But why should a license be needed to open a repair shop, dealership, a factory, a nursery etc?
Govt wants to wet its beak. Some of these business categories have an entire government agency dedicated to the regulation of that industry.
You don't want no-regulation in dense urban environments. But the rules are unclear, the permitting system opaque, the outcomes kind of subjective and open to too many outside interference, and the agents of the bureaucracy mostly disinterested in getting things at any sort of reasonable speed.
Like, it is probably easier for me to open a taco shop in Japan then it is in the USA, and Japan is THE land of red-tape and bureaucratic prescriptivism.
Completely off-topic, but I wonder one of the reasons why government/bureaucracy jobs in Japan tend to attract more engaged workers is the relative difficulty of bureaucracy in Japan. Imagine this: most legal documents have all the words still written in some mixture of Church Latin and French. Including giant explanatory paragraphs. Navigating this document without the aid of a trained worker (who most likely has a college degree in Church Latin and Legal French) is nigh impossible even for educated individuals and so they guide you step by step through every box and field.