You’ve been in Japan too long when, on a visit home, it takes you three tries to write a check. It’s funny but true. Japan is a very cash-based society, and there are no such things as using personal checks to pay for goods. On payday, employees at many Japanese companies in Japan get a fat envelope of 10,000 yen notes as their monthly salary, which would be unthinkable in the U.S. A couple of years ago we bought some land in order to expand the J-List facilities, and I remember going to the owner’s house to pay them for the land in cash, which was certainly an interesting experience. As a result of this lack of personal checks, foreigners who live in Japan for a long time completely forget how to write them and have to re-learn it every time they go home. When you need to pay for something in Japan, you usually do a direct transfer to their bank account, called furikomi in Japanese. It’s inconvenient and the bank fees are high (around $6 to send $200 for some hard drives I bought recently), but that’s the system that’s used most commonly in Japan.
