Mobile Phone Guide #1: Basics

Today begins Access J’s latest installment featuring a comprehensive guide to purchasing your very own mobile phone. If you are fresh off the boat or just curious about the local market, have no fear, we have you covered.

Japan has long been a land known for its extravagant mobile phones, replete with GPS, high-spec cameras, extra large screens, and all sorts of doo-dads. What's more, the Japanese mobile phone market is possibly one of the most unique and (some might argue) isolated markets in the world. Japanese phones (携帯電話), or keitai denwa (often shortened to simply 携帯 keitai) utilize many features not found in many other parts of the world and, therefore, are largely unusable outside of the Japanese market. Some big differences are:

•   Japanese phones are almost always “SIM-locked” meaning that if you change carriers you must change phones and bringing your own phone is a no-no. Kind of inconvenient, but limits phone-theft, amongst other things.

• There are several competing technologies used by the big mobile networks, not all of which are global standards.

• The use of mobile web, e-mail, and applications (which we will cover later) is almost ubiquitous, so much so that phone e-mail is used instead of traditional short text messaging

Since landlines are expensive—although thanks to fiber optics, this is changing—and the mobile phone is the nexus of socialization in Japan, you should, like, probably get one. Or you could just do what one of our other writers did and rely on your girlfriend to do all the social networking for you, until she gets sick of it.

Major Mobile Phone Providers in Japan

Company	Technology	Subscribers	Pre-paid?
NTT DoCoMo	WCDMA 2.1ghz	58.01 million	no
au	CDMA 800mhz	33 million	yes (limited access)
Softbank	WCDMA 2.1ghz	25.41 million	yes
Wilcom	PHS 1.4ghz	3.75 million	no
E Mobile	WCDMA 1.7ghz	3.12 million	no

First and foremost, there are three main phone companies used by most Japanese: NTT DoCoMo, au, and Softbank. These carriers cover pretty much the whole country and even the country side is well serviced my most providers, although NTT DoCoMo is particularly renown for its high level of coverage. NTT DoCoMo has long been the dominant provider although recent competition from rivals has brought down its commanding lead. Thanks in part to its status as the exclusive iPhone provider, Softbank (formally Vodafone Japan) has been stealing away customers at a relatively fast clip.

The other two remaining providers are Wilcom and E Mobile, both of which service relatively specialized areas. Wilcom caters to business with free in-network calling and low cost, simple to use handsets while E Mobile focuses on reselling its radio spectrum to 3^rd parties and mobile computer broadband users. Both companies have coverage that focuses almost exclusively on big cities. At time of writing Softbank has been in talks to acquire a majority share in Wilcom as the company has been losing customers at rapid pace and its financial stability is questionable.

Unlike Europe, where most companies use a technology called GSM and its more advanced cousin, W-CDMA, Japan has several standards in play, all mutually incompatible. This means that your handset is effectively tied to your carrier and even if you pop the SIM out, you are still out of luck. Moreover, even though Softbank and NTT DoCoMo use the same technology on the same frequency they have no roaming agreements that allow you to “borrow” or roam on a rival network where there is no native service and their phones are fixed to a specific company branded SIM. To add to the confusion, E Mobile uses the same technology but on a different radio band, requiring special phones. au, on the other hand, uses CDMA technology which is rarely used outside of the US, Canada, and Korea. However, this particular brand of CDMA uses a unique frequency combination and cannot be used internationally unless a specific world phone is purchased. NTT DoCoMo and Softbank utilize a relatively global standard and radio frequency that allows for international roaming (although some older W-CDMA phones by DoCoMo are incapable of roaming due to hardware quirks). Confused yet? Don’t worry it gets better….kind of…

Stay tuned to AccessJ for our upcoming installments where we will show you how to go about purchasing a phone at your local shop as well as the ins and outs of a typical Japanese mobile phone plan and even how to use your fancy new phone to socialize with all your friends! Part two arrives crisp and new next Friday.


Other Mobile Phone posts:

1. Mobile Number Portability


2. Requesting an MNP Reservation Number 

Other posts in this series:

Part #1: The Basics

Part #2: Important Paperwork

Part #3: Pre-Paid Phones
Part #4: Post-Paid Phones 
Part #5: Paying Your Bills

Part #6: Mobile E-mail Guide

Part #7: Multi-Lingual Phones

Part #8: Renting and Roaming

The Best Way to Learn Hiragana and Katakana

If you've been put off learning Japanese by the complexity of the script, then here's some good news: it's not actually that hard! Well, the two basic alphabets aren't. Kanji will always be daunting due to the amount, but kana will get you most of the way through the language.

If you have the time and patience, both hiragana and katakana can be done in a day or two.

I don't believe in the slow and painful methods some people recommend for learning these Japanese characters. They aren't complicated enough to require pictorial stories to memorise.

My solution is simple: www.realkana.com (just to clarify: we get no money for you clicking this link)

It's an unbeatable flashcard-style site covering both alphabets. It requires the user to type a response to a kana syllable on screen. Very simple, but completely effective. You don't need to buy any books or other resources.

Here's how I learned hiragana and katakana in six and four hours respectively:

1. Select five characters to study.
2. Study them until you make no mistakes at all.
3. Deselect those five and select the next five.
4. Learn them.
5. Study the second set of five together with the first.
6. Deselect those ten and select the next five.
7. Study those three sets together.
8. Repeat until you're studying all the characters at once and not making any mistakes.

It sounds simple enough, and if you can concentrate for a long period of time it will work beautifully. Of course, you don't have to learn them all in a day, or a week. Even five minutes a day will get you there eventually, and the rewarding feeling of being able to read something so alien to your first language will keep you going.

And that's that. No need for geeky posters or flashcard sets. After you've memorised them it's just a matter of practising. Read things in kana (even if you don't understand the meaning) whenever you can, and always write in kana when you study. 

You'll find katakana more difficult to remember in the real world because it's used so much less, so put extra time into that.

The same people made a site called www.realkanji.com, but I can't recommend that as highly as the realkana. Kanji requires a whole game plan to study and memorise. Stay tuned for that guide soon.

Being an ALT #10: More School Hopping

In the last installment of our Being an ALT series, we discussed how some ALT jobs cover more than one school and how hopping between schools can affect your experience as a teacher in Japan. This time we'll continue that discussion and look particularly at how an ALT's time is split between multiple schools and the ways that can increase or decrease your workload.

School Politics

If you are a shared resource between schools, you can bet that every one of your schools is out to get its fair share of your time. When you ask for time off from work at one school, you may be asked why you can't take a day off from the other school instead. On the other hand, if you manage things well, it will seem to any given school that you haven't asked for many days off at all.

At the beginning of each school year, determining annual calendars of what days you'll visit each school and trading or rescheduling days to make sure each school's total count stays equal are also part of the multi-school ALT adventure.

Finally, if you work at rivaling schools, you may find yourself having to choose between school festivals or enkai parties to attend, and you will be occasionally asked awkward questions by faculty about which school you think is better. (Perhaps an English teacher might even ask you this last question during a lesson, which you'll then get to handle, impromptu, in front of the students... ahem...)

Scheduling Loopholes

On the other side of schools fighting to make sure they each get you for their one-hundred-and-sixteen days per year (or whatever your number of days happens to be), being a multi-school ALT means you'll occasionally find yourself at the mercy of an unintended scheduling conflict. Your schools may have slightly different summer or winter holiday dates, or test days, or demo lesson days, or PTA conference days. This can work out in your favor with an extra few days of summer vacation, or it could work in the other direction, such as two English demo lessons in the same week or paying for two enkais instead of one.

Planning Classes

If your JTEs are well-organized, they'll be able to tell you a week in advance what classes you're going to be teaching and at what point the students will be in their studies. But, not all JTEs are on the ball with this. You may not know in advance what you will be doing next time you come to a certain school. This can manifest as a rushed Monday morning in which you are told last minute what you'll be doing in the day's first class. When you don't have all your materials with you (see next point), it can be a real mental strain.

Doubled Materials

Another tough part of the multi-school environment is maintaining your teaching materials. In short, if you want to have the materials you create available for you to teach with, you'll have to truck them around in your bag each day you change schools. Your desk may not feel like "your" desk, because it'll be inconvenient to store things in it, and if you commute by car your car may become a portable desk instead. If you commute by bicycle or public transportation, you may just have to lug around an obnoxiously heavy bag on your commute.

Along similar lines, if one school issues you a laptop, you probably won't be able to take that computer with you to use at other schools. Schools may quip about you bringing your own laptop into work. And very security-paranoid schools may even frown on your popping USB drives in and out of their computers. (But, honestly, that's a little extreme. If you explain openly that it's the only reasonable way to keep your materials together across workplaces, it should work out all right.)

On the plus side, you'll be able to get twice as much mileage out of any material you create: Multiple schools means more chances to do lessons with students of the same grade level. This means you can reuse materials you've already prepared and develop your ideas and lesson delivery through repetition. Repeating the same lesson twice (or more!) is one of the best ways to hone your in-class explanations and become a better teacher. A lot of the bullet points here have been negative, but to be honest, this point alone makes teaching at multiple schools worth the hassle!

So in summary, don't let the negative aspects of a multi-school job put you off. As an ALT you'll have all the same opportunity to get involved (just show your teachers that you want to be!), and the broader experience you gain from working with different sets of students and coworkers more than makes up for the smaller annoyances. Take our points here as warnings you can use to prepare yourself for the job, rather than letting them stress you out when you find them out alone. Enjoy your new job!

Being an ALT series: 

Part #1: Teaching English in Japan 

Part #2: Your Role

Part #3: A Typical Day

Part #4: Planning Classes 

Part #5: Getting Drunk on Duty (the Enkai) 

Part #6: 4 Japanese Teachers You May Have to Work With

Part #7: Physical Resources

Part #8: Making Activities

Part #9: Hopping Between Schools

Part #10: More School Hopping

Part #11: Getting Molested At School

Part #12: It Is Really This Easy?

Part #13: Brushing Your Teeth At School

WS: "He/She Was and They/We Were (Not)" 2nd G JHS

This is a game using was, was not, were and were not. It's a variation of a classic ALT activity which has been kicking around for decades. All the versions I've found elsewhere look like they were designed on a 1980s word processor, so I've completely remade it from scratch. The game is called Hello Kitty Murder.

This can be played with any number of students above 10, and works best with 2nd grade junior high.

First, ham up a terrible story of Hello Kitty being kidnapped/murdered. Next, give out one character card to every student.

Here are 40 character cards for that.

Students stand up and find a partner, janken, and the winner must ask each a series of questions:

1. Where were you yesterday?
2. What time were you there?
3. What were you doing there?

Students respond with

1. I was (at Kappa Sushi).
2. I was there (at 12pm).
3. I was (reading a newspaper)

There are answers using both the positive and negative ("was not eating sushi" etc).

The responses are taken down as memos on the answer sheet.

Here is the answer sheet.

Students cannot deduce who did the kidnapping with the hints alone, so during or at the end of the game announce that you have heard more from the police - the location, time etc. You can increase the tension by making the hints broader, such as "it happened between 1 and 3pm", "it was in a sushi place" (there are several different sushi places on the cards.

I make the criminals two characters working together, and abuse them with "why???"s at the end. Ham it up before and after for best results.

You might be left with a damp finish after that (doesn't feel right to just end it there). If that's the case, award the students one point for each interview they conducted, and five points if the interviewed the murderer. Give stickers or something.


If you want to speed it up a bit, make the questions more specific - instead of asking the time and place, students choose one time (of two) and ask what the interviewee was doing then: "what were you doing yesterday at 12". This way they can ask more people in the same time.

How to Not Sweat Like a Beast in the Summer

You have probably never heard of the demoniacally named Driclor before. It's a roll-on treatment for hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating. It works. Unbelievably. If you use it for a couple of weeks, you will not sweat in the applied areas. This is perfect for the viciously hot and humid Japanese summers.

It's normally prescribed, but is available without a prescription. Read on for how to get hold of some in Japan.

I have never found this for sale in Japan, but UK and other nationality companies will ship internationally. I recommend Expresschemist.co.uk, where you can also buy your toothpaste or other toiletries you are missing in Japan. One roll-on will set you back about 4 pounds, and postage to Japan about the same.

You can also buy from Amazon.co.uk for a similar price.

Apply before bed and wash off in the morning. Expect to be eternally grateful for it.

Side-effects.
The active ingredient of Driclor is aluminium chloride hexahydrate. This itself is harmless, although in can be broken down into hydrochloric acid. This doesn't affect the end result, but can lead to irritation shortly after applying the roll-on. It goes away and isn't strictly bad for you, but can be a bit irritating (get it?). Other than that, Driclor is side-effect free.

The downside is, of course, you need to apply it to most of your body during the summer. Can't win them all.

There's also a product called Anhydrol Forte, which does the same job. I have no experience with that one, however.

I wish you the greatest happiness when you realise you can wear whatever you like this summer, without worrying about sweat patches.

Disaster Donation Opportunity: Clothes

A friend of mine passed on this address which is accepting clothes donations.

989-2393 "Wataricho"
Miyagi ken, Watarigun
Watari cho Aza kyuukan 62-1
Sato kinen Taiikukan

９８９−２３９３宮城県亘理郡　
亘理町字旧館６２番地１
佐藤記念体育館

Their number is 0223-34-0505

They're looking for high quality spring and summer clothes with little or no signs of wear. They don't need winter clothes because they can't store them, or underwear as the shops there are starting to reopen.

Exclusive Preview of New JHS Textbooks!

Here at AccessJ we're always one step ahead of the game. We tear the competition in two with our cut-throat professionalism and unstoppable momentum. Out of the way "Gumper ALT Life Stories" and "JipanGU" sites, AJ gone crazy.

Anyway, so we got hold of a copy of next year's JHS textbooks (at least, for selected schools). It's a reworked version of New Crown - that series I got so angry about last year with my "5 Most Annoying Pages in New Crown", "4 Stupidest Characters in New Crown", and "3 Appalling Stories from New Crown" posts.

Here's your chance for a sneaky peak before 2012!

Well, first things first. Wang Ming has had a sex change! Someone finally helped him take the last step towards becoming Yang Meling. Ratna has slithered off back to India, too, unless her eczema got so bad that she just crumbled into dust and was rebuilt as a boy called Raj. Speaking of Emma (does that even qualify as a bad pun?), she's still there, but along with the rest of the cast has had a massive face-lift. The retarded, camp watercolourist from last issue has given way to the elite skills of some anime-savvy whipper-snapper.

In fact, and I may alienate half of our audience for saying this, but it actually looks quite good. Not only was New Crown dated this year (and every previous year it was used), but it had so much nonsense content that either didn't teach anything useful or made little to no sense at all (like the bizarre re-tellings of Alice in Wonderland and the Whale Rider). The new edition seems to have deliberately targeted the problem sections and made them into something useful, and, low-and-behold, actually entertaining (sort of).

However, there's also a hell of a lot more material to cover. This probably has something to do with the upcoming change in the education system. Japan's education functions on a 10-year plan, after which the previous decade is analysed and the results used to formulate the next. Last time this led to massive changes in how children were taught. The high levels of suicides and stress were attributed to the huge workload on school students. The proposed solution was to drastically cut that workload (no school on Saturdays and a dramatic drop in expectations) and focus more on involving the personalities of students in every-day school life. The result of this change, however, was (predictably, I guess) a drop in achievement. So, looks like it's back to the old method... More on this in a future post.

Today we'll treat you to character comparisons. Next time, we'll have a closer look at how the same chapters/pages have evolved in the new edition.

Kumi

Paul

Wang Ming

Ratna

So it's all change, huh? Paul has also acquired a physically handicapped brother (presumably to balance out his own mental retardation). More details in the future, folks.

Bonus picture: Ms Sasaki trying to screw up Paul's shodo. 

You may be interested in these posts:

• 3 Appalling Stories from New Crown
• 4 Stupidest Characters from New Crown
• 5 Most Annoying Pages from New Crown

Being an ALT #9: Hopping Between Schools

In some ALT positions, you will teach at not just one school, but instead rotate through a set of assigned schools. This is especially common among junior high school and elementary school ALTs, but even high school ALTs may find themselves covering a few small, rural high schools or trucking out to a special needs school once every couple weeks.

This game of musical workplaces can be good or bad, depending on your preferences. Over our next two Being an ALT posts, we'll discuss some of the pros and cons of this arrangement. First, we'll look at some of the interpersonal impacts of having more schools to visit, and next time we'll consider scheduling issues it might provoke. If you're considering a move to a multi-school job, we hope these posts will provide you some food for thought.



A More Diverse Experience
First off, with multiple schools, you'll encounter a much wider variety of students and teachers. Every class of students has its own personality, and every school has a personality, too. Some schools are the pride and joy of their community. Other schools are out in the slums (or as close as you can get in Japan), and student behavior will reflect this fact. Lunch and cleaning time routines vary from school to school, as do teacher meetings and the way ALTs are employed. You may be a human tape recorder at one school but be given free reign over most lessons at another.

More Coworkers
More faces means more Japanese names to remember, and moving around between schools also means it will take a little longer for coworkers at any given school to warm up to you. However, as a team-teaching ALT, more coworkers means more people for you to try working with and a greater chance to meet teachers with whom you really jive in the classroom.


Perpetual Visitor
A common complaint about the ALT job is that you never really fit in as part of the team. It's easy to feel like an outsider or a special exception in this world. The intensity of that feeling depends on you and your specific situation, but if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, be aware that a multi-school ALT job can exacerbate or prolong the feeling. It will take longer to build relationships with your students and coworkers if you only see them for part of each week, and jumping between schools makes it easier to be "forgotten."

Being Forgotten
This is standard new-ALT rigamarole, especially if you don't speak Japanese (but even if you do!). A lot of information that circulates the school will fail to come across your desk. Maybe it slipped the English teacher's mind to let you know, maybe they didn't make enough copies of an announcement to put one on your desk, maybe they didn't think you'd be interested, or maybe it's something they've decided you don't need to know.

Serious things, like a student stealing a teacher's wallet, school property being vandalized over the weekend, a teacher's loss of a relative, or a student running away from home, tend to get swept out of the ALT's field of vision, intentionally or otherwise. These probably won't be explained in English to you.

But, other daily information that you really do need might not reach your ears, either. The daily schedule might have been shifted by ten minutes in one direction, or maybe lunch comes an hour earlier than usual. This kind of information is usually circulated in the daily schedule or on the chalkboard in the staff room, but it's going to be in Japanese.

This and other things, like not hearing about the annual staff photo until the morning of, can leave ALTs feeling pretty cynical or impotent in the workplace.

Of course, one of the biggest issues with multi-school ALT jobs is how the schools divide your time. Next week we'll look at how schools deal with sharing an ALT and how it'll increase (or sometimes decrease!) your workload. Stay tuned, and as always, if you have any experiences to share, please comment below!

Being an ALT series: 

Part #1: Teaching English in Japan 

Part #2: Your Role

Part #3: A Typical Day

Part #4: Planning Classes 

Part #5: Getting Drunk on Duty (the Enkai) 

Part #6: 4 Japanese Teachers You May Have to Work With

Part #7: Physical Resources

Part #8: Making Activities

Part #9: Hopping Between Schools

Part #10: More School Hopping

Part #11: Getting Molested At School

Part #12: It Is Really This Easy?

Part #13: Brushing Your Teeth At School

WS: "Are You From Vatican City?" 1st G JHS

This week's worksheet is for the early days of first grade junior high, and covers the "Are you from..." grammar.



The sheet is pretty self explanatory, but here's a quick rundown:

1. Copy both pages of the sheet (download here) for each pupil.
2. Copy page 2 at a larger page size and cut out all the flags so that each student can have two.
3. Students have a set time limit (5-10 minutes) to play bingo. 
1. They must ask other students two "Are you from.." questions.
2. If the responding student has the flag of the country in question, they say yes and the asking student gets to mark it off their bingo card.
4. Reward all students over X number of bingos (or any at all).

I think it's fun because it's such a challenge to find three countries from the huge list. First graders are usually enthusiastic enough for it to work, but if you have a bad or depressed class you might want to reconsider.

Getting an ETC Card Reader

In order to use an ETC card on the express-ways of Japan, you nearly always need to have a machine to wirelessly communicate with the toll booth.

We will covered how to get an ETC card very soon, which is significantly more difficult for foreigners (especially the military), but now let's look at getting the box installed.


First of all, go to an auto-mobile shop/garage and choose a box. ETC boxes come in various price brackets, though the added benefits of the more expensive options are limited (if you can even work out what they are), so I'd recommend just getting the cheapest.

There will be two prices on the box. The cheaper of the two is the unit price, the second the price including installation. Boxes start around 7,000 yen, and you should be able to find one including installation for just under double that.

When you take the unit to the counter, they'll ask if you want it installed.

You may have to wait for a bay in the garage area to be free, at which time the staff will say something like "The wait time for a bay is .... minutes, are you OK waiting that long?" If time is an issue you'd want to make a reservation beforehand.

For those needing help, I'd say something like this to make a reservation:

ETCを設置していただけたいですが、来週土曜日の予約をお願いできますか？
(ETC o setchi shite itadaketaidesuga, raishū doyōbi no yoyaku o onegai dekimasu ka?)
 - the underlines words being the day you want to make the reservation.
At the store, if they were explaining that you need a reservation they'd probably say something like,
予約は必要ですが。。。
(Yoyaku wa hitsuyōdesuga. . .)
"You need to make a reservation"
また明日の午後に来られますか？
(Mata ashita no gogo ni kitararemasu ka?)
"Can you come back tomorrow afternoon?"

After you've made an appointment (or been pleasantly surprised), you will have to fill out your name and address on a form, and give them your shaken certificate to photocopy. Later, or next, you will drive your car to the fitting area and negotiate where you would like the machine to be installed (the antenna is always behind the rear-view mirror). Literally almost anywhere is fine. Mine is just under the steering wheel. They remove part of your dash to fit the box, so you might not want to watch if you're sensitive about your car!

The fitting process takes 30-45 minutes. Then you're all set.

More

• If you move prefecture and change your licence plate, you will need to get your ETC paperwork updated.
• There are some "one-piece" boxes which don't need to be fitted (they sit on a holder on the dash and have the antenna built-in), although I've never seen one.

Abbreviations in Furikomi

Take a deep breath... this is dry but useful information.

When making a bank transfer (振込, furikomi) in Japan, information regarding the transfer can only be sent using single-bit (half-width) katakana characters, Latin alphabet letters, numbers, or a small subset of punctuation. When you make a furikomi at a bank or ATM, the system will properly annotate information about the bank and branch you want to transfer to. However, properly entering the beneficiary's name is up to you.

(By the way, spaces are also valid in furikomi data. They count as one character.)

Usually, this is an obvious step: You enter in the name of the beneficiary exactly as he or she has directed you. The katakana used must match the katakana they used for the name on their account exactly, or the furikomi won't go through.

What you may not have known is that there are special abbreviation codes used to accommodate long company names so they fit inside the ATM/furikomi slip's character limit. (In my experience, the limit is often 15 characters.)

For example, if you were in charge of sending a furikomi out to the toy company Bandai, the formal name of the company, 株式会社バンダイ, wouldn't fit within a 15 character limit: ｶﾌﾞｼｷｶﾞｲｼｬﾊﾞﾝﾀﾞｲ

Sixteen characters. Damn. What to do?

The wrong way to handle this situation is to enter as much of the name as you can and truncate the end.

The right way to handle this situation is to use designated account abbreviation codes to eliminate common, long titles, such as 株式会社 (publicly traded stock company). A full list of such abbreviations is available here (Japanese).

In the case of our example, the correct abbreviation for 株式会社 is a simple ｶ. But, the next part of the process is also important. You need to use appropriate delineation to indicate how the abbreviation fits into the title. Because 株式会社 comes at the beginning of Bandai's formal company name, you'd start the name on the transfer out with a ｶ, follow it with an ending parenthesis, then add the rest of the company name, like so: ｶ)ﾊﾞﾝﾀﾞｲ

Similarly, if the 株式会社 bit came at the end of the company name, like in music company Yamaha's name, ヤマハ株式会社, you'd use a beginning parenthesis and a ｶ at the end of the name: ﾔﾏﾊ(ｶ

But, what if the 株式会社 bit comes somewhere in the middle of the name you need to send to? Maybe, in a much more likely example, you're not sending to the company's name as a whole but to a specific department: The account name you're sending to is the general affairs department at Yamaha, ヤマハ株式会社総務部. The answer is fortunately unsurprising: You get to put a parenthesis on each end of the ｶ, to end up with a fantastic ﾔﾏﾊ(ｶ)ｿｳﾑﾌﾞ

OK, so what about when you've used all the reasonable abbreviations for your name, and you still end up with something too long, like this (fictional) general affairs department name at Takeda Pharmaceuticals: 武田薬品工業株式会社総務部. Even after abbreviation, it's still a whopping twenty-two characters: ﾀｹﾀﾞﾔｸﾋﾝｺｳｷﾞｮｳ(ｶ)ｿｳﾑﾌﾞ

In this situation, truncation is the rule of thumb. The bank will match up as much of the beneficiary name you could enter to the actual name on the account and make a decision about whether the transfer is legitimate. If that answer still leaves you feeling queasy, there's a simple but time-consuming way to double check yourself: ATMs at some banks will display the account holder name on their confirmation screens when you try to initiate a furikomi. The account holder name is displayed in single-byte katakana, up to a certain number of characters, just like you'd need to write it in to make a successful transfer. Simply go to such an ATM, start making a cash transfer (where you put money into the ATM to send rather than sending from your bank account), and fill out the beneficiary details up to the confirmation screen. Once you've seen how the name should be written, take a memo, and hit "Cancel" on the ATM so your experimental transfer doesn't actually go through.

May Blog Roundup

May has been and gone now, and taken with it all the pretty colours of spring, leaving us only with the creeping humidity and threatening reveal of dozens of praying mantis eggs.

Anyway, this month saw us pass 100,000 hits since late last year, and the growing AccessJ team provided you lovely readers with some great posts as a thank you.



This month you may have missed:

A post on how to get those pesky ID cards for buying cigarettes, a look at Japanese Hangover Preventatives, the start of our look at the bizarre questions Japanese people ask each other on the internet, and an entry covering the Japanese Fruit Picking Seasons for your picking pleasure.

We also published:

Earthquake
Maps showing the most dangerous places in Japan during earthquakes, and where earthquakes are most likely to occur.

Health and Fitness
How to buy and train with Kettlebells in Japan, and how to register for Distance Running Events.
not forgetting our popular post on the Cost of Giving Birth in Japan, and our big-hitter How to Take a Crap in Japan.

Cars
A detailed look at Vehicle Registration and Licence Plates, and an explanation of how licence plate security works.


Last bus not least, yesterday we talked you through Applying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

There were plenty other posts that didn't make the lowdown here, so be sure to check out our archive links at the top of the page for more.


And coming up next month will be the return of our popular Being an ALT series, as well as tips on how to not sweat like an animal during the forthcoming hot summer. We'll cover all about ETC cards, give you some Japanese learning tips and bring you fresh content from a brand new writer who will cover Japanese cell-phones in minute detail. Stay tuned.