Changing the address of the car

27 Dec 2025 | #car | #japan

We bought a second-hand minivan earlier this year and recently finished building our house in Tokyo with Ichijo. So when we moved in, we had to update the address of the car.

I have moved multiple times before, and it always involved the following steps:

  1. Go to the city hall of the old address and register my moving-out
  2. Go to the new city hall and register my moving-in. They update the address on the Residence Card and on the My Number Card
  3. Go to the police station and ask them to register the new address on the Driving License (they ask to see the Residence Card to verify the new address)

The whole process takes a few hours and it’s completely free.

However this time we had a car, which added some additional steps.

At the local police station (警視庁 武蔵野警察署) we had to apply for a garage certificate (車庫証明書) for the new house. This cost 2,400 yen and we could pick up the certificate 3 days after the application. In these 3 days they actually had a guy come to our house to measure the parking spot. We were just leaving at that time, so he could see that our car could fit comfortably, but he still had to measure the exact size of the lot.

After we got the garage certificate, we had to go to the nearest Motor Vehicle Inspection and Registration Office (自動車検査登録事務所) which in our case was the Tama one (多摩自動車検査登録事務所) near Tachikawa. Luckily both our old and new address falls in this office’s area, thus we could keep our original license plate (which also says Tama 多摩). If one moves between areas, then they will need to get a new license plate which would likely add cost and time to the process.

We called them ahead of time and they told us to bring the following documents:

  • the original Vehicle Inspection Certificate (blue paper, 自動車検査証) - the dealership recommended to keep this in the car
  • Resident Record showing the old and new address, without MyNumber (住民票　前住所含む　マイナンバー記載なし) - I got one from a konbini using my MyNumber card
  • the Garage Certificate from the police (車庫証明)

There is a form to fill out, which can be pre-filled online on this website. I did this and had to use this other website to convert my address to their numerical codes. The last step gives you a pdf to print. I made a mistake to let the printer resize the pdf to fit into the printable area, making it a few millimeters smaller. However this meant that in the office they couldn’t process it with their OCR machine, so they asked us to fill out a new form by hand.

There is another system called OSS (ワンストップサービス, One Stop Service) that is supposedly even faster, but I only saw it while we were already waiting in the office, so I didn’t use it this time.

Overall the process in the office took about half an hour. We started at the general reception, told them that we just moved, handed over the documents. The guy asked us to fill out the form again as it was slightly smaller than expected, and to pay the 350 yen for the stamp duty in a nearby building. Then we submitted the hand-filled form and the stamp, waited about 10 minutes, got sent to another building, other form to fill, then they gave us the updated Motor Vehicle Inspection Certificate Record Details (自動車検査証記録事項) and gave back the original Vehicle Inspection Certificate (自動車検査証) (which doesn’t have the address written).

I expected that the police station will be able to update the address of the car (since they can handle driving licenses), so I was a bit surprised that they sent us on this side-quest, but overall it only took a few hours incl. travel and cost less than 3,000 yen, so it wasn’t too bad.

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