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9. How Can the Japanese Manage without Personal Checking Accounts?
- University of Hawai'i Press
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9 How Can the Japanese Manage without Personal Checking Accounts? Toshiki Jinushi and James Mak In Japan, don’t expect to pay your bills by check. There are no personal checking accounts! Businesses can have checking accounts, but not individuals (except for a few very wealthy individuals). You’ll have to find some other way to pay for your purchases. What if you want to pay for a magazine subscription? One option is to go to any of the 24,500 post offices (which, by the way, are not open on Saturdays) and instruct the postal service to pay the magazine publisher’s account at the postal service. Of course, you have to pay the magazine subscription price plus a service fee to the post office. You can also send cash by registered mail. Utility bills can be conveniently paid at any of the twenty-four-hour convenience stores with no extra service charge. Or you can go to a bank. Bank Accounts At the bank, you can fill out a form and give it, and your money, to a teller, and pay each bill in that way. Or, if you have an ac59 count, you can arrange with your bank to transfer money electronically from your account to pay some bills. Oh yes, people do have bank accounts. But the bank’s service fee for paying bills is higher than that of the postal service. Yet a personal bank account is now necessary in Japan because that’s how employers pay their employees, electronically transferring money on pay day. In the past (and still true for some people) employees were usually paid in cash. But electronic transfers are common now. Nevertheless, you can’t just stay at home and write checks against your bank account. Before the widespread use of bank transfers, landlords and utility companies usually sent employees door to door to collect money. So there was a time when you could pay your bills without leaving home, but you didn’t pay them by writing checks. The problem with paying bills directly at the bank is that you have to make a separate trip to the bank each time you want to pay a bill. It usually means taking off from work early, since banks close at 3 p.m. on weekdays and are not open on Saturdays . (The post office gives you a bit longer on weekdays.) The only people who can go to the bank during regular banking hours are housewives, retired people, and working people with flexible schedules or with work schedules that just happen to match regular banking hours. There are typically very few men in business suits waiting at teller windows to pay their personal bills. Life in Japan without personal checking accounts can be inconvenient if you’re a single salaryman living on your own or a short-term resident. A Cash Society Instead of carrying checkbooks, the Japanese tend to carry large amounts of cash with them at all times. While America began to adopt checks as a popular means of paying bills after the Civil War, Japan remains a cash-oriented society. Japan has large numbers of bank automatic teller machines (ATMs)— 60 Japan: Why It Works, Why It Doesn’t [34.238.138.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:30 GMT) one for about every thousand people (see chapter 19). The ATMs are so sophisticated that they allow you to withdraw as little as a 10 yen coin (or 10 U.S. cents) or several million yen in a day. But the machines close at 7 p.m. on weekdays, and when many workers are just getting off work—between 6 and 7 p.m.— the machines charge a fee (103 yen) for usage. There is always a fee if you use an ATM that doesn’t belong to your bank. ATMs, which are available for very limited hours on weekends, also can be used to pay some bills, but many people—especially senior citizens—are either intimidated or frustrated by the complicated procedures required to pay bills using ATMs and so prefer to wait in line at the bank. Foreigners may have difficulty using the ATM machines because the operating instructions are in Japanese. In any case, bill payment by ATMs is a relatively recent innovation in Japan, but it is not available on all ATMs, and not for all hours that ATMs operate. Because there are no personal checks, it is difficult to withdraw money...