Japan has almost half the GDP per capita than Germany and the mentioned fee is the minimum in a rural area (a place where driving becomes essential), not Tokyo.

Japan is a bureacracy-driven credentialist Confucian scholar-boner societal nightmare, so pushes for more credentialism are never a surprise. Recently this month laws and fines for bicyclists have gotten stricter. Yes, a human-powered vehicle that almost anyone can ride without a license is deemed necessary to enforce. This is what the government thinks is worthy of its time, and it thinks making immigration harder to do with more bureaucratic entry barriers is necessary when the foreigner population is barely 3%. The process to getting a driver's license is insane. If you want to avoid the Kafkaesque procedures at the license center, you have to go to a school that costs around $2000 and takes several weeks so you can have forced participation in the bureacracy. The United States fails to prioritize anything whereas Japan prioritizes all the wrong places and thinks such misprioritization is good because it considers any centralized action at all to be inherently good. Wheels spinning in place.