While living in Japan and owning a car, you might want to suspend the car temporary from public road use. In this way you do not have to pay road tax and have a valid shaken as the car cannot be used on the public road. The process for this temporary de-registration or suspension of license plate will be explained in this article.
The following procedure is for a car that is currently registered in Japan with valid shaken and insurance. First of all, a point to take is that there are two types of registration suspensions in Japan:
・ Temporary registration suspension (一時抹消登録)
・ Permanent registration suspension (永久抹消登録)
With the permanent registration suspension it will not be possible to re-register your car. This is commonly used for cars that are being scrapped. In this case we focus on the procedure for temporary one.
First of all, it depends on the type of vehicle where you need to go to do the procedure:
・Standard cars: Regional Transport Bureau
・Light cars: Light Motor Vehicle Inspection Association
What should be prepared when going to the office is the following:
・ Vehicle inspection certificate (自動車検査証)
・ Owner’s seal certificate, issued within the last 3 months (印鑑登録証明書)
・ Owner’s official seal, the same official seal as the seal certificate (実印)
・ License plate, front and back
・ Identification card, driving license, health insurance, etc.
・Juminhyo, in case your current address is different than that of the vehicle inspection certificate (住民票)
Upon arrival, you need to get the following application documents:
Fill them in with the details highlighted in blue boxes above and get a stamp. Hand in your license plates at the counter related to license plates and clearly mention you are going for a temporary de-registration (show them the form you filled). You will get a special evidence document in return. Then hand in all the documents you brought, the application forms and the license plate return evidence document to the counter that takes care of the administration related to vehicles.
If all is OK, you will receive evidence of temporary de-registration. Make sure you keep it with your vehicle documents because you will need it if you want to re-register the vehicle in the future. And if you still have more than 3 months left of the road tax that is paid every year between April-June, then you can go to the tax counter to get a refund.
In case you want to re-register the vehicle, it would require a new shaken. If you would do it by yourself, you need to enroll for liability insurance and get a temporary license plate first in order to drive the vehicle to the shaken center.