Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to the Buying a House in Japan podcast. My name is Take, joined by my co -host, Joseph Stockerman. Joey, how are you doing? What's up, everybody? I'm doing great. Or should I call you Professor of Masters of Economics, Cambridge? That was a good episode. Last one. We had a lot of good comments. A lot of people reached out.
Speaker: by not an expert in any sense. That was long that was a long time ago. Okay. We'll do a follow up though. I think we had a couple people reach out and actually I listened to a couple podcasts on Japan's economic state. So that's our next podcast. There's a lot of, Japan's got a lot of debt, man. It's really scary actually. I looked up some numbers like, Ooh, this is gnarly. A lot of debts. And yeah, that's one of the reasons why they're like, Oh,
Speaker: bank of Japan, they're never going to change rates. debt's There's so much debt, including household debt in Japan. They own the debt. Guess how much debt they have? Just in yen. Just throw out a random number. In yen? In yen. I heard this number. I was like, what? In the tens of trillions? They have 1 .3 quadrillion.
Speaker: Yeah. much really and I don't even know how many zeros is that. It's got to be a thousand trillion. Oh my God. I don't know. But anyways, we'll talk about that another time. I got some spicy updates, ah not updates, but wanted to chat about banking in Japan. I know it's a hot topic top of mind for you in particular. Okay. Banking in Japan. As some of you guys know, we opened our process For us, as we opened a company in Japan, a large part of this of opening the company was our motives were to get a bank in Japan. So we did get a bank account open at SMBC. Why didn't we just go personal bank account?
Speaker: Why didn't we? Because we can't. I think it's very, very difficult. We've heard some from a couple people who think they can with, what did that guy say? Post office bank or something? Yeah, the Yucho bank account. Yeah, essentially. I knew i asked Taki the question why we didn't go with a personal bank account. I know the answer. The answer is you need the residence card, not permanent residency, but the Zaidu card. the We used to call it the Gaijin card back in the day. You need one of those things. You need to have an immigration status to open a personal bank account in Japan.
Speaker: Really hard. So if someone does figure out how you can open a bank account as a foreigner, please let us know. But for all intents and purposes, I think us opening a KK or a GK and then opening a bank account is probably the easiest. Although, how much does it cost us now? We've spent a lot of money opening this. Fair warning. It won't be cheap. so we have a bank account We've had this bank account since about April, it's been opened, still having used it, still haven't once seen what the balance is in our bank account. And I don't know which way you want to take this episode, ta but there's a lot to talk about there. I was deep in the weeds of online banking yesterday, spent about two hours, still don't have a, still don't know what our balance is. But yeah, to to your first question or your first point, it's expensive. We pay.
Speaker: i think last month was actually our cheapest month, but we pay 1400 us a month just to keep this bank account alive. So yeah To add more color to that though, we are also like we're hiring someone to be our quote unquote representative director in Japan. So there's other things there. But yeah in our current arrangement, again, I know someone's going to reach out and be like, you guys are getting ripped off, but this is the way we did it. I don't regret. I think we kind of just optimized for getting it done in English. so probably way but
Speaker: Here's the layer that like, here's how it works, nuts and bolts. I feel like on our consultations a lot of time, we're like, oh yeah, open a G K in Japan and you can get a bank account. Here's how that looks in practice and the associated costs. You can open a G K, but to do anything in Japan, you're going to need a representative director.
Speaker: You can be that representative director as a foreigner. Me and Takei are actually representative directors, but you need to do anything. Open a bank account, get a SIM card, anything else you can think of that is like, uh, you know, ah one of those things that's hard to do in Japan. You're going to need a representative director that is either a Japanese national or a permanent resident. So has gotten that special permanent resident status. That's what's expensive for us. We went with an English speaking service and.
Speaker: The having the representative director on board. So there are services that do this. They'll provide a representative director. That's the expensive part. On top of that, we pay an ad for an address fee. Like we don't have a physical office in Japan or actually we do. We could open, we could use our property and open up a, say that's our physical ah office, but we are using the same company that we get the representative director from. We're.
Speaker: borrowing essentially their address, basically their business address is our address. And we also pay that fee. On top of that, there was a set up fee to get the bank account set up. It's not easy even for a company that specializes in this to open a bank account for a company owned by foreigners in Japan. So that was and more fees on top of that, I think in the ballpark of 2000 or $3 ,000. So.
Speaker: That's the nuts and bolts when, when we do say this, like on our consultations, you can open a bank account. If you open up a company, it's going to take a long time. It's where, when are we now August? Maybe we started this in February, March. So that's where we are now with it. Still haven't seen our balance on this bank account. And we've been paying a lot of money just to get to this point.
Speaker: It's been brutal, but I also do think... Shout out to the company we've been using. I do think they're working really hard. and and just In Japan, it is a difficult... I've heard from other people too. It's very difficult to open a Bing account. It is a very much relationship -based thing too. I know this our company that we worked with, JOS, they have a personal relationship with SMBC.
Speaker: Hey again they did not guarantee by any means they would could open a bank account luckily we had a website that we showed and i think that. Lower their garden and forgot to prove quite quickly. but Yeah it's been very difficult to step one they open our bank account but then we only got like a little checkbook.
Speaker: And it's been a whole ordeal just to open an online bank account, which we have opened an online bank account. We now I think have a debit card. The next step is we need to get a credit card. It's been a six month journey. Joey, talk to me a little bit about the online banking access and just generally banking tech in business, banking tech in Japan. So when we first opened that when we first got the bank account opened this April,
Speaker: We got what's called a Tsucho, so T -S -U -C -H -O Tsucho, which is basically a paper bank booklet. So if anyone has had experience banking in Japan, they know what this is. You have this little booklet. It looks like a book that you actually open, you tilt the book 90 degrees and then you open it kind of vertically, I guess you would describe it as. And almost like when you go to the airport and they have, ah you open your passport to the Scan the Passport page.
Speaker: You do something very similar in Japan. You open up your Tsucho to the right page and then you insert it into the ATM. And then it'll do things like, and then you basically have access to make deposits or pay out withdrawals, pay other people, and it'll print out your balance on this paper booklet.
Speaker: But when you're done and you take the thing out, that's all we have. This is like the main way banking, like house household banking is done in Japan. I'm surprised this is all you get initially for a business bank account as well. But remember, Japan is very cash. Heavy country in a sense, like so many transactions are still done in cash there. So I do think a lot of businesses, they probably just take out cash, pay for stuff, collect the receipt, and then that's how they do their finances. But that's what you're going to get off the bat.
Speaker: <unk>mp What we did then is we want the car we eventually we want it. So what we can't do with this is buy anything on Amazon. We can't make any online purchases. We need to be in Japan, physically in Japan to check balances or make any, do anything with our bank account, make any payments. And you need to go to the bank in person. So not ideal. We wanted to get online banking set up. We wanted a debit card and we want a credit card. And we also want an ETC card, which is very important if you're traveling around Japan.
Speaker: by car and the ETC card is through a credit card company. So again, we're doing that through SMBC. Which way do you want me to go? I can go many different ways from here. We'll give a little context, color the picture. I know business banking here in the United States is not perfect. we Joey and I actually have tried a couple different banks for our US s based LLC. It's been hit or miss like opening accounts, how easy it is, who do we got to talk to? Luckily, we found a good Benzes bank, Mercury bank, which I think is modern technology. It moves pretty quickly. Don't know. Yeah, Mercury is awesome. but We can make a bank account immediately. So shout out to Mercury. You guys are are killing it. Joey, tell me about your
Speaker: We haven't been able to see our online balance yet. We put in about roughly $8 ,000 and we're kind of like, dang, we really need that for furniture. but we yeah We put in about $10 ,000. Okay, so getting getting towards online banking. so First, let me just describe. so There's something called a cash card. What we have is a cash card, not a debit card. We don't have it in our hands. The company helping us, JOS, we have a cash card. You cannot use that for online purchases.
Speaker: the Tsucho again, but in card form. Can't use it for any online purchases. It's literally just for taking cash out at the ATM. That's one more step that we got just a few days ago. So debit card without being... I was confused as well. I kept asking this. And no, you cannot use it for online purchases. It's just for taking cash out. Cash card, it's called. Cash card. So online banking has been... So I've been trying to get access to our online bank for the past...
Speaker: I guess day I spent a day at the JOS offices and they at least got me set up, but I tried logging in again last night and yeah, still haven't seen the balances. It's this thing is crazy. I've never seen software like this. So first of all, I think I had to download two different applications onto my.
Speaker: MacBook Pro and you know, the Apple, you know, the, the software, my operating software, I double clicking to install as an operating software is flagging everything. They're like untrusted. This things thing seems very risky, blah, blah, blah. It's asking for permission to edit this key chain on your device. And I'm like, oh, this is like i' right off the bat, just poor user experience. Like.
Speaker: It's some sort of software that you need to install. I'm sure it's not, I'm like 90 % sure it's not malicious or stealing any of my data. But honestly, you need to download two different pieces of software that ask for quite a lot of access to things on your computer. That's how this experience starts. Yellow flag. All right. I mean, pretty, pretty, yeah, like blood orange flag. Blood orange, okay. What's next? But it's SMBC. So I'm inclined to give them a tiny bit of trust. So next,
Speaker: Okay. I was handed a stack of documents. I wish I could share these documents with you because they're like, some of them are like explainer documents on how to set up your bank. I've actually got them in front of me right now on how to set up your bank account. And it's just, there's so much text on these. There's images, there's screenshots of like screens you should be seeing, but the images are so blurry. It's like so JPEG. And small, like I can't read what any of these images are saying. So it's very unhelpful, the paper documents I was given. Okay. So you, higher level, you get two sign -in accounts. So me and Taki both have two accounts. We have a admin account and a user account. So the admin account, I don't, okay. Honestly, I was about to say, I know the admin account does this and the user account does that. I honestly don't know yet what the difference is.
Speaker: I just know that both are restricted to some capacity. but So both are still restricted from seeing the balance, which is the most frustrating part here. We have an admin account and a user account and neither of them can see the balance in our bank account. So I don't know what to say there. yeah On top of that, I could keep going. On top of that, once you sign in with one of the accounts, the user account or the admin account,
Speaker: You can't sign in with the other account until you completely quit your browser, clear all cookies and like browsing history. It seems like it locks you in to one of these accounts, but there's no way. So I just have, I have to open two different incognito tabs, but it's very annoying that you can't just log out and sign in with a different account. It like somehow it like locks you into that account.
Speaker: On top of that, oh guy joe last sorry I'll just wrap this up. There's a lot more I could vent about online banking in Japan, but on top of that, we also have a physical one -time code device. I'm not sure when this needs to be used yet. Obviously I haven't got there. I haven't got there yet. But yeah, I mean, all this is to say is that banking in Japan is, you know, extremely frustrating and these websites are are honestly very terrible user experience.
Speaker: I believe it's all in the name of security, but honestly, I'm very skeptical that the security is even there in the first place and just completely not user friendly. Blood orange is the warning for security, which is a little concerning first off. But I remember you were here in Santa Cruz and you're like, Taka, you got to take, I got all these papers for you. all And I like just avoided it so bad. I was like, no, Joe, I don't want the banking papers. You take them. They were, they're like thicker than my laptop, maybe two, two laptops of just like Japanese text basically. Right.
Speaker: yeah And on top of that, i don't I can't even remember the two sketchy applications I had to install that wanted real deep access to stuff, passwords and stuff on my computer. So for you to even give you access, we would have needed to figure out what those applications were and I've completely forgotten. so Okay, so the TLDR, online banking and banking in Japan is a pain in the ass, right?
Speaker: It's worse than not having a bank account almost because our money's locked up. we so we have yeah Again, $10 ,000 in that bank account, which we needed to like we needed put money to open it. And I think when we opened a business, there was all these things about why we needed certain that amount or minimum threshold. I think they had said the more you deposit initially, the higher chance of getting the account approved. So we had put in a little bit more than we were comfortable with.
Speaker: But geez, okay Joey, what's the next steps? How are we going to get our money out? How do we get access to this? Are we going to call JOS or get something Japanese to do it? so i think So right now, eventually I believe with JOS help, I will be able to figure it out, figure out how to view my balances and figure out how to make payments. I think that is it's just a matter of time. and putting in the effort to understand the website. So I don't think ne's next steps are that serious. I think if one good thing would be a little bit of redundancy, if you could install these sketchy apps on your computer, next time we're in Tokyo, if we go back to JOS, ask them how to do that. Just so in case I can't move money or in some some sort of, or I lose my computer, my computer gets stolen or something like that. I think that type of redundancy would be helpful. I think that we.
Speaker: Honestly, so there are online only banks in Japan. Shinsei bank is one of them. And that's what one of our good friends, another entrepreneur in the space uses. And I'm tentatively optimistic that they're much better than SMBC. I honestly think we open another bank account and abandon ship on SMBC. Absolutely. If it's this hard for us to see our balance, I saw your email chain back with them and it just so many screenshots and so much text. I'm just like,
Speaker: As someone who doesn't know, japanese can't read Japanese, that if you think the Japanese real estate sites are daunting, like the screenshots you were citing me, I was like, holy shit, this is really bad. and i It's really bad. it's it like It blows my mind how bad it is. Just like the login process, the like the weird sketchy stuff I had to install. it's just Did no one ever take a step back? and like think like why i'm on I like to make fun of Japanese websites a lot.
Speaker: I think they're really bad quality ah in terms of like just design elements, but banking website, SMBC online banking value door it's called has really just blown all.
Speaker: everything I thought about Japanese poor web design out of the water. It really takes the cake. You were so frustrated yesterday. I saw your WhatsApp. You were like, what what is happening? I was like, oh, thank God Joey's handling this. I appreciate you doing that. Again, Japan is on floppy disks. and Actually, they won. They are no longer on floppy disks, but fax machines are still around. Similarly, I remember when we were setting up the internet at TBC,
Speaker: we were Yeah, I don't know how you pulled that off. It's very much that same experience, Takei, just a little bit. Honestly, equally frustrating. Takei magically got the internet set up. It was very similar, like those small images with blurry text. It was literally insanity, like whatever. Insanities do the same thing over and over and expecting different results. we actually Insanity worked. I remember like refreshing the button over and over and just doing the same thing until internet works. so um If you are buying Enakia or setting up internet in Japan, just know it's not going to be as easy as it is in the States. If you're opening a bank account, expect it to take a long time. If anyone listening has a solution, please, please let us know. Joey, I think our next venture, are we making a digital banking app in Japan next? I think there's opportunity, right? You mentioned that Mercury Bank is so good. For anyone in the US creating a bank account,
Speaker: Wow. Mercury bank is phenomenal. It is FinTech like they leverage your money is stored in a different bank. Mercury bank isn't a true bank. It's a FinTech and then they sort of pass you. Your funds are held in a different bank, but I mean that is.
Speaker: as long as you trust that like it's such a great system so we' keep you guys posted i know this is a little bit more of a rant episode but i think it's important if you are buying a place and you want to move to japan and especially it open a business the bank account process don't maybe recommend SMBC. Again, if anyone's listening and has better recs, we're going to take a look at Shinsae. We're going to take a couple other looks because we just need access to cash in Japan. In the meantime, if you are just moving over, I use like a Charles Schwab debit card. You can take like Gomanen at a 7 -11 every day, but that's not feasible long -term. So we hope to have a credit card, debit card, and ETC card so we can drive the highways. As long as you trust that, it's such a great system.
Speaker: Be warned, Japanese tech is really behind the times, right, Joey? Exactly. Yeah. we'll We'll report back here if we do switch banks or or try something else. will We will switch banks. I do not want to do the same process you just did and install the stuff on my computer. and It's crazy. It's really crazy, actually. like I'm still a little bit i'm bewildered.
Speaker: We got to just go and take the cash out and and just hold the cash maybe. Maybe we do that. Maybe next time we go back. We'll figure it out. Okay. Well, thank you guys for listening to our rant episode. We just want to keep you guys just real talk. If you are making a bank again, it's not going to be easy. If someone has a better solution for us, please reach out to us. But other than that, Joey, we'll catch you on the next episode. See ya. See ya.
