Buying a car in Japan.

In order to buy a car in Japan you must have a stamp made (Hanko) with your name on it, and have that stamp registered at City Hall. You can see my other post on Getting a Hanko. I did only once find something on the Internet that said you did not need to have the stamp as a foreigner. So if anyone can confirm this please post a reply. I choose just to get the stamp rather than find out if I needed it.
There are a few websites you can look at to figure out prices.
http://www.goo-net.com/english/
This one is in English but I thin the Japanese version is better and easier to search. You just find your location on the map. Then scroll down the next page with types of cars until you get to amounts of money. You can click on less than 20 man and you will have a list of cheap cars in your area.
You can click above the price column and it will reorder from cheapest to most expensive. There are 13 columns in total. Price is number 10.


レガシィツーリングワゴン ＧＴ ４ＷＤ
ドリームファクトリー The second is the type of can and picture
平成5年 Next the age in the Japanese calendar
ホワイト Colour
11.0万K Number of 10,000kms it has done for this one 110,000kms
2.0L Size of the engine.
なし Not sure
なし The shaken this says 'nashi' so it doesn't have any if it does it will give the expiry date in the Japanese calendar
青森県
3.98万円(リ済別) The cost in 10,000yen i.e. 39900yen
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詳細を見る This will sometime give a different price and it is the price including all on road costs i.e. 2 years shaken.

While I think this site is great to get an idea of costs, I did try to buy a few very cheap cars only to find that they were already sold and the nearest car available was at least twice as expensive as the one advertised. However some of the more reasonably priced cars were really available. Although, apparently the owner of the shop, who advertised the car I wanted to buy, was too nervous to sell to a foreigner. So I gave up and had my school arrange a car for me.

So if your in Japan and looking for a car you will probably know by now that shaken is a 2 yearly tax and can be quite expensive. I managed to find a car for 90,000 yen with one years shaken. I was only staying one year so that was perfect. You can get really cheap cars with only one year shaken left if your only staying one year.
Other things to consider are the yearly tax. For a yellow plate car it is only around 5000 yen but for a white plate car it is about 30,000
Insurance, costs about 5000yen at least per month for the most basic plan.
If your in a snowy area consider 4WD.