Article

Where the two tracks separate

There is more than one fork, and they work independently.

[ 画像 ]int-kiji-hansokukin4:3

Read alongside

There is more than one fork, and they work independently.

The two tickets

Blue ticket, red ticket — the colour IS the legal category

aokippu 青切符 (blue)

hansokukin 反則金

Road Traffic Act, Art. 125 onward (the traffic-violation notification system)

An administrative track. Pay the stated amount within the deadline and no prosecution follows. It is not a criminal record.

akakippu 赤切符 (red)

bakkin 罰金

Road Traffic Act, Chapter 8 (penal provisions)

A criminal track. A court sets the amount within the statutory range. There is no fixed schedule to read it off.

Four, not two

The system has four outputs, and only two of them are the same kind of thing

It is tempting to describe Japanese traffic enforcement as a fork: administrative on one side, criminal on the other. That picture is not wrong, but it is missing half the structure.

There are four distinct consequences. A hansokukin, paid by the driver under the notification system. A bakkin, imposed on the driver by a court. An abandoned-parking charge, billed to the vehicle's registered user. And demerit points, which attach to a licence and are not money at all.

They differ in who pays, which instrument sets the amount, and whether a licence is touched. A model with only two channels will tell some people they owe nothing when they do, and tell others they will take points when they will not.

The first fork

Whether the conduct is offered the administrative route

The notification system covers a defined set of violations and offers to conclude them on payment. For speeding, that offer stops at a defined margin over the limit: past it, the Act excludes the conduct from the system entirely.

That exclusion runs before any amount is consulted. It is not the top rung of the price ladder — it is a gate in front of the ladder, and above it there is no notice sum at all rather than a larger one.

The margin is not the same on every road. An expressway or motor-vehicle-only road carries a higher threshold than an ordinary road, which is also why two of the schedule's speed categories are expressly limited to those roads: the equivalent excess on an ordinary road is already past the gate, so it can never reach them.

The second fork

Whether the DRIVER is eligible for it

The second fork has nothing to do with the driving. Four grounds remove a person from the status the route depends on: unlicensed or suspended, intoxicated, having caused a traffic accident, or under sixteen.

These apply regardless of how small the excess was. A driver comfortably inside the cheapest band who meets any one of them is referred anyway, for a reason nothing in the speed table would reveal.

The two forks are in different provisions and neither refers to the other. They are genuinely independent conditions, and both must hold for the administrative route to be available — which is why no single calculation on this site claims to resolve them together.

What differs after the fork

One amount is stated; the other is decided

On the administrative side the amount is read from a schedule: a figure for the conduct and vehicle class, fixed in advance.

On the criminal side there is no schedule. The Act states a ceiling of ¥100,000 for the speeding offence; the floor of ¥10,000 comes from the general criminal law rather than from the traffic legislation at all. Between them, the amount is the court's.

That floor deserves care, because it is an inference across two instruments rather than a quoted provision. The general criminal law applies to offences under other laws unless that other law provides its own rule, and the traffic act provides none here. Citing the traffic act alone for that figure would be citing the wrong instrument.

The channel with a different payer

Abandoned parking is not a fine passed to the owner

When a vehicle is left where it should not be and no driver is identified, a charge may be ordered against the vehicle's REGISTERED USER. This is not the driver's penalty redirected — it is a separate register with its own schedule, aimed at a different person.

It carries no points, and the reason is structural rather than a gap. The two registers are mutually exclusive: where an identified driver pays the notice sum for the same conduct, the order against the registered user is withdrawn. Points attach to a driver's licence, and the premise of this route is that no driver was identified.

So identical conduct produces points on one route and none on the other, and the difference is not seriousness but whether the law found someone to attach them to.

The word problem

Most people search for the channel that does not apply to them

The most common way to look up what a violation costs uses the criminal word, bakkin. For parking in particular — the very violation most often searched that way — a bakkin is generally not what applies at all.

That is a register error sitting inside the most popular query in the market, and it is a design constraint rather than a piece of trivia. A page has to be findable under the word people type and correct about the word that applies, in the same breath.

It is why the correction panel recurs across this site. Not to be pedantic, but because getting the register right is the difference between understanding your position and confidently misunderstanding it.

What this system does not cover

What this site does not answer, and why

These are content, not gaps. Each is a bounded statement that a NAMED instrument does not contain something — never a claim that "the law is silent".

Death and injury by driving is a different Act

The Act on Punishment of Acts Causing Death or Injury by Driving was amended by the same Act that amended the Road Traffic Act (Act No. 52 of 2026), but its offences and penalties are its own. This site has not transcribed them. A case involving death or injury is outside this calculator.

自動車運転死傷行為処罰法, in force 2026-07-21