Today I had two missions, firstly to get a mobile phone and secondly to open a bank account. In Japan you can get phones anywhere but finding a bank open is a bit trickier, so after a bit of cursing that I was still in bed at noon, I went to Yokohama, the nearest place that had a branch of the bank I wanted to join that was open on Saturdays.

I was hunting for the bank and started looking at phones:

“How much is this phone?”
“It’s ….., do you have your bank details we can set it up for you right away”
“Umm no, sorry, I don’t have an account yet.”
“Well I’m afraid without a bank account you can’t buy a phone.”
“No problem, I’ll be back later.”

I then succeeded in finding the bank, where the following conversation took place:

“I’d like a bank account please.”
“Certainly, we need your name, address and phone number”
“I don’t have a phone yet, sorry”
“What do you mean you don’t have a phone?”
“I mean I don’t have one, because I need a bank account to get a phone”
*consults with higher powers*
“nope sorry, no phone, no bank account”

Double-you Tea Efffff!!!!

There was much sighing at this point from me, I then figured that they would most likely not ever call the number I gave them and so any random 8 digits after a Tokyo code would work fine. It never ceases to amaze me how banks hope to stop fraud when they don’t even attempt to check things like this. It makes no sense to require a phone number but frankly, when someone is sat there and magically “remembers” their phone number, I’d be suspicious.However now having a bank account, I can now get myself a phone tomorrow and change the number on my bank account and the world will be right.

On a positive note I did take some nice pictures of some buildings and had a pretty tasty soup for dinner, so it wasn’t a totally terrible trip…