Quick Explainer: No, That Japanese License Number Isn't "Rare".

From kei cars to super full-featured minivans, Japan's got several models of cars that turn drivers of all types green with envy. However, whenever I watch any video that's got a Japanese car in it, someone invariably comments, "Oh, that's a rare license number" or "Those people must have gotten lucky to get that number".

What those comments actually say is, "I've never been to Japan", because if you had been, I guarantee if you were paying attention, you would have seen multiple cars with that exact same combination. My car's license plate has a 4-digit combo I picked, and literally within the area I walk every day, I've seen 5-6 different cars with the exact same 4-digit combo. How? Because there are a crazy number of different pieces of information on a Japanese license plate.

If you want a super, super deep dive on this, the Wikipedia page on Japanese license numbers is very useful, but if you just want a quick primer with my personal experiences woven into it, here ya go, buddy:

Tired: “That’s a rare license plate!” Wired: “That’s a cool license number.”

This is a fake plate that I generated using an online Japanese license plate generator. (If this is your actual plate, sorry. I have seen this combo out and about, but I don't think the top code and the hirgana were close.) So, first off you'll see the kanji characters top center for Kyoto. There are ~140 different locales that get license plates. Unlike in the US, they are not generated per state/prefecture. In 2006, the MLIT allowed many new places to have their own plate designations that were not full prefectures, so long as they had about 100,000 cars in their borders. That alone means you can have 140 different cars with the 4-digit code.

To the right of that is an indicator of the car's type. If it's a kei car, it'll get a code that is 5XX, if it's a standard passenger car it'll get a 3XX. That's 2 separate batches of 100 different numbers. Some quick combinatorics, and that means you're already at 28000 potential cars that have the exact same license number. But we're not done yet.

The cars also have a hiragana character in front of the 4-digit number. If you're a standard passenger car, you get one of 30 characters randomly assigned to your car. If you have a kei car, you get 1 of 42 hiragana. Which means there are a possible 1,176,000 distinct yellow plate cars that can have the same number, and a mere 840,000 white plate license doppelgangers you can have. Add them together, and that 4-digit combo you might think is rare can show up on over 2 million different cars. (And this doesn't even cover rental cars, taxis, and public transit.)

You might be curious, are the numbers randomly assigned? Can you pick? Do you have to pay? You can decide to choose a random number, or select your desired number combo. The hiragana character is generated for you, I think just to cut down on the amount of wordplay the government has to keep an eye on. Just looking from the app the car salesman was using, it appeared there was a pay option, so maybe if numbers are in demand for the local area, you might have to splash some cash to secure it.

And that's my tip on how to avoid looking like a tourist when it comes to commenting on Japanese license plates!