My 1991 Suzuki Cappuccino came with the Japanese license plate from when it was registered in Japan, so I wanted to find out what it meant.

See the picture of my plate above. The plate is yellow with black text, which means it is a kei car.

The top line is 3 Japanese characters and a number. In my case, the 3 Japanese characters are Nagano, Nagano, which is the office this plate was issued.

09 is the next number, which is a class code. This is supposed to tell why a vehicle is used, like private transport, taxi, commercial, etc, but since my number is 2 digits, that is not how it is currently setup (3 digits), and I couldn’t find anything on what class code 09 meant. If you know, send it to me!

The next line has a hiragana text, which is found out translates to “se”. I have no idea what this means.

And the last bit is 4 numbers, which is just numbers.

So I basically found out my car was a kei car (which I already knew) and was from Nagano. Neat.