A few days ago before my mate Lee left i agreed to pay for something that he had arrange to have shipped to the UK, you are probably wondering why he didn't pay. He'd arranged it as a last minute thing, just so happened our shipping agent come into the office the day before he was flying back to the US so Lee arranged shipping, Tatsuno san was not sure how much it would cost, so Lee asked if i would pay and he would send me the money, no problem i said thinking that there was none, there i go thinking again got to stop that.
Turns out it cost 33,000yen about $330 so i just paid a few days later got the receipts scanned them sent them to Lee along with my bank detail here so he could arrange to have the money sent to me. No problem, i mean only about $350 including charges right, did not even think about it i mean i can draw more than this out of the ATM every day and just put it in my bank account so what's the problem.
Woo a few days later i get a phone call that i missed so got a voice mail in Japanese, got our interpreter Chris to tell me what it said, turns out i someone "Lee" had sent me $350 and they wanted to know why and what it was for, and was i a member of the Mafia.
Chris got a little pissed off at this apparently he had come across it before and though it was double standards as "they only picked on people with foreign names" his words not mine and left Japanese people alone, apparently the rule is 1,000,000 Yen or $10,000 transfers should be no problem, which i think is pretty much the rule every where or at least similar, but no it seems if you have a foreign sounding name here and are transferring money you may be doing something illegal, i like to think it is just their way.
Anyway i wasn't as bothered a Chris who was getting a bit irate on the phone, probably a Polish thing and the whole of Japan is against Poles (Chris is Polish by the way) anything for a quite life that's me. What did piss me off a bit though was they wanted me to go down the bank with my passport and Alien Registration card and fill out some paperwork and prove who i was, it's not like the bank did not have copies of these as they took it when i first opened the account to prove who i was and to see that i was not here illegally.
Now the bank opens 9am and closes at 3pm and i work an hour away, so it either meant going to work late one day or going home just after dinner time, which i principle i don't mind having time off work but not to go to the bank. After conversations back and forth between Chris and the bank they decided they would phone back and see if they could do it by post, Chris told to make sure they phoned back with some one who could speak English as he probably would not be around. You guessed it far too easy they did phone back i missed the call and they left a message in Japanese. This phone tag happened a couple of times every time in Japanese duh, finally got it worked out but i had to go down the bank and prove who i was, saying it's me over the phone did not seem to work very well.
From what i can make out they do this with all bank transfers even though it's only required for large ones, go figure it's that Japanese attention to detail, i mean it is a bank transfer after all. Finally got it sorted and went down the bank filled in the forms everyone was as I've come to expect in Japan so polite and apologetic it's hard to get pissed off with them even if you want to. Just go along with everything and it usually works out fine, there is usually a lot of bowing and "arigato gozaimasu'ing" when your finished which is thank you very much, they even sometimes throw a domo arigato gozaimasu or two in which is thank you very very much and very polite, i challenge you to get pissed off then.
After all this off i trot back to work via some where for dinner first, actually went to "Freshness Burger", i mean you could only get a chain of burger restaurants in Japan called Freshness Burger, burgers were fresh though. Got back to work and got another phone call when i got back the bank and again in Japanese, had to find some one to translate Chris wasn't there. Turns out i filled my name in wrong, now i know I'm the the world greatest at spelling but i can spell my name for christs sake, I'd put my christian name first as you do or i do and it should have been my surname first. Told the lady via Fumio who was doing the taking just to change it, but oh no she couldn't far too easy she would have to post me the form so i could change it then post it back. So here's me thinking if they can post it this time for me to fill in why the hell couldn't they post it the first time, another mystery of the east. The other thing i had noticed when i have done anything official is that no one will fill any on the form in for you they point to areas to fill in but you have to actually fill it in. For instance when i was in the bank there was a date to fill in which the lady pointed to, bear in mind it's all in Japanese now she's said date but i thought it was my date of birth for some reason. I filled it in, she pointed again and i thought I'd done it wrong you know the UK way or the US way, we go D/M/Y they go M/D/Y so i change it to the US way. Turns out it was today's date she wanted, she had seen me do it wrong twice so knew i did not really understand what she wanted but still would not just take the pen and fill in the date, it's little things like this that are real frustrating over her.
So that's it the saga of $350 money laundering racket, no photos on money laundering so I'm just going to add a few random shots. The one on the left is from Chris's desk, he's now moved into our office as his contract has finished with Honda and we have taken it on for a few months, we need an interpreter, which he is good at the other thing he seems to be a wizz at is Origami, make of it what you will.
Check out the ones below, have you ever seen a vending machine like this, its just down the road from the site and is the first and only one i have ever seen that dispenses eggs.
1 comment:
What an exciting life you lead Steve!
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