I figured this would be a good time to transfer some of the money I’ve made from my Japanese bank to my American bank because 1) it’d be harder for me to spend the money if it weren’t sitting in my Japanese account and 2) more importantly, the Japanese yen is way strong right now. I actually made my first attempt at making the wire last week on a day when I had a lot of time off from work. I was proud that I thought to look up and write down key phrases like “foreign remittance” before going to the bank. I showed up at the bank and was directed to the second floor, where a sign an English told me that this was the place to do a “foreign exchange.” I took my seat in line next to a sumo wrestler, trying to ignore the now-familiar overpowering smell of talcum powder and baby oils used by the stable managers to dress the wrestlers. After waiting twenty minutes, I was called to a window, where a woman explained what I needed to do to wire money. She began asking what I thought were strange questions, so I thought I had to have been misunderstanding. I asked her to write down the instructions in Japanese, and I said I’d return on Monday after having a friend translate them for me.
I was feeling even more confident when I decided to return to the bank on my lunch break this afternoon. I made sure I had all the right forms, my official Japanese seal, my passbook (like a Japanese checkbook), and my dictionary. A friend had responded to the banker’s note and written exactly what I wanted to have done. The friend also told me that the banker wrote that my transfer had already been approved and that I just needed to return to the bank to complete the transaction. I made my way back to the second floor (no sumo wrestlers this time), where I found myself sitting across from a different woman, one who looked, I thought, even more annoyed to get stuck dealing with the foreigner.
“Rob-san?” she asked, before I could say anything. Apparently the woman from last week had left a note explaining what I was trying to do. This would be painless, I thought! My first order of business was to retrieve the dry cleaning that I had, embarrassingly, left at the bank the prior week. I knew they had it because they had left a message on my cell phone saying so. The woman asked me to identify my lost items, so I told her I had a shirt and a pair of pants. “What color is the shirt?” she asked. “You mean, the one you’re holding right in front of me?!” I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “It’s blue,” feeling pretty confident that my Japanese was correct. “And what size are the pants?” she asked. For a second, I thought she might have been making fun of me, but then I remembered that by Japanese standards, I’m not as skinny. The woman disappeared for a moment, and I saw her confer with an older gentleman in the back of the bank floor. I had apparently identified my own clothing to the bank manager’s satisfaction, for when she returned, she handed me my dry cleaning. I should’ve called it a day and stopped there, but I pressed on.
Pretty quickly, I reached the point I had gotten to the previous week. I had all the forms filled out, and I was ready to stamp my katakana name and get out of there. Then, the interrogation began. “What is your purpose?” she asked. Summoning my best Japanese and utilizing the vocabulary that I had studied prior to undertaking this endeavor, I replied: “I am a customer of this bank, and I would like to transfer money from my personal Japanese account to my personal account in America. Here is all the information you need.” She looked puzzled, as if I didn’t understand her question, so she pointed to the word purpose written in English and even added a little question mark next to it for emphasis. I responded in kind by showing her the note my friend had written. She read it a few times and then the questioning began again. “Are you sending money to your children?” “No.” “Do you have children?” “No.” “Are your children dead?” “No.” “So, you have children?” “No, I do not have children, and I have never had children.” “So you are sending money to your parents?” “No.” “You do not have parents?” “No, I have parents, but I am not sending money to them.” “Where do they live?” “Huh? What?” Again: “Where do they live?”
I managed to steer the conversation away from my parents and back to me. She asked me again what my purpose was. I tried to tell her again, this time slower and more emphatically, “This is MY money, and I WANT to transfer it.” “Why?” she asked. I typed the word savings into my dictionary and pointed at the screen. She asked again what my purpose was, and this time, I was about to reach across the table and punch her in the face. “Savings,” I said. “Why?” “Savings.” “Why?” “Savings!” “And then?” “More savings.” “And then?” “More savings!” At that moment, I had a sudden flashback to my fifth grade teacher explaining conversation patterns to the class, and I could hear him saying that conversations between adults and toddlers usually take the form of question-statement-question-statement-question-statement.
After about the tenth time she asked why, I cracked under the Japanese torture tactics and gave her an answer that I thought would satisfy her: “Maybe I’ll use the money to pay for law school,” I said. This was a terrible mistake on my part because it set her off on a whole new line of sadistic questioning. “How much does law school cost?” she asked. I told her. “How will you pay for law school with this little money?” she asked suspiciously. Then: “And how many years is law school?” I told her. “And why do you want to go to law school?” she asked. “To become a lawyer.” “What kind of lawyer?” I was, by this time, more than a little angry, but I tried to reassure myself that I was probably just caught in the middle of some cultural misunderstanding. I resolved to stay calm and answer her questions one at a time. “What is the name of your law school?” she asked. I told her I hadn’t even applied yet. “So you don’t have any acceptance letter?” “No.” “So, then, you don’t know that you will attend law school?” She had me cornered. Then, she asked me to provide the bank with copies of pamphlets of law schools I would like to attend. I would have done anything at that moment to have gotten the hell out of out of Japan.
Her interest in my post-graduate plans waned, and she began asking about my undergraduate university and what I had studied. The word Princeton seemed to register with her, but she immediately asked for proof. I was feeling more and more like a criminal and began to realize that there’s no way this could be standard procedure for wiring money. I produced my Princeton ID from my wallet, and she seemed genuinely surprised. Score one point for the foreigner! At this point, the following items were all displayed on the table before Satan: my passport, my Japanese bank card, my alien registration card, my Princeton ID, my American ATM card, my credit card, my passbook, and my Japanese seal. She began asking more questions about my American bank account, so I pulled out what I thought would be my final trump card: a blank check. She picked it up with two fingers, like a child holding a dirty diaper. “What’s this?” she asked. “In America, we use these to make payments. Here is my account information. Your bank may keep it for security reasons.” She pointed to the large letters V-O-I-D I had written over the check. “And what’s this?” she asked. I took a deep breath and explained. “Well,” the woman said, “if the check is ‘void,’ then why would we want to keep it? Here, you can have it back.”
Over the next half-hour, the woman and I stared each other down from across the table, like two generals engaged in an intense game of Battleship. We came to a few more impasses. If I remember correctly, she was puzzled by why some forms of identification had my last-name first and some forms had it last. I also found myself explaining at length what a middle name is, why it only sometimes appeared on my identification, and how it can be shortened using a single alphabet letter. Our last melee was over the branch name of my American bank; I explained over and over and over that the bank did not have a branch name but could simply be identified by its address (Japanese banks, if you can’t guess, all have special branch names). “Sir, there must be a branch name!” she insisted. “There isn’t one.” “But that doesn’t make sense!” “It also doesn’t make sense that your bank doesn’t have an address!” is what I wanted to say, but I took another breath and began explaining again.
At last, her questions came to an end. She took my identification, told me to wait, and disappeared. After fifteen minutes, I told the closest person that I needed to leave because I was going to be late getting back to work. I was told to be patient. Ten minutes later, I again said I needed to leave immediately, and I asked for my ID back. I was told to wait a little bit longer. A few minutes later, the woman reappeared and handed me a transaction receipt. We exchanged some (insincere?) bows, and two hours after entering the bank, I left, racing back to work.
***
As much as I try to laugh at these sorts of experiences, there’s a dark element to them that I, like many foreigners, I believe, try to ignore, and that’s xenophobia. Xenophobia, I think, is just a more syllabic, more Hellenic way of saying racism. It does not manifest itself, as it does elsewhere in the world, as outright contempt or (heaven forbid!) disrespect toward foreigners; rather, in Japan I found that it asserts itself as a passive mistrust and suspicion of foreigners. All individuals not holding Japanese passports are required to submit to fingerprints before entering Japan. Personally, I think this seems like a smart idea, but I know many foreign nationals in Japan resent the fingerprinting.
I can’t say I blame Japan for what I perceive as its xenophobia. Along with North and South Korea, Japan is one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in the world. Different figures estimate that the population is either 98 or 99 percent ethnically Japanese. The remaining portion is almost entirely ethnically Chinese and Korean. Foreigners here tend to remark that part of being a Westerner (of European ethnic origin) in Japan means never fitting in anywhere, no matter how good your Japanese or how many years you’ve lived in Japan. Japanese people, no matter how kind, will always regard you with the same social expectations they have for 5 year-old children. Therein arises part of the xenophobia, I think. Because most Japanese people have very little interaction with foreigners, they have a hard time differentiating between what foreigners can’t be expected to know and what they can be expected to know. For example, I appreciate it when people take the time to explain to me how to sit seiza style; I don’t appreciate it when salesclerks explain to me that I’m not supposed to take the tags off of clothes I try on.
I suppose I take for granted the knowledge that people who do not look like me know how to try on clothing and how to use a knife-and-fork. It makes me wonder about whether growing up in a multi-ethnic country is a blessing.
I don’t entertain the idea that people, on an individual level, are xenophobic. I’m convinced that the woman at the bank harbored absolutely no ill-will against me. The xenophobia, rather, is more cultural and institutional. I imagine that the bank simply has special procedures in place for working with alien residents and that that particular branch doesn’t often work with foreigners. For a while in the afternoon, I tried hard to justify the banker’s behavior and her questioning. Then, I relayed the incident—without opining—to a coworker in an attempt to understand the cultural barrier that perhaps I had not seen at the bank. I was surprised by her reaction. She averted her gaze. “I’m so ashamed sometimes,” she said, “by the way Japanese people treat foreigners.” She told me that she had never heard of a Japanese person being asked such invasive questions and that she found the questions obnoxious and rude. I was glad to receive the clarification, but I regretted broaching the subject with her.
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