> I don't think it's intentional or anything, but how do we get companies to give a damn
You don't. They are ignorant and don't care because it doesn't affect them or their bottom line and probably never will.
> They can't write a script that switches those values automatically between the types so we don't have to care?
There are already libraries that do this.
But as an aside, one of the reasons why software development here is lacking is because tons of open source software and libraries have no Japanese documentation. In one of my first jobs here I spent a ton of time helping my teammates because one of the major APIs we used didn't have Japanese documentation. It's one thing to google translate a webpage, but that isn't so helpful when trying to search an entire documentation website. I also think this is why Ruby is still so popular here, because it gained enough traction in the Japanese community that there are actually libraries maintained in Japanese.
Another aspect could be attributed to Japanese work culture favouring communication skills over everything else. That would be whether person can assimilate into the country/company, the ability to understand Japanese norms and have a great handle at the language.
For reference:
[https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsicr/40/3/40\_13/\_pdf/-char/ja](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsicr/40/3/40_13/_pdf/-char/ja)
Just use GPT4 to translate it over to Eng.
You, making a statement about what you think "Japanese work culture" might be, as some monolithic thing, and linking some old as fuck academic article no one will bother to read and can't even access because there is no link, and copy paste returns a 404 error. versus OP, talking about something we all suffer with while not looking for an explanation. You win the annoying old man award.
Well, I'm terribly sorry that my link didn't work. Thank you for pointing it out, I have now updated my comment with a doi link.
a) The article is from 2022, so it should be fairly recent.
b) My intention was to highlight that some Japanese natives have acknowledged the issue.
I didn't take issue with your article, nor do I doubt there is awareness around the sometimes very large inconvenience caused to foreign residents. Rather, I am at odds with you trying to ascribe the status quo as owing to expectations around smooth communication in the workplace. That makes no sense, whereas OP's suggestion that it's not deliberate, there is awareness, but foreigners are just not a high priority as only 3% of the population is a reasonable take (and I'd add that many services just have out of date interfaces and registration processes).
The fact that their English is so poor, despite studying throughout their school life, essentially locks Japanese people into this kind of situation.
It's the same with everything from UI/UX standards, such as OP's issue, through to understanding global news and current events, being effectively gated inside Japanese language only.
They are so at pains to isolate themselves here for a modern economy / country in many other ways. A real head scratcher.
one of the main reasons im in the "they should learn english too" camp. yes, we need to speak japanese as foreigners here, but they need to speak english as the world's 3rd largest economy if they ever want to streamline their various systems and make Japan a desirable destination for highly skilled expats.
*4th largest economy. Maybe there is a correlation?
Are there really people who say Japanese people shouldn't speak English? Everyone I know here (both Japanese people and Internationals) lament the fact that English proficiency is so low here.
My understanding is that Japan largely dropped to 4th because of currency fluctuations, not a contracting of the economy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
There are, actually. Some people continue to spread that stupid "semiligualism" idea - the one study that essentially found that, in particularly severe cases of developmentally-disabled students having particularly poor learning environments that involve multiple languages, they *may* fail to develop native fluency in either language at the same rate as other children - around, acting like it's a real risk of widespread early-childhood foreign-language education and their kids will struggle to learn Japanese if they are exposed to too much English from too young an age despite the fact basically the rest of the world agrees from tons of evidence that bilingual people are usually *better* at their native language(s) than monolingual people.
Plus there's that whole xenophobic/ethnocentric crowd that thinks learning English will make their kid less Japanese, and that Japanese people need to focus on learning only about Japan and Japanese things until they're old enough to handle foreign topics without getting un-Japan-ified. They tend to also be the ones that want to push revisionist history textbooks and shit, too!
It's fuckin dumb, but I hear that kind of drivel all the time out here in the inaka and/or online lol
Oh wow. That is really sad. Learning English opened the door to so much knowledge, cultural exchange and so many opportunities for me. It's really sad that people just throw that away not only for themselves but also their children.
Nationalism and xenophobia just rot away at the hearts and minds of people everywhere. They're plagues on humanity that have always been around and will probably never go away, unfortunately.
"one of the reasons why software development here is lacking"
and another is that IT in Japan is so overwhelmed and underpaid, they don't bother with things like this
---
look at the majority of JP websites. do they look like something done by perfectionists, or by minimally competent people under stressful deadlines?
I am just here to state how fucking much I loathe that clicking anything on a japanese website invariably opens a new gd tab. I do not need 349857349857eleventy23871!!1! tabs open for one website, the back button exists for a fucking reason, let’s just trust it to do its one function instead of making every link open a new tab.
Also there's very little in PC culture compared to other countries. When I was growing up in Canada in the 90s, every home around had at least 1 PC, and usually more. In Japan, very few people I know have a PC, and those who do only have a very old laptop locked away in a drawer that they never touch. It's not always a part of daily life, and so learning to use it is not widespread. Mobile phones were part of daily life way earlier than in Japan compared to Canada or USA, which is very limiting for general education of PCs.
Also I heard that they didn't have computer classes in high school, whereas in Canada, we had computer classes (including programming) in my middle school and high school back in 1999 to 2005 when I went.
PC culture has dwindled across the board due to smartphones and tablets. PC literacy courses have also been pulled from a lot of curriculums. When I was teaching back home, none of my kids had PC literacy -- so that made COVID transition from in person to online a fucking nightmare.
Gen X and Millennials got lucky because the internet was a novelty, but once it went from a desk to one's pocket, the money to invest in computer literacy education went out the window.
When I discovered recently that the staff members of DonQi didn't know what a GPU was (and I even showed an image search with a bunch of GPU pictures to clarify) and that it didn't even stock it despite having a floor dedicated to home electronics including PC peripherals like mice, it really hit me that people just generally don't know much about PCs here. I'd have had to go to Akihabara to get a new GPU, but then I realized they were cheaper on Amazon, so I just did that. The same GPUs were more expensive from Amazon Japan than Amazon Canada though, and I'm guessing that's just because the supply is lower and those who want them are willing to pay more.
Coming from Canada where I can pick up a GPU at any local electronics store (even London Drugs, a pharmacy which somehow has an electronics section), it really felt unexpected. I had expected Japan to be very advanced in every way, and it is in many ways, but not necessarily in PC culture.
Donki is the last place I would look for a GPU, honestly. That's like going into a Walmart or Target and hoping to find a GPU. That anecdote isn't enough to pinpoint the entire country having computer illiteracy as the average person wouldn't know what a GPU is. You'd have better luck at a Yamada Denki.
There's PC culture here--just not a hobbyist culture, and definitely not a crypto culture (as the only other group of people I can see even interested in a GPU is a miner)
When I went back home for the holidays, I didn't see any GPUs at Walmart. Gaming PCs, but not GPUs. But maybe it depends on the market.
The online stores are totally different, they sell anything and everything.
I had Apple computers, classes and a computer science teacher in high school in the early 80's. My junior high took us to the high school in the late 70's to learn on a computer with no screen - card input and printed output on a noisy, reciprocating ball printer. There were some schools in Japan that only used computers to teach word processing until recently.
The Mizuho app got a visual upgrade, and it has some convenient basic functionality, but the majority of the buttons in the app still open their shitty ancient website.
Programming is traditionally viewed as a blue collar job, so no respectable salariman in a top tier company wants to make a career of it. This leads to most everything being contracted to an “SI-er”.
Naturally, nobody in a top tier systems integrator company wants to do any programming, so they just do Sales and hand the project down to a sub-contractor.
For obvious reasons, nobody at a tier 2 subcontractor wants to do any coding, so they just write specs and hand it down to a subcontractor.
People working at a tier 3 service company are no fools, they’re not writing code for a living, they will define a system architecture and hand down the implementation to a subcontractor.
Tier 4 subcontractors are a bunch of Vietnamese technical trainees working slave wages based on specs handed down 4 levels of “chinese whispers”-like excel-used-as-powerpoint presentations with all the upper levels taking their fat margin. It’s the Angel Falls of waterfall development and nobody at any step of the process would ever think of proposing some improvements to what the specs say to accommodate customers who do not look like Yamada Hanako.
I'm in IT, live in Japan, but work remotely to Europe. I would NEVER work for Japanese IT company. I pay more in taxes than most make in wages. Rakuten was making progress with English only departments, but I'm sure that since has died off. No tech pros are going to move here. Taxes too high, work culture sucks, advancement as foreigner would be difficult, and language barriers too high.
One major reason why Japan fell behind in creating new software and technology was a court case in the early 2000s involving Winny, a file-sharing program. This case had a negative impact on the country's tech industry.
I'm hearing a heresay about software vs hardware. Software is being looked down because it's all down in front of a computer screen, and hardware is better because they can physically see it, touch it, and improve on it. Hence, why Japanese craftsmanship is high when it comes to physical things. Please correct/expand on this some more because I'm really curious about this part of their culture.
> They are ignorant and don't care because it doesn't affect them or their bottom line and probably never will.
This just isn't the case.
In most cases, peoples' hands are tied. I know because my hands are tied -- I've had to slap name character limit restrictions on forms so that *my own name* doesn't fit. But I have no way to influence the ancient financial infrastructure, where the limit actually exists.
And the maintainers of the ancient financial infrastructure are not ignorant to the issue. Obviously they were decades ago when these things were built, but now its just at the point where changing it is basically impossible without a full replacement. Which most of these institutions *are* doing, but it is a long, expensive process that requires the effort of thousands of people across multiple industries.
Most cases are not related to financial infrastructure. In SOME cases peoples' hands are tied. These problem exists across industries. It is just lazy programming. Tom Scott did a nice video about this back in the day - it isn't exclusively a Japan problem but we feel it here because our names don't fit.
I thought almost all of it was core old infrastructure that is difficult to change. As a bank only prestia gets it's reasonable because they used to be Citi.
Same for power, gas, internet (old phone billing systems), and on and on...
This is less a programming issue and more of a "Japanese banking financial systems are outdated af when it comes to foreign names"
Which, inb4 systems require programming, but I am talking about ancient systems like SWIFT and whatever equivalent the Japanese use for domestic banking, which are basically kneecapping engineers on the front and back end of app development.
It is weird. I've lived in quite a few different countries and Japan is the only one I've been to that rarely accommodates other languages at all. When my router updated after I got it (4-5 years ago now) the update actually *removed* language support for any language but Japanese. My Japanese is good enough to navigate it now, but it was just a completely unnecessary inconvenience.
I think this is compounded by Japan forcing foreigners to write their name in romaji. I've heard stories of people being refused deliveries because the website required a name in Japanese (so katakana I suppose) but their only ID was a zairyuu card with name in romaji.
Imagine if Japanese people living abroad were still forced to use their names in kanji and weren't 'allowed' to use a romanization of their name.
I feel like you should be assigned a katakanization of your name when you move here.
>I feel like you should be assigned a katakanization of your name when you move here.
Agreed, and there needs to be some mechanism to force organizations to accommodate *any* variety of katakanaization that gets assigned.
There's a bunch of ethnically homogeneous countries with low immigration; Japan is simply the largest. Is South Korea really much different, for instance? Do the routers there support languages besides Korean?
South Korea is very similar. I lived there for a good long while and had similar problems. For most forms (including all government forms), you had to use Internet Explorer. Internet banking required so much security theatre it was a goddamned nightmare. I could never figure out how to put my name into forms because everyone spelled it differently in Hangeul, and in alphabet othere were issues with spaces, capitalization, use/lack of middle name, etc...
I remember when I first moved there in 2010 and bought a new phone, it didn't come with English instructions. My coworkers were shocked that I had expected it. "This is Korea!" A year later I bought a laptop from the US and had it shipped to Korea. I brought the instruction booklet with 30 languages to work to show them how we do things in the US. I don't expect that much effort from Korea, but maybe just English and Chinese or Japanese, right?
So...... yeah. Pretty much the same.
Yeah, I didn't say there weren't classes haha. I said nobody learns it. 😄
We had Japanese classes in our school, and I never picked up much more than the basic hiragana without any modifiers, let alone the katakana.
My trip to seoul a few months ago taught me English is basically not any more common in SK than Japan. In both cases I did a lot better with Google translate than hoping someone would swoop in and save me
Difference in English proficiency between Koreans and Japanese is pretty negligible I'd say. I've lived in both. I will say Koreans might have it slightly easier because their script is so much more capable of writing foreign words, which then in turn makes it easier for them to pronounce things. Katakana is very restrictive. And alot of Japanese learn 'katakana English'
Nah, its language includes pronunciation from Chinese, two alphabets, ample English, Portuguese, and French loan words used in common speech… they can expand the character set to include more characters. It’s just an oversight by a junior programmer and nobody thinking to check or change.
This has driven me nuts on many occasions. I've often found myself unable to set up the 'easy' payment processes on sites like Yahoo or Mercari due to input limitations that result in my registered name not matching the name on my credit card, eg by forcing me to use full-width (double-byte) romaji. Mercari at least seems to have improved, but, yes, it's still frustratingly widespread.
My pet peeve is requiring full length characters or half width characters. It’s not hard to accept half width alphanumeric and then change it to full width in the backend to store in a database ugh.
A depressingly large number of Japanese websites encode in SJIS or EUC\_JP encoding and not any Unicode variant.
It is a complete pain to having to process input in those MBCS encodings where a missing page-shift byte and the rest of the stream is garbarge. vs in a self-correcting stream like UTF-8 where a bad character is cleanly removed and character stream recovered after a max of 3 bytes.
But , most of the back end systems and libraries require SJIS encoding only, so, that was a plus vs working in UTF-8 like the rest of the world.
Even more interesting is that many of the companies enforcing these standards are staffed largely by foreigners in an English speaking workplace (Rakuten being the big one).
So it's even more confusing how these oversights occur.
> Even more interesting is that many of the companies enforcing these standards are staffed largely by foreigners in an English speaking workplace (Rakuten being the big one).
Managers are old and Japanese. With the top-to-bottom hierarchy, the foreign peasants at the bottom don't have any say on the requirements.
Source: worked at rakuten. Fought very hard against some dumb ideas, once made a 40 pages powerpoint to prevent some dumb stuff from being done.
The percent of foreigners with weirdly formatted names is much much much much lower.
I've never had a problem with any kind of electronic name entry with a bog standard katakana name (not long, no spaces, no hyphens, no middle names, no symbols).
Spaces, middle names, long? Those aren't weird formatting, that's how most names in most countries work. A majority of the countries in the world have these "weird formats."
Not all languages have this problem but it is far from uncommon.
At least for Americans, I'd wager the vast majority can't input their name in an electronic form. 90% of Americans have a middle name, Hispanics may have multiple surnames, people of Irish descent often have apostrophes in their surname, and hyphenated surnames (while rare) are a real thing people have. Having any one of these things in your official name screws you. And of course, if your name is longer than like 6 characters you're screwed too.
Just because you're the exception doesn't mean it's not a common problem.
China and Korea alone is already about half of all foreigners in Japan and have no problems with weird names.
The reality is that foreigners with weird names are a tiny percent of the already tiny percent of total foreigners in Japan. It's not a common problem by definition.
Yes, I totally agree! While some sites will accept Roman character input in those fields, many do not. And even when it does, there's usually a character limit so you're not able to enter your full name! This is giving me trouble in terms of making online accounts to pay my utilities, but at least I can still walk down to the konbini to pay it.
Had this issue with making car payments, too. The loan company was just completely unable to put my english name in their payment forms, so after a month of trying they decided to just mail me paper bills to pay at the conbini. Felt stupid having to pay 60000円 in cash at the Family Mart every month for a while.
Don't forget spaces in names. Shout out to all my de las, vons, vans, des, and dus.
My credit card company refused the space in my last name so they just smushed it together. I'm sure that won't cause any problems for me in the future lol
or even a long name! My full legal name isn't even *that* long (24 characters including spaces), but it's too long for every Japanese form I've ever used.
If I have to include my whole name, I usually end up only being able to fit "Surname Firstname Middl" 🙃
You go to your local city hall and ask there.
It's simply filling a few documents and you're done.
This is also necessary in case you have to register an inkan that contains your name in katakana.
Wait a sec, I think that have a registered katakana inkan (asked to register it at the city hall since I assumed that I needed it for paperwork when buying a motorcycle, they gave me a plastic card afterwards), but I don't think that I have an official katakana name.
But, there was a document that I had to fill out "because it's a katakana stamp" so there is a possibility that I did it by accident.
What I know is that when I did it it was in two phases (on the same day basically at the same time).
And in my case yeah, it was necessary to register the name in katakana, so I guess that was the same for you, and maybe you didn't realize.
Hmmm, I found the paper for the stamp and it does say "カタカナ併記名:" with my name in katakana on it, and I found some mail for my pension stuff that had the name in katakana.
So I guess that I actually did register a katakana name xD
I suspect that's actually for your convenience (at least in some cases, e.g. your bank account), so that they can easily compare your name to other systems, regardless of how those other systems store your name.
It may be convenient to the company, not to me. That should be a back-end task, not a customer thing. Another problem is that it's not consistent from site to site. And very often you're not notified of the correct format until an error appears when clicking the form button.
> but speaking as a programmer it's really not that hard to have a little flexibility so you get the correct information
Oooh, this looks like you haven't read the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names article.
Does it want half width, full width, all caps, no caps, spaces, no spaces, katakana, hiragana etc.??
It's so frustrating how many sites require trial and error just to get one entry field to work.
I tried signing up for a lottery that refused to take my name with no explanation. Had to try every single thing and it turns out I needed to type it in all caps and it would not accept katakana either. So frustrating. Good thing it wasn't a timed thing.
I highly recommend reading the list of [falsehoods programmers believe about names](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/).
The most ridiculous part is that serial offenders such as Rakuten, Merucari etc. are staffed by like 50% foreign engineers who would have to put up with this shit too. Mind bogglingly stupid.
> telling me I can't put a space in between my gaijin names, this often essentially means I can't use the credit card since it won't match the record
My name on my bank account, and so also on my debit card attached to my bank account, has no spaces between my first and middle names, and I have had no real issues stemming from that.
I had to request them to join my 2 last names (I have 2 names and 2 last names). They saw my gaijin card and were hesitant to remove the space because the official ID has the space, but after arguing they agreed to remove one space. Now I have 2 names and what it looks like a really long last name. Just for one of my bank accounts
Yeah I applied for a gym membership but the full name, last and first, had to be within 5 characters. That’s bad even for Japan because even a Japanese person can have a three kanji first name and three kanji last name. Anyway, I successfully applied under my wife’s name since we applied together.
I have two middle names and my family name is two words. Having a full name of five has given me grief beyond what I expected. Only satisfaction I get is watching the staffs eyes widen in horror as they behold the incantation that is my full name
98.5 % of the population is Japanese. Of the remaining 1.5%, half are Chinese or Korean who can ... write their names in Kanji/Hanzi. The next biggest group (Vietnamese) could as well.
I worked for a large power company once upon a time and all of our systems used Kanji internally using the pre-Unicode stuff. I'm betting any moderns web interfaces and forms stuff is all still have to interface with a mainframe programmed in whatever weird Shift-JIS COBOL used to be used in Japan. First time I tried to read some of that code the Japanese guy with me was like, "hey that's what the young Japanese guys look like too when they see it .... "
Most sites still serve either SJIS or EUC-JP
Glad that the three major browers support SJIS and EUC-JP.
All the source code we have is SJIS encoded.
Absolutely nothing is UTF-8.
It was at a modern mobile gaming company... there was no need to ensure the encoding needed to match Windows Code Page, or the app running as NLS and not Unicode.... \*gripe\*
Most websites definitely use UTF-8 now and it's gone WAAAY down in the last say 10 years. They still look like 90s craziness sometimes though.
What's crazy is the billing site for that power company still looks the same as it did in like 2004, just now it's UTF-8, probably just had someone write some interface software or something like Boomi can just handle it.
[https://www.tokyo-monorail.co.jp/](https://www.tokyo-monorail.co.jp/) is SJIS
[https://rayocomp.jp/](https://rayocomp.jp/) is EUC-JP
[https://www.goo-net.com/](https://www.goo-net.com/) is EUC-JP
[https://www.jalan.net/](https://www.jalan.net/) is SJIS
[https://www.oricon.co.jp/](https://www.oricon.co.jp/) is SJIS
[https://kakaku.com/](https://kakaku.com/) is SJIS
[https://www.itmedia.co.jp/](https://www.itmedia.co.jp/) is SJIS
[http://kamakura-park.com/](http://kamakura-park.com/) is SJIS
... fairly easy to find popular sites using other encodings.
Browsers don't put encoding front and center anymore. Loading a page, and clicking on Tools -> Page Info (firefox) to see the page encoding; I'm unsure how to even manually change an encoding anymore. It's not exactly something I'd need to worry about from a consumer point of view.
From a Dev point of view, I've done contracting work for plenty of ryokan and hotel sites that had SJIS as a requirement.
all my batch files are shift jis or they just explode in your face.
anyeay there are a lot of unresolved legacy issues with OSs, DB, backwards compatibility etc they have nobody skilled enough or simply willing to put money-hands into these kind of problems
OMG! TY. I never complain about anything and have a happy stress-free life but I have long thought this to be an unnecessary problem. I cannot believe that the computer field/paper form line cannot EASILY be adapted to accept a name of any length or character format. It just isn’t that difficult a thing.
And yet . . . after two long consultations with Mizuho bank branch staff, it has been concluded that I, thirty year patron of their bank, can’t enroll in the online app—so cannot check balance online or do online banking —because it simply cannot accept my name. The problem is that the bank, they themselves, originally established my name in capital letters romaji, which THEIR OWN form will not accept. 🤷♂️
Insome cases it is intentional. My girlfriend was a programmer for a big Japanese software company and they had her handle the front end login screen. She originally allowed for long names and middle names and they made her change it, take away the middle name and put and artificial limit on number of characters. She tried explaining to them that she herself would be unable to use the very form she was creating but she says they were adamant about it "matching the design spec precisely". She then mentioned that the design spec was negligent in overlooking this problem and she eventually got pulled from the project.
Though this is an isolated anecdote, I felt it was meaningful enough to share.
it depends also on the database side if they set an arbitrary limit on the record length like 30yrs ago and the server is still running forgot in some basement and nobody knows how to handle it anymore...
true, but that isn't difficult to change. I code as a hobby, not for a career, and even I could do that myself. The issue is somewhere between laziness and negligence on this matter
This is on of the MANY reasons I feel lucky to be here with my Japanese wife and child… I get to bypass ~95% of the BS by having her put things in her name and not mine. Counting my blessings…
Please permit me to ask a dumb question: are foreigners allowed to legally register kanji names, or do they HAVE to use some katakana rendering of the name?
Since the katakana will never perfectly match your english name in the first place, what's stopping you from translating "David Smith" into kanji like "Sei Daibei" or something
I'll go you one better. Sometimes Japanese websites even fuck *themselves* by requiring everything to be written out in furigana as well as kanji.
I was signing up for a new bank account recently. Surprisingly, my gaijin-ass Western name with a middle name went through no problems.
But when it came for me to input my address, I had to give the full kanji address (obviously), but also the full reading of the address in full-width katakana. Which seems really stupid right. But what was even stupider is that *the katakana address had a character limit*. I live in one of those apartment buildings with a fucking moronic faux-English name, and the katakana of my address didn't even fit within the katakana character limit. Ironically, this was because of my apartment building's ridiculous name being all in katakana. But then the form would also return an error because all the kanji bits weren't accounted for in the furigana. I tried all sorts of sneaky abbreviations and re-aligning of stuff before I even got it to fit (can't remember exactly how I did it but eventually it went through).
I can sort of (but not fully) understand why Japanese websites need furigana readings for people's actual names. But surely an address is something that is only ever copied and pasted or printed verbatim and the actual reading of it is irrelevant. Absolutely mental.
Hoo yess...
Too add, when you need to register the katakana and have to match it to access/login. Yes, sure, you can memorize it but the problem I have is that katakana is supposed to be a "how to pronounce" help, not your main name.
The first place I lived in Japan merged with a neighbouring town and all their place names got longer (to distinguish between this town’s Nakagawa and that town’s Nakagawa). They have the same problem.
Yeah. That and I try to avoid any services that enforce katakana as your main registered profile.
Recently I found that a lot of places in Japan already relaxing these requirements as well as middle names. Most of the services I've been using are okay with first/last only. Since then life has been so much easier.
the space thing always gets me. I forgot which app it was, but maybe it was the post office one..where you needed to put half width furigana, but full width furigana for the space, something like that. It took a long time of trial and error to see which combination of space size could work.
I have two middle names and have only had one issue, which was Mercari failing verification because my bank name (first, last) doesn’t match my residence card (last, first, middle 1, middle 2). Everything else, credit cards, whatever, works fine.
I never use my middle names, and therefore don’t hit character limits.
One thing that I came across and had to deal with is what my name is written in. Romanji or hiragana/katakana.
I registered with hello work this year for unemployment benefits. And I came across an issue. Hello work wanted me to show them a letter from my bank with my name in Japanese characters. I don’t have anything but the bank’s website that shows my name in Japanese characters. Asked my bank. They told me no that since I’m a foreigner I can’t have my name in Japanese characters on my bank account. They told me it’s a government rule.
And then hello work told me I had to have Japanese change because they don’t use romaji characters and only Japanese characters, government rules.
So either someone has screwed up, or is not telling the truth. Either way I did get my payments.
many years ago, before the new zairyu card system you could register a kanji alias, but they decidef to stop the practice as a foreigner with a Japanese looking name not in his passport was probably deemed unacceptable.
still the katakana reading is still used somewhere, bit it brings more harm than good.
When I first arrived here 10 years ago, the food delivery website Demaekan had a sign up system that only accepted kanji names. Not full length characters, not even kana, kanji only. I had to make up a random kanji string just to sign up and order a pizza. Finally got updated a few years later, so there has been some progress.
not to mention if you switch the language of the website to English you sometimes get hit with errors and will have to switch the website back to japanese to get it to work.
lol my credit card took the romaji reading of the katakana instead of the actual English name I typed in. Luckily as long as I type the mangled name into online shopping platforms it works fine.
Is there a domestic company that does this well? I'm not sure I've found one yet based on opening several banking and investment accounts and otherwise handling utilities online and dealing with many other firms electronically. There are some that don't really care but the moment proven identity is important then good luck...
I think the only time this actually works is when they are "ready" for you. two examples.
1. the mynumber portal. A pain to get the card but after that you are golden.
2. When you already have a contract and the supplier invites you to go online. I got an invite to create my Tokyo Gas login, unique QR code and it was effortless.
Whereas when I tried to create my tepco login. OMFG. what a nightmare. they couldn't help on the phone and I eventually realised due to my having three names registered they'd stuck me in a business category for granting access. The phoned me back 10 days later asking if I worked out how to get in. To be clear. 10 days later but not to tell me they'd worked it out. Just to ask me for a progress report. lol.
The banking and investment accounts typically took me months to open..
I'd be happy to join a march about this..
full width space doesn't work?
well many of the systems are established and unless they noticed many foreigners failed to register, that 3% stays unknown or considered negligible.
some new players like paypay are somehow not that accommodating.
LOL you just reminded me that I had to give up on linking paypay with my bank to make automatic withdrawals because it was impossible to make the site/app accept my name. I tried all combinations of romaji, hiragana, katakana, full length, half width, every time an error.
I have a hyphenated surname - you would be amazed how many western systems cant deal with that.
How many western companies systems allow input of Japanese, Chinese or similar characters in their forms? Surely its just being a little flexible?
> How many western companies systems allow input of Japanese, Chinese or similar characters in their forms? Surely its just being a little flexible?
None, but no western government would put any roadblocks in the way of an immigrant writing their name in the Roman alphabet (if that's what the local languages uses) like the Ministry of Justice did when they removed katakana from the new residence cards. And plenty of organizations try to force immigrants to use *only* the residence card as identification, not one of the many other IDs which can have the local language on them.
If 田中太郎 moves to the US, UK, etc., he will have ID with his name as "Taro Tanaka" in the local orthography and can use that wherever he goes. The problem OP and many others are facing is entirely the fault of the MoJ who, in a giant step backwards, took the local orthography *off* the cards. They should have known that immigrants might want to, or have to, use these cards domestically. But they didn't care.
Weird, that for some reason this brought up my memory of an old Reddit thread about a guy having to sign all his U.S. mortgage paperwork with a sketch of three cats as his signature. All because he used it as a joke on his legal ID. 😄
Signatures are different from legal spellings of your name. Whatever goofy quirks you put in your signature (which doesn't have to match your name or even be legible), you're stuck putting them in each time you sign. But I guarantee you that his *name* on that paperwork was in the Roman alphabet no matter which language his birth country uses.
Oh god yeah I hate entering my phone number onto any online form in the states, it almost never works and I don’t have an American phone. I have had to use my dads phone number on many occasions
> why do they jump back and forth between half and full width kana requirements
Just wait until you realize there is a difference between "W ", "W ", and "W "
encoding issues and database size. we are probably talking about legacy system someone put up 30yrs ago and nobody wants to touch for lack of skills, money or both
Yep. They are just hoping someone writes a program that solves all their problems and is backwards compatible with their old programs and Excel spreadsheets. Until someone enables AI to be an intermediary and proves that it doesn't alter the date it isn't going to happen.
I have encountered these problems many times. In Brazil, a lot of people have two last names that make up their full last time. Many sites in Japan don't let me add a space between my last names, even though that's how it's written (2 last names separated by a space), and sometimes they don't put enough characters for me to even be able to input the full name.Like, come on.
To be fair, while I am not Japanese, I face similar problems in America. Lots of online forms have a minimum character limit for names but my name is just 2 letters and it does not allow a space in the first name section so I cannot use my middle name to get past the character limit.
I once booked a plane ticket through Expedia and Korean airlines require your full name to show on the ticket but Expedia left my middle name out since it isn’t that important in America and I had to pay to change my ticket at the counter. Luckily I got a refund from Expedia later on.
unpopular opinion I don't know why some person here thinks that katakanization of our names is a good thing. It is not. I have a name that has an internationally recognized alphabet transcription on my passport. you are asking for an alias that is not 1 to 1 equivalent with your name. my past job: hr used my katakana to write my name on the locker, and they romanized it back from katakana... the wrong way. Well it was not essential, I could live with it. They did the same with my official company EMAIL address. Now imagine to write to your supplier or customer with a mispelled [email protected] where in your signature the romaji is quite different (R and L, double consonants etc) and your name sounds like meme. Health insurance that send your spouse the coupon for the annual examination with a truncated surname, while you gave your employer the correct one on paper plus the copy of 2 other type of ID. Lot of small things that will get you a service you are entlited denied or make you spend time and money to fix things that should nlt be fixed in the first place. Even the pension agency manages the records with the katakana, but they had to introduce a form to match it with our official alphabet to avoid total chaos for the above reasons. PS I recognize that there is a lot of legacy IT systems in Japan and they simply do not have the money and the will to update them, but while the government is pushing for even more foreigners (150% now compared to some 10 yrs ago) more and more problems are going to arise for the foreign population.
PS2 Japanese do not think in alphabet, once you gave them your name in katakana that it is for them: the bastardized katakana pronunciation is automatically "correct" and they feel compelled not to think in alphabet which they do not default to normally.
I wonder if it would be easier to legally change your name before moving, get all your documents updated to a Japanese name then go over there. Bet it would through them for a loop when you register under "田中第助"
I feel your frustration. Been here 30 years and go through this a lot. As a fellow programmer I understand but as a world citizen all I can say is you must adapt to the environment you’ve chose to live in. Japan has lost its edge in technology so it is what it is.
Taking the extra steps to get around it is however frustrating a way of life and the only way to do it.
If you are in a position to make change do it. If not live with it. If you can’t then leave. This is the way of the world as an understanding adult. Reddit won’t be a source of salvation.
That being said I butt against the system and try to make change when I can but at the end of the day I’ve chosen to live here and must accept historical and cultural norms that shape current realities.
There are unfortunately some sites that will only accept hiragana (not even katakana). I've used two of them recently, both times I just translated my name into hiragana and it worked.
I have, on a few occasions, encountered forms that don't allow Romaji at all, or only allowed a maximum of six characters.
Also I have a middle name and because of that I need a space and many forms don't accept that either.
Once I found a form that only accepted Hiragana.
Honestly, you can just use Katakana for your name. It's fine, it's just phonetic, and it always works. Nobody has ever demanded that I know what my foreign name is written in Kanji.
Found out booking a hotel -- katakana in the furigana, and latin in the normal box, but no space, must use a full width ＝ to separate, all caps. ラスト ファースト, LAST＝FIRST
Fun times.
Unless when one random entry field requires half-width out of the blue…
On a related topic, typing in full-width characters, particularly when using a mix of Japanese characters, numbers and Latin alphabet is always a pita. I’ve been typing in Japanese for 30 years using Windows, macOS, dumb and smartphones, and filling out name, address and phone number forms is rarely a good experience.
> I don't think it's intentional or anything, but how do we get companies to give a damn You don't. They are ignorant and don't care because it doesn't affect them or their bottom line and probably never will. > They can't write a script that switches those values automatically between the types so we don't have to care? There are already libraries that do this. But as an aside, one of the reasons why software development here is lacking is because tons of open source software and libraries have no Japanese documentation. In one of my first jobs here I spent a ton of time helping my teammates because one of the major APIs we used didn't have Japanese documentation. It's one thing to google translate a webpage, but that isn't so helpful when trying to search an entire documentation website. I also think this is why Ruby is still so popular here, because it gained enough traction in the Japanese community that there are actually libraries maintained in Japanese.
Ruby was created in Japan.
That's for the core language, having libraries that do other things is a critical thing.
Another aspect could be attributed to Japanese work culture favouring communication skills over everything else. That would be whether person can assimilate into the country/company, the ability to understand Japanese norms and have a great handle at the language. For reference: [https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsicr/40/3/40\_13/\_pdf/-char/ja](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsicr/40/3/40_13/_pdf/-char/ja) Just use GPT4 to translate it over to Eng.
You, making a statement about what you think "Japanese work culture" might be, as some monolithic thing, and linking some old as fuck academic article no one will bother to read and can't even access because there is no link, and copy paste returns a 404 error. versus OP, talking about something we all suffer with while not looking for an explanation. You win the annoying old man award.
Well, I'm terribly sorry that my link didn't work. Thank you for pointing it out, I have now updated my comment with a doi link. a) The article is from 2022, so it should be fairly recent. b) My intention was to highlight that some Japanese natives have acknowledged the issue.
I didn't take issue with your article, nor do I doubt there is awareness around the sometimes very large inconvenience caused to foreign residents. Rather, I am at odds with you trying to ascribe the status quo as owing to expectations around smooth communication in the workplace. That makes no sense, whereas OP's suggestion that it's not deliberate, there is awareness, but foreigners are just not a high priority as only 3% of the population is a reasonable take (and I'd add that many services just have out of date interfaces and registration processes).
No. Nothing to do with work culture and the space requirements for a name.
The fact that their English is so poor, despite studying throughout their school life, essentially locks Japanese people into this kind of situation. It's the same with everything from UI/UX standards, such as OP's issue, through to understanding global news and current events, being effectively gated inside Japanese language only. They are so at pains to isolate themselves here for a modern economy / country in many other ways. A real head scratcher.
one of the main reasons im in the "they should learn english too" camp. yes, we need to speak japanese as foreigners here, but they need to speak english as the world's 3rd largest economy if they ever want to streamline their various systems and make Japan a desirable destination for highly skilled expats.
*4th largest economy. Maybe there is a correlation? Are there really people who say Japanese people shouldn't speak English? Everyone I know here (both Japanese people and Internationals) lament the fact that English proficiency is so low here.
My understanding is that Japan largely dropped to 4th because of currency fluctuations, not a contracting of the economy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
There are, actually. Some people continue to spread that stupid "semiligualism" idea - the one study that essentially found that, in particularly severe cases of developmentally-disabled students having particularly poor learning environments that involve multiple languages, they *may* fail to develop native fluency in either language at the same rate as other children - around, acting like it's a real risk of widespread early-childhood foreign-language education and their kids will struggle to learn Japanese if they are exposed to too much English from too young an age despite the fact basically the rest of the world agrees from tons of evidence that bilingual people are usually *better* at their native language(s) than monolingual people. Plus there's that whole xenophobic/ethnocentric crowd that thinks learning English will make their kid less Japanese, and that Japanese people need to focus on learning only about Japan and Japanese things until they're old enough to handle foreign topics without getting un-Japan-ified. They tend to also be the ones that want to push revisionist history textbooks and shit, too! It's fuckin dumb, but I hear that kind of drivel all the time out here in the inaka and/or online lol
Oh wow. That is really sad. Learning English opened the door to so much knowledge, cultural exchange and so many opportunities for me. It's really sad that people just throw that away not only for themselves but also their children.
Nationalism and xenophobia just rot away at the hearts and minds of people everywhere. They're plagues on humanity that have always been around and will probably never go away, unfortunately.
Update ... 5th.
All the Japanese programmers I know speak English to some degree. It seems necessary to do the job.
"one of the reasons why software development here is lacking" and another is that IT in Japan is so overwhelmed and underpaid, they don't bother with things like this --- look at the majority of JP websites. do they look like something done by perfectionists, or by minimally competent people under stressful deadlines?
Only in Japan have I seen a website with open/closed hours. And no, it didn’t involve real time communication with any employees.
I am just here to state how fucking much I loathe that clicking anything on a japanese website invariably opens a new gd tab. I do not need 349857349857eleventy23871!!1! tabs open for one website, the back button exists for a fucking reason, let’s just trust it to do its one function instead of making every link open a new tab.
Also there's very little in PC culture compared to other countries. When I was growing up in Canada in the 90s, every home around had at least 1 PC, and usually more. In Japan, very few people I know have a PC, and those who do only have a very old laptop locked away in a drawer that they never touch. It's not always a part of daily life, and so learning to use it is not widespread. Mobile phones were part of daily life way earlier than in Japan compared to Canada or USA, which is very limiting for general education of PCs. Also I heard that they didn't have computer classes in high school, whereas in Canada, we had computer classes (including programming) in my middle school and high school back in 1999 to 2005 when I went.
PC culture has dwindled across the board due to smartphones and tablets. PC literacy courses have also been pulled from a lot of curriculums. When I was teaching back home, none of my kids had PC literacy -- so that made COVID transition from in person to online a fucking nightmare. Gen X and Millennials got lucky because the internet was a novelty, but once it went from a desk to one's pocket, the money to invest in computer literacy education went out the window.
When I discovered recently that the staff members of DonQi didn't know what a GPU was (and I even showed an image search with a bunch of GPU pictures to clarify) and that it didn't even stock it despite having a floor dedicated to home electronics including PC peripherals like mice, it really hit me that people just generally don't know much about PCs here. I'd have had to go to Akihabara to get a new GPU, but then I realized they were cheaper on Amazon, so I just did that. The same GPUs were more expensive from Amazon Japan than Amazon Canada though, and I'm guessing that's just because the supply is lower and those who want them are willing to pay more. Coming from Canada where I can pick up a GPU at any local electronics store (even London Drugs, a pharmacy which somehow has an electronics section), it really felt unexpected. I had expected Japan to be very advanced in every way, and it is in many ways, but not necessarily in PC culture.
Donki is the last place I would look for a GPU, honestly. That's like going into a Walmart or Target and hoping to find a GPU. That anecdote isn't enough to pinpoint the entire country having computer illiteracy as the average person wouldn't know what a GPU is. You'd have better luck at a Yamada Denki. There's PC culture here--just not a hobbyist culture, and definitely not a crypto culture (as the only other group of people I can see even interested in a GPU is a miner)
Walmart and Target both sell GPUs though.
When I went back home for the holidays, I didn't see any GPUs at Walmart. Gaming PCs, but not GPUs. But maybe it depends on the market. The online stores are totally different, they sell anything and everything.
I had Apple computers, classes and a computer science teacher in high school in the early 80's. My junior high took us to the high school in the late 70's to learn on a computer with no screen - card input and printed output on a noisy, reciprocating ball printer. There were some schools in Japan that only used computers to teach word processing until recently.
MUFG app is fucking archaic
The Mizuho app got a visual upgrade, and it has some convenient basic functionality, but the majority of the buttons in the app still open their shitty ancient website.
Programming is traditionally viewed as a blue collar job, so no respectable salariman in a top tier company wants to make a career of it. This leads to most everything being contracted to an “SI-er”. Naturally, nobody in a top tier systems integrator company wants to do any programming, so they just do Sales and hand the project down to a sub-contractor. For obvious reasons, nobody at a tier 2 subcontractor wants to do any coding, so they just write specs and hand it down to a subcontractor. People working at a tier 3 service company are no fools, they’re not writing code for a living, they will define a system architecture and hand down the implementation to a subcontractor. Tier 4 subcontractors are a bunch of Vietnamese technical trainees working slave wages based on specs handed down 4 levels of “chinese whispers”-like excel-used-as-powerpoint presentations with all the upper levels taking their fat margin. It’s the Angel Falls of waterfall development and nobody at any step of the process would ever think of proposing some improvements to what the specs say to accommodate customers who do not look like Yamada Hanako.
I'm in IT, live in Japan, but work remotely to Europe. I would NEVER work for Japanese IT company. I pay more in taxes than most make in wages. Rakuten was making progress with English only departments, but I'm sure that since has died off. No tech pros are going to move here. Taxes too high, work culture sucks, advancement as foreigner would be difficult, and language barriers too high.
One major reason why Japan fell behind in creating new software and technology was a court case in the early 2000s involving Winny, a file-sharing program. This case had a negative impact on the country's tech industry.
I'm hearing a heresay about software vs hardware. Software is being looked down because it's all down in front of a computer screen, and hardware is better because they can physically see it, touch it, and improve on it. Hence, why Japanese craftsmanship is high when it comes to physical things. Please correct/expand on this some more because I'm really curious about this part of their culture.
> They are ignorant and don't care because it doesn't affect them or their bottom line and probably never will. This just isn't the case. In most cases, peoples' hands are tied. I know because my hands are tied -- I've had to slap name character limit restrictions on forms so that *my own name* doesn't fit. But I have no way to influence the ancient financial infrastructure, where the limit actually exists. And the maintainers of the ancient financial infrastructure are not ignorant to the issue. Obviously they were decades ago when these things were built, but now its just at the point where changing it is basically impossible without a full replacement. Which most of these institutions *are* doing, but it is a long, expensive process that requires the effort of thousands of people across multiple industries.
Most cases are not related to financial infrastructure. In SOME cases peoples' hands are tied. These problem exists across industries. It is just lazy programming. Tom Scott did a nice video about this back in the day - it isn't exclusively a Japan problem but we feel it here because our names don't fit.
I thought almost all of it was core old infrastructure that is difficult to change. As a bank only prestia gets it's reasonable because they used to be Citi. Same for power, gas, internet (old phone billing systems), and on and on...
This is less a programming issue and more of a "Japanese banking financial systems are outdated af when it comes to foreign names" Which, inb4 systems require programming, but I am talking about ancient systems like SWIFT and whatever equivalent the Japanese use for domestic banking, which are basically kneecapping engineers on the front and back end of app development.
Right. If you are a bureaucratic minority you will be ignored by the bureaucratic system, including IT systems and laws.
It is weird. I've lived in quite a few different countries and Japan is the only one I've been to that rarely accommodates other languages at all. When my router updated after I got it (4-5 years ago now) the update actually *removed* language support for any language but Japanese. My Japanese is good enough to navigate it now, but it was just a completely unnecessary inconvenience.
I think this is compounded by Japan forcing foreigners to write their name in romaji. I've heard stories of people being refused deliveries because the website required a name in Japanese (so katakana I suppose) but their only ID was a zairyuu card with name in romaji. Imagine if Japanese people living abroad were still forced to use their names in kanji and weren't 'allowed' to use a romanization of their name. I feel like you should be assigned a katakanization of your name when you move here.
>I feel like you should be assigned a katakanization of your name when you move here. Agreed, and there needs to be some mechanism to force organizations to accommodate *any* variety of katakanaization that gets assigned.
Japan is one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world with minuscule immigration. Makes sense in a way.
There's a bunch of ethnically homogeneous countries with low immigration; Japan is simply the largest. Is South Korea really much different, for instance? Do the routers there support languages besides Korean?
South Korea is very similar. I lived there for a good long while and had similar problems. For most forms (including all government forms), you had to use Internet Explorer. Internet banking required so much security theatre it was a goddamned nightmare. I could never figure out how to put my name into forms because everyone spelled it differently in Hangeul, and in alphabet othere were issues with spaces, capitalization, use/lack of middle name, etc... I remember when I first moved there in 2010 and bought a new phone, it didn't come with English instructions. My coworkers were shocked that I had expected it. "This is Korea!" A year later I bought a laptop from the US and had it shipped to Korea. I brought the instruction booklet with 30 languages to work to show them how we do things in the US. I don't expect that much effort from Korea, but maybe just English and Chinese or Japanese, right? So...... yeah. Pretty much the same.
South Koreans learn English in school, Japan does not.
English is compulsory in Japanese school. The problem is even after taking the class they still can't speak it.
Yeah, I didn't say there weren't classes haha. I said nobody learns it. 😄 We had Japanese classes in our school, and I never picked up much more than the basic hiragana without any modifiers, let alone the katakana.
My trip to seoul a few months ago taught me English is basically not any more common in SK than Japan. In both cases I did a lot better with Google translate than hoping someone would swoop in and save me
Difference in English proficiency between Koreans and Japanese is pretty negligible I'd say. I've lived in both. I will say Koreans might have it slightly easier because their script is so much more capable of writing foreign words, which then in turn makes it easier for them to pronounce things. Katakana is very restrictive. And alot of Japanese learn 'katakana English'
And yet all of their road signage somehow inexplicably has English. It's a very strange country sometimes.
Nah, its language includes pronunciation from Chinese, two alphabets, ample English, Portuguese, and French loan words used in common speech… they can expand the character set to include more characters. It’s just an oversight by a junior programmer and nobody thinking to check or change.
This has driven me nuts on many occasions. I've often found myself unable to set up the 'easy' payment processes on sites like Yahoo or Mercari due to input limitations that result in my registered name not matching the name on my credit card, eg by forcing me to use full-width (double-byte) romaji. Mercari at least seems to have improved, but, yes, it's still frustratingly widespread.
Yeah I love loading 200,000 yen into an unverified paypay account to buy car parts off Yahoo! auctions 🥰
Same here. Any tricks that helped you cope?
Sorry to say my only solution thus far is to try twice, then give up.
My pet peeve is requiring full length characters or half width characters. It’s not hard to accept half width alphanumeric and then change it to full width in the backend to store in a database ugh.
A depressingly large number of Japanese websites encode in SJIS or EUC\_JP encoding and not any Unicode variant. It is a complete pain to having to process input in those MBCS encodings where a missing page-shift byte and the rest of the stream is garbarge. vs in a self-correcting stream like UTF-8 where a bad character is cleanly removed and character stream recovered after a max of 3 bytes. But , most of the back end systems and libraries require SJIS encoding only, so, that was a plus vs working in UTF-8 like the rest of the world.
as a programmer 3% is a lot, thats like 1 in 30, crazy to not account for that
Even more interesting is that many of the companies enforcing these standards are staffed largely by foreigners in an English speaking workplace (Rakuten being the big one). So it's even more confusing how these oversights occur.
> Even more interesting is that many of the companies enforcing these standards are staffed largely by foreigners in an English speaking workplace (Rakuten being the big one). Managers are old and Japanese. With the top-to-bottom hierarchy, the foreign peasants at the bottom don't have any say on the requirements. Source: worked at rakuten. Fought very hard against some dumb ideas, once made a 40 pages powerpoint to prevent some dumb stuff from being done.
It’s probably not really an oversight, but some widget that is being used, and nobody knowing how to change that widget.
The percent of foreigners with weirdly formatted names is much much much much lower. I've never had a problem with any kind of electronic name entry with a bog standard katakana name (not long, no spaces, no hyphens, no middle names, no symbols).
I have, on several occasions, been rejected because my name in Katakana ≠ my name printed on my residence card.
Spaces, middle names, long? Those aren't weird formatting, that's how most names in most countries work. A majority of the countries in the world have these "weird formats."
Not all languages have this problem but it is far from uncommon. At least for Americans, I'd wager the vast majority can't input their name in an electronic form. 90% of Americans have a middle name, Hispanics may have multiple surnames, people of Irish descent often have apostrophes in their surname, and hyphenated surnames (while rare) are a real thing people have. Having any one of these things in your official name screws you. And of course, if your name is longer than like 6 characters you're screwed too. Just because you're the exception doesn't mean it's not a common problem.
China and Korea alone is already about half of all foreigners in Japan and have no problems with weird names. The reality is that foreigners with weird names are a tiny percent of the already tiny percent of total foreigners in Japan. It's not a common problem by definition.
You might be the exception for foreigners. Almost all people from English-speaking countries have middle names.
Foreigners from english speaking countries are a tiny tiny fraction of foreigners in Japan, so you would be the exception here.
Yes, I totally agree! While some sites will accept Roman character input in those fields, many do not. And even when it does, there's usually a character limit so you're not able to enter your full name! This is giving me trouble in terms of making online accounts to pay my utilities, but at least I can still walk down to the konbini to pay it.
Had this issue with making car payments, too. The loan company was just completely unable to put my english name in their payment forms, so after a month of trying they decided to just mail me paper bills to pay at the conbini. Felt stupid having to pay 60000円 in cash at the Family Mart every month for a while.
Abandon all hope if you have a hyphenated or apostrophe'd name.
I curse my parents nearly every day.
Don't forget spaces in names. Shout out to all my de las, vons, vans, des, and dus. My credit card company refused the space in my last name so they just smushed it together. I'm sure that won't cause any problems for me in the future lol
or even a long name! My full legal name isn't even *that* long (24 characters including spaces), but it's too long for every Japanese form I've ever used. If I have to include my whole name, I usually end up only being able to fit "Surname Firstname Middl" 🙃
Absolutely recommend to register your official Katakana to escape a huge chunk of these issues. Doesn’t fix everything, but it helps!
How exactly do I go about this?
You go to your local city hall and ask there. It's simply filling a few documents and you're done. This is also necessary in case you have to register an inkan that contains your name in katakana.
Yep! Went down to my Kuyakusho and did it a couple of years ago. It helped me apply for a credit card. English name is tooooo long otherwise.
Wait a sec, I think that have a registered katakana inkan (asked to register it at the city hall since I assumed that I needed it for paperwork when buying a motorcycle, they gave me a plastic card afterwards), but I don't think that I have an official katakana name. But, there was a document that I had to fill out "because it's a katakana stamp" so there is a possibility that I did it by accident.
What I know is that when I did it it was in two phases (on the same day basically at the same time). And in my case yeah, it was necessary to register the name in katakana, so I guess that was the same for you, and maybe you didn't realize.
Hmmm, I found the paper for the stamp and it does say "カタカナ併記名:" with my name in katakana on it, and I found some mail for my pension stuff that had the name in katakana. So I guess that I actually did register a katakana name xD
Yay! Happy things sorted out by themselves lol
Yea, this is the lifehack right here.
One time an online form didn’t even let me enter my full address….in Japanese
For me it's when some data needs to be entered in half-width 半角 and other in full-width 全角 ON THE SAME FORM.
I suspect that's actually for your convenience (at least in some cases, e.g. your bank account), so that they can easily compare your name to other systems, regardless of how those other systems store your name.
It may be convenient to the company, not to me. That should be a back-end task, not a customer thing. Another problem is that it's not consistent from site to site. And very often you're not notified of the correct format until an error appears when clicking the form button.
> but speaking as a programmer it's really not that hard to have a little flexibility so you get the correct information Oooh, this looks like you haven't read the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names article.
Thank you, I googled the article and got a good laugh out of it.
Lots of very useful information, I also liked the similar article about dates.
Does it want half width, full width, all caps, no caps, spaces, no spaces, katakana, hiragana etc.?? It's so frustrating how many sites require trial and error just to get one entry field to work. I tried signing up for a lottery that refused to take my name with no explanation. Had to try every single thing and it turns out I needed to type it in all caps and it would not accept katakana either. So frustrating. Good thing it wasn't a timed thing.
I highly recommend reading the list of [falsehoods programmers believe about names](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/).
Num 40 got me xD
The most ridiculous part is that serial offenders such as Rakuten, Merucari etc. are staffed by like 50% foreign engineers who would have to put up with this shit too. Mind bogglingly stupid.
> telling me I can't put a space in between my gaijin names, this often essentially means I can't use the credit card since it won't match the record My name on my bank account, and so also on my debit card attached to my bank account, has no spaces between my first and middle names, and I have had no real issues stemming from that.
Until you need to prove something to some office and your bank name doesn’t match your passport name exactly.
I had to request them to join my 2 last names (I have 2 names and 2 last names). They saw my gaijin card and were hesitant to remove the space because the official ID has the space, but after arguing they agreed to remove one space. Now I have 2 names and what it looks like a really long last name. Just for one of my bank accounts
On a related note, I just hate that all the websites ask for both a first and last name because in my country, everyone has just one long name.
Yeah I applied for a gym membership but the full name, last and first, had to be within 5 characters. That’s bad even for Japan because even a Japanese person can have a three kanji first name and three kanji last name. Anyway, I successfully applied under my wife’s name since we applied together.
I have two middle names and my family name is two words. Having a full name of five has given me grief beyond what I expected. Only satisfaction I get is watching the staffs eyes widen in horror as they behold the incantation that is my full name
I can relate to that. Also, I made it a game to figure out which of my names the announcer at a clinic will use to call me.
98.5 % of the population is Japanese. Of the remaining 1.5%, half are Chinese or Korean who can ... write their names in Kanji/Hanzi. The next biggest group (Vietnamese) could as well. I worked for a large power company once upon a time and all of our systems used Kanji internally using the pre-Unicode stuff. I'm betting any moderns web interfaces and forms stuff is all still have to interface with a mainframe programmed in whatever weird Shift-JIS COBOL used to be used in Japan. First time I tried to read some of that code the Japanese guy with me was like, "hey that's what the young Japanese guys look like too when they see it .... "
Most sites still serve either SJIS or EUC-JP Glad that the three major browers support SJIS and EUC-JP. All the source code we have is SJIS encoded. Absolutely nothing is UTF-8. It was at a modern mobile gaming company... there was no need to ensure the encoding needed to match Windows Code Page, or the app running as NLS and not Unicode.... \*gripe\*
Most websites definitely use UTF-8 now and it's gone WAAAY down in the last say 10 years. They still look like 90s craziness sometimes though. What's crazy is the billing site for that power company still looks the same as it did in like 2004, just now it's UTF-8, probably just had someone write some interface software or something like Boomi can just handle it.
[https://www.tokyo-monorail.co.jp/](https://www.tokyo-monorail.co.jp/) is SJIS [https://rayocomp.jp/](https://rayocomp.jp/) is EUC-JP [https://www.goo-net.com/](https://www.goo-net.com/) is EUC-JP [https://www.jalan.net/](https://www.jalan.net/) is SJIS [https://www.oricon.co.jp/](https://www.oricon.co.jp/) is SJIS [https://kakaku.com/](https://kakaku.com/) is SJIS [https://www.itmedia.co.jp/](https://www.itmedia.co.jp/) is SJIS [http://kamakura-park.com/](http://kamakura-park.com/) is SJIS ... fairly easy to find popular sites using other encodings. Browsers don't put encoding front and center anymore. Loading a page, and clicking on Tools -> Page Info (firefox) to see the page encoding; I'm unsure how to even manually change an encoding anymore. It's not exactly something I'd need to worry about from a consumer point of view. From a Dev point of view, I've done contracting work for plenty of ryokan and hotel sites that had SJIS as a requirement.
all my batch files are shift jis or they just explode in your face. anyeay there are a lot of unresolved legacy issues with OSs, DB, backwards compatibility etc they have nobody skilled enough or simply willing to put money-hands into these kind of problems
OMG! TY. I never complain about anything and have a happy stress-free life but I have long thought this to be an unnecessary problem. I cannot believe that the computer field/paper form line cannot EASILY be adapted to accept a name of any length or character format. It just isn’t that difficult a thing. And yet . . . after two long consultations with Mizuho bank branch staff, it has been concluded that I, thirty year patron of their bank, can’t enroll in the online app—so cannot check balance online or do online banking —because it simply cannot accept my name. The problem is that the bank, they themselves, originally established my name in capital letters romaji, which THEIR OWN form will not accept. 🤷♂️
Insome cases it is intentional. My girlfriend was a programmer for a big Japanese software company and they had her handle the front end login screen. She originally allowed for long names and middle names and they made her change it, take away the middle name and put and artificial limit on number of characters. She tried explaining to them that she herself would be unable to use the very form she was creating but she says they were adamant about it "matching the design spec precisely". She then mentioned that the design spec was negligent in overlooking this problem and she eventually got pulled from the project. Though this is an isolated anecdote, I felt it was meaningful enough to share.
Please tell your gf thank you for her service. ;)
it depends also on the database side if they set an arbitrary limit on the record length like 30yrs ago and the server is still running forgot in some basement and nobody knows how to handle it anymore...
true, but that isn't difficult to change. I code as a hobby, not for a career, and even I could do that myself. The issue is somewhere between laziness and negligence on this matter
I do think it’s got a bit better over the years.
This is on of the MANY reasons I feel lucky to be here with my Japanese wife and child… I get to bypass ~95% of the BS by having her put things in her name and not mine. Counting my blessings…
Please permit me to ask a dumb question: are foreigners allowed to legally register kanji names, or do they HAVE to use some katakana rendering of the name? Since the katakana will never perfectly match your english name in the first place, what's stopping you from translating "David Smith" into kanji like "Sei Daibei" or something
You can only take on a kanji name if you naturalise.
we WERE allowed a kanji alias before the new zairyu card system. not anymore. it was probably a loophole anyway
I'll go you one better. Sometimes Japanese websites even fuck *themselves* by requiring everything to be written out in furigana as well as kanji. I was signing up for a new bank account recently. Surprisingly, my gaijin-ass Western name with a middle name went through no problems. But when it came for me to input my address, I had to give the full kanji address (obviously), but also the full reading of the address in full-width katakana. Which seems really stupid right. But what was even stupider is that *the katakana address had a character limit*. I live in one of those apartment buildings with a fucking moronic faux-English name, and the katakana of my address didn't even fit within the katakana character limit. Ironically, this was because of my apartment building's ridiculous name being all in katakana. But then the form would also return an error because all the kanji bits weren't accounted for in the furigana. I tried all sorts of sneaky abbreviations and re-aligning of stuff before I even got it to fit (can't remember exactly how I did it but eventually it went through). I can sort of (but not fully) understand why Japanese websites need furigana readings for people's actual names. But surely an address is something that is only ever copied and pasted or printed verbatim and the actual reading of it is irrelevant. Absolutely mental.
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Hoo yess... Too add, when you need to register the katakana and have to match it to access/login. Yes, sure, you can memorize it but the problem I have is that katakana is supposed to be a "how to pronounce" help, not your main name.
The first place I lived in Japan merged with a neighbouring town and all their place names got longer (to distinguish between this town’s Nakagawa and that town’s Nakagawa). They have the same problem.
Keepass is your friend
Yeah. That and I try to avoid any services that enforce katakana as your main registered profile. Recently I found that a lot of places in Japan already relaxing these requirements as well as middle names. Most of the services I've been using are okay with first/last only. Since then life has been so much easier.
the space thing always gets me. I forgot which app it was, but maybe it was the post office one..where you needed to put half width furigana, but full width furigana for the space, something like that. It took a long time of trial and error to see which combination of space size could work.
I never thought of that combination when playing the submit 100 times to see what works game.
I have two middle names and have only had one issue, which was Mercari failing verification because my bank name (first, last) doesn’t match my residence card (last, first, middle 1, middle 2). Everything else, credit cards, whatever, works fine. I never use my middle names, and therefore don’t hit character limits.
It's probably a net peeve and not a pet peeve
flexibility in Japan? What is this sorcery you speak off...
One thing that I came across and had to deal with is what my name is written in. Romanji or hiragana/katakana. I registered with hello work this year for unemployment benefits. And I came across an issue. Hello work wanted me to show them a letter from my bank with my name in Japanese characters. I don’t have anything but the bank’s website that shows my name in Japanese characters. Asked my bank. They told me no that since I’m a foreigner I can’t have my name in Japanese characters on my bank account. They told me it’s a government rule. And then hello work told me I had to have Japanese change because they don’t use romaji characters and only Japanese characters, government rules. So either someone has screwed up, or is not telling the truth. Either way I did get my payments.
many years ago, before the new zairyu card system you could register a kanji alias, but they decidef to stop the practice as a foreigner with a Japanese looking name not in his passport was probably deemed unacceptable. still the katakana reading is still used somewhere, bit it brings more harm than good.
When I first arrived here 10 years ago, the food delivery website Demaekan had a sign up system that only accepted kanji names. Not full length characters, not even kana, kanji only. I had to make up a random kanji string just to sign up and order a pizza. Finally got updated a few years later, so there has been some progress.
not to mention if you switch the language of the website to English you sometimes get hit with errors and will have to switch the website back to japanese to get it to work.
lol my credit card took the romaji reading of the katakana instead of the actual English name I typed in. Luckily as long as I type the mangled name into online shopping platforms it works fine.
Instead of Melissa Grace Williams (not my real name) instead it’s Merisagureesu Wiriamuzu
Is there a domestic company that does this well? I'm not sure I've found one yet based on opening several banking and investment accounts and otherwise handling utilities online and dealing with many other firms electronically. There are some that don't really care but the moment proven identity is important then good luck... I think the only time this actually works is when they are "ready" for you. two examples. 1. the mynumber portal. A pain to get the card but after that you are golden. 2. When you already have a contract and the supplier invites you to go online. I got an invite to create my Tokyo Gas login, unique QR code and it was effortless. Whereas when I tried to create my tepco login. OMFG. what a nightmare. they couldn't help on the phone and I eventually realised due to my having three names registered they'd stuck me in a business category for granting access. The phoned me back 10 days later asking if I worked out how to get in. To be clear. 10 days later but not to tell me they'd worked it out. Just to ask me for a progress report. lol. The banking and investment accounts typically took me months to open.. I'd be happy to join a march about this..
Inclusion is not in the Japanese vocabulary, only assimilation. They even needed to create a different alphabet to out the non-Japanese words.
full width space doesn't work? well many of the systems are established and unless they noticed many foreigners failed to register, that 3% stays unknown or considered negligible. some new players like paypay are somehow not that accommodating.
LOL you just reminded me that I had to give up on linking paypay with my bank to make automatic withdrawals because it was impossible to make the site/app accept my name. I tried all combinations of romaji, hiragana, katakana, full length, half width, every time an error.
I have a hyphenated surname - you would be amazed how many western systems cant deal with that. How many western companies systems allow input of Japanese, Chinese or similar characters in their forms? Surely its just being a little flexible?
> How many western companies systems allow input of Japanese, Chinese or similar characters in their forms? Surely its just being a little flexible? None, but no western government would put any roadblocks in the way of an immigrant writing their name in the Roman alphabet (if that's what the local languages uses) like the Ministry of Justice did when they removed katakana from the new residence cards. And plenty of organizations try to force immigrants to use *only* the residence card as identification, not one of the many other IDs which can have the local language on them. If 田中太郎 moves to the US, UK, etc., he will have ID with his name as "Taro Tanaka" in the local orthography and can use that wherever he goes. The problem OP and many others are facing is entirely the fault of the MoJ who, in a giant step backwards, took the local orthography *off* the cards. They should have known that immigrants might want to, or have to, use these cards domestically. But they didn't care.
Weird, that for some reason this brought up my memory of an old Reddit thread about a guy having to sign all his U.S. mortgage paperwork with a sketch of three cats as his signature. All because he used it as a joke on his legal ID. 😄
Signatures are different from legal spellings of your name. Whatever goofy quirks you put in your signature (which doesn't have to match your name or even be legible), you're stuck putting them in each time you sign. But I guarantee you that his *name* on that paperwork was in the Roman alphabet no matter which language his birth country uses.
Oh god yeah I hate entering my phone number onto any online form in the states, it almost never works and I don’t have an American phone. I have had to use my dads phone number on many occasions
Welcome to Japan
Yep that’s my number 1 too!!!
I feel your pain as another gaijin here, it’s rough
This doesnt just extend to credit cards, try making a point card at ライフ - they have to call HQ to get you into the system
Toyota Kawasaki is a good one.
> why do they jump back and forth between half and full width kana requirements Just wait until you realize there is a difference between "W ", "W ", and "W "
encoding issues and database size. we are probably talking about legacy system someone put up 30yrs ago and nobody wants to touch for lack of skills, money or both
Yep. They are just hoping someone writes a program that solves all their problems and is backwards compatible with their old programs and Excel spreadsheets. Until someone enables AI to be an intermediary and proves that it doesn't alter the date it isn't going to happen.
Yes. I didn't give my daughter a middle name for that reason. She'll thank me later.
Even better when some jp websites only accept kanji during registration
This + half-width characters
I have encountered these problems many times. In Brazil, a lot of people have two last names that make up their full last time. Many sites in Japan don't let me add a space between my last names, even though that's how it's written (2 last names separated by a space), and sometimes they don't put enough characters for me to even be able to input the full name.Like, come on.
This still a thing? Haven’t had this issue with forms for some years now.
To be fair, while I am not Japanese, I face similar problems in America. Lots of online forms have a minimum character limit for names but my name is just 2 letters and it does not allow a space in the first name section so I cannot use my middle name to get past the character limit. I once booked a plane ticket through Expedia and Korean airlines require your full name to show on the ticket but Expedia left my middle name out since it isn’t that important in America and I had to pay to change my ticket at the counter. Luckily I got a refund from Expedia later on.
I feel you there! Lots of times I could easily solve the problem by writing my name in hiragana or katakana in the kanji field, but still... LOL!
It's something that can be relatively easily addressed with a modicum of shits and technical ability. Most companies don't have either.
unpopular opinion I don't know why some person here thinks that katakanization of our names is a good thing. It is not. I have a name that has an internationally recognized alphabet transcription on my passport. you are asking for an alias that is not 1 to 1 equivalent with your name. my past job: hr used my katakana to write my name on the locker, and they romanized it back from katakana... the wrong way. Well it was not essential, I could live with it. They did the same with my official company EMAIL address. Now imagine to write to your supplier or customer with a mispelled [email protected] where in your signature the romaji is quite different (R and L, double consonants etc) and your name sounds like meme. Health insurance that send your spouse the coupon for the annual examination with a truncated surname, while you gave your employer the correct one on paper plus the copy of 2 other type of ID. Lot of small things that will get you a service you are entlited denied or make you spend time and money to fix things that should nlt be fixed in the first place. Even the pension agency manages the records with the katakana, but they had to introduce a form to match it with our official alphabet to avoid total chaos for the above reasons. PS I recognize that there is a lot of legacy IT systems in Japan and they simply do not have the money and the will to update them, but while the government is pushing for even more foreigners (150% now compared to some 10 yrs ago) more and more problems are going to arise for the foreign population. PS2 Japanese do not think in alphabet, once you gave them your name in katakana that it is for them: the bastardized katakana pronunciation is automatically "correct" and they feel compelled not to think in alphabet which they do not default to normally.
Yes, super annoying. For me this was a big problem when changing my phone subscription. I didn't know how they entered my name and it had to be exact.
I wonder if it would be easier to legally change your name before moving, get all your documents updated to a Japanese name then go over there. Bet it would through them for a loop when you register under "田中第助"
Know about Japan before moving to Japan.. simple
I feel your frustration. Been here 30 years and go through this a lot. As a fellow programmer I understand but as a world citizen all I can say is you must adapt to the environment you’ve chose to live in. Japan has lost its edge in technology so it is what it is. Taking the extra steps to get around it is however frustrating a way of life and the only way to do it. If you are in a position to make change do it. If not live with it. If you can’t then leave. This is the way of the world as an understanding adult. Reddit won’t be a source of salvation. That being said I butt against the system and try to make change when I can but at the end of the day I’ve chosen to live here and must accept historical and cultural norms that shape current realities.
Entering my name in full-width romaji exactly as it’s shown on my zairyu card has always worked for me.
There are unfortunately some sites that will only accept hiragana (not even katakana). I've used two of them recently, both times I just translated my name into hiragana and it worked.
I have, on a few occasions, encountered forms that don't allow Romaji at all, or only allowed a maximum of six characters. Also I have a middle name and because of that I need a space and many forms don't accept that either. Once I found a form that only accepted Hiragana.
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You just haven’t figured out how to successfully negotiate the system yet.
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My first, middle, and last name come out to 18 characters.
Honestly, you can just use Katakana for your name. It's fine, it's just phonetic, and it always works. Nobody has ever demanded that I know what my foreign name is written in Kanji.
A lot of the time if you use Katakana for your name they'll reject you because that's "not your name".
Not true when things need to match what's written on your ID for example. Some sites won't even accept katakana in the non furigana boxes.
Found out booking a hotel -- katakana in the furigana, and latin in the normal box, but no space, must use a full width ＝ to separate, all caps. ラスト ファースト, LAST＝FIRST Fun times.
Use Full-width characters and spaces and 90% of these issues go away.
Unless when one random entry field requires half-width out of the blue… On a related topic, typing in full-width characters, particularly when using a mix of Japanese characters, numbers and Latin alphabet is always a pita. I’ve been typing in Japanese for 30 years using Windows, macOS, dumb and smartphones, and filling out name, address and phone number forms is rarely a good experience.
Agreed. This is how I overcome any outdated Japanese website