I could get bookings during weekdays when they were easier to get. Due to the need to have a lot of space for their dinky road system, these schools are always in out-of-the-way places, so I pretty much needed to take a half day off to get there and back each time I had a lesson.
The lessons themselves are probably similar to a RRRS course, though I'm just guessing since I've never done one. The bikes all have lights on the handlebars so the instructors can see what gear you are in, and which brakes you are using etc. and these are taken note of in the tests too.

At the end of the course you sit a test which is piss easy compared to what you would get at the testing center (this is the only reason these schools stay in business). If you are so crap that you still fail, no problem, the test is only $120 for a resit as many times as you like. Eventually you pass, and then you start saving money again, this time for something to ride! (XJR400 for me)

The cheapest way to get a license is just by jumping in the deep end, and sitting the test at a license testing center. These 'testing centers' are the official license issuers, like LTSA in NZ (or MOT? or whatever...). Anyway you can sit a test for the 'big bike' license straight away, for the piffling cost of only $50 ! wow! However you will not pass, since the test is designed by Erno Rubik, the testing staff are the spawn of Satan, and you cannot practise anywhere, hence the driving schools have a market. A friend of mine told me he got his license this way, and even after the 10 attempts it took (thats $500) he was still a lot better off than going to a school. I was suitably impressed with this, until a few years later when I was sitting the license center test myself, when I smelled bullshit... he must have had access to a bike to practise... must have.