3 in 30 - 2001.09.02 Sunday
It has been so long that we have thought about license plates that we almost forgot. It is second nature to read and interpret them. Beverly reminded me last week about the information on license plates.
The plate on this black Toyota multipurpose vehicle has a wealth of information. First of all, it was parked in the Auto-Bacs lot suggesting that it belonged to one of the workers or that it needed to have work done on it.
The top line tells what prefecture the vehicle is licensed in. This one happens to be Hachioji. Those three characters are kanji, the writing derived from Chinese characters. The 300 in the top line indicates the relative size of the engine. In this case it is a fairly large engine, probably a V-8 or something.
The larger line reads Ta 97-17. When we were just learning hiragana, we would practice reading the characters as the cars passed going the opposite direction. Since the licenses would appear in random order, it was a good opportunity to practice.
This was a small car in the Ekos parking lot. Not only can you tell that it is a small car by looking at it, but the license plate is yellow and the number in the top row is only a 50. This car too was licensed in Hachioji. Hachioji is a town about 20 K south across the river.
Smaller car licenses are less expensive than for larger cars, just as in the States.
The hiragana is SE, pronounced like a shortened "say".
This car was licensed in Tama prefecture. The size is rather standard sized.
The oddment about this car is that it has a Roman character "Y" instead of hiragana. That identifies it as a car that was licensed to someone under SOFA status, probably at Yokota Air Base.
There are other combinations, including larger plates for trucks over a certain size and small plates for motorcycles. We occasionally see plates with the letter "E" on cars that imported with left-hand steering.