Article

What happens if you do not pay

Following the non-payment path through the provisions, in order.

[ 画像 ]int-kiji-harawanai4:3

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Following the non-payment path through the provisions, in order.

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.

The premise

Not paying is not a smaller version of paying

The instinct is to treat an unpaid notice as an unpaid bill: the balance sits there, perhaps a surcharge accrues, and it can be settled later on worse terms.

That is not the structure. The notice sum is what concludes the administrative route, and the administrative route is an offer with a time limit on it. When the window closes without payment, the offer is not renegotiated — it is simply no longer the route the case is on.

What remains is the ordinary criminal process for the same conduct. That is a change of instrument, of decision-maker, and of the kind of consequence involved, and it is why this site describes non-payment as a move rather than as an outcome.

The first step

The amount stops being a number you can look up

The most immediate difference is that the schedule stops applying. On the administrative route the amount was stated in advance for the conduct and vehicle class; on the criminal route no such table exists.

What the legislation gives instead is a ceiling: for the speeding offence this site models, ¥100,000. The floor, ¥10,000, does not come from the traffic legislation at all — it is the general minimum in the criminal law, which applies to offences under other statutes unless that statute provides its own rule. The traffic act provides none here.

This site cites that chain rather than attributing the floor to the traffic act, because the figure is genuinely an inference across two instruments. Between ceiling and floor, the amount is decided by a court, and nothing on this site can predict where in that range a particular case would land.

There is one qualification this site states but does not model: the criminal law's minimum carries a proviso allowing a court to go below it on statutory mitigation grounds. What is given above is the un-mitigated floor.

Further along

If a court-imposed fine cannot be paid

Where a court fine cannot be paid in full, the criminal law provides for detention in a workhouse in its place, for a period between 1 day and 2 years.

There is no conversion rate. Japan states no formula of days per yen — the court sets the period, and it is pronounced together with the fine at sentencing. Any source offering an arithmetic conversion is supplying a rule the statute does not contain.

The upper bound is expressed in years rather than as a day count, which is why this site treats it as a calendar span. Two years measured across a leap year is a different number of days from two years measured elsewhere, and rounding that to a fixed figure would introduce an error the statute never authorised.

A check worth reporting

The general fine-raising Act applies, and does nothing here

There is a separate Act providing a general mechanism to raise a statutory fine ceiling or floor that has become too low, and it does apply to Road Traffic Act offences. It is live machinery, not a historical footnote.

Applied to the figures above, it raises nothing: they already clear its thresholds. This site says so explicitly rather than passing over it in silence.

That is a deliberate editorial choice. "This mechanism does not exist", "this mechanism was not checked" and "this mechanism was checked and did not fire" are three different statements, and only the last one is what happened here. Collapsing them into an omission would lose real information.

The boundaries

What this article is not about

Everything above concerns the ordinary criminal route for a traffic violation of the kind this site covers. Two nearby things are outside it, and conflating them would be a serious error.

The summary-trial procedure for traffic cases is a different Act with its own, higher ceiling than this offence's own. It is a procedural ceiling rather than this offence's penalty, and the two must never be quoted as though they were the same limit.

Driving that causes death or injury is governed by a separate and considerably more severe Act altogether. It is not within this site's scope, and nothing here should be read as describing what happens in such a case.

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