possessedfaxmachine

Setting up an account here as a foreigner, even though you have some sort of resident status, is like a real life RPG. Opening an account anywhere in Europe is a matter of a few dozen minutes, or instantly online. All these absurd procedures are supposedly to prevent fraud. Because only foreigners commit fraud, apparently… So it’s gotten complicated. And lo and behold, it’s still happening. That you can’t transfer money between banks instantly on a weekend? The reason is supposedly because the transactions have to be audited. But this completely ignores the fact that outside of the weekend the same transaction takes place immediately. So does that mean that either no one checks it outside of the weekend, or on the other hand, some Tanaka-san checks it in a second outside of the weekend? The problem with banking here is more inefficiency and clinging to often 4 decade old systems. Or the simple fact that although there is one bank, another Branch other than the one where you opened your account won’t cancel or otherwise help. And this is 2023.

I can’t imagine any other complication at this point. And then that cash is king. Not when a grandmother, who is 86 years old, has to go through such a process.

I have this unpleasant hunch that if any projection occurs here, it will end very soon after threats of, for example, a bomb from some 右翼団体 faction. It wouldn’t be the first time. Like in Nagoya, when a simple statue caused a furor of absolutely unbelievable proportions, and especially the subsequent reaction was completely out of proportion. Because pretty much everything that relates in any way to WW2 and doesn’t paint the portrait the government here is painting (“nothing happened at all and the numbers don’t add up either”) is sort of stonewalled here.

Strong wage growth? Anything can be hidden under that lofty title. Many companies here do “raise” wages, but only to cover inflation. The average Japanese here does not know what the inflation rate is and that what they are getting is actually worth less. Or he doesn’t care because “めんどくさい”. Actual pay raises, such as two or one decade ago, where there was an actual pay raise every year at more or less the same inflation rate and currency value, just aren’t there. But people here are not in the habit of questioning anything. If you’re lucky, you get more, but buy the same amount of stuff as before.

Over the last three decades and especially the last decade (the Fukushima accident) TEPCO has a history of missteps, reprehensible neglect, denial, and most of all creative work with their own documents or even more creative backdating of already existing documents to make everything look okay on paper so they can continue to get funding from the government here (sorry, actually just a bunch of LDP gerontocrats and 日本会議 members) to cover their fuckups. They have shown nothing but a series of lies and utter incompetence over the past decade. Anything they say should be taken with a very large grain of salt. They seem to want to forget that even for days and perhaps weeks afterwards they claimed that nothing actually happened and that it was a fraction compared to XYZ. And actually there was no problem, they claimed there was no problem even when people started moving. And then they pretended that they never said there was no problem and were transparent. But people here are not used to question or check whatever they are being told