Comment by aikinai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aikinai | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

How long ago did you live in Japan? Very little of this is true anymore. Unless maybe you're deep in the country and only dealing with businesses and authorities that stopped evolving decades ago?

I recently moved and only communicated with the real estate agent and the moving company by chat. Large trash reservation is online. Drivers license requires an application, but isn't that normal? Same with a lease; I think those are still paper in most countries.

I don't know of any ATMs that close anymore; maybe super rural banks still do?

It depends on the municipality, but the good ones have moved most of their paperwork online and allow you to digitally sign it with an actual signing certificate embedded on your My Number card and the NFC chip in your phone. If you're doing the paperwork on a computer, you scan the a QR code to complete only verification and signing with the phone.

Certainly not everything's cutting edge, but a lot of things are quite streamlined these days. Immigration paperwork, for example, is a cakewalk compared to the US, probably requiring about 100 times fewer pages at least in my past experience.

Edit: And as someone mentioned below, modern apartments are very soundproof, just not the old wooden ones.

Didn’t you still have to stamp the actual lease contract ? (+ guarantee paper, insurance etc.)

We went through the whole dance a few months ago, and while most of the discussions were done by chat/mail, we still ended up snail mailing a ton of paper back and forth to close the deal.

Also most bank ATM still have closing hours, it can be way later than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but it still closes at night e.g. Mufg’s Kouenji branch: https://map.bk.mufg.jp/b/bk_mufg_s/info/BA592126/

Going further west and some will close at 18h or 20h without remorse.

For soundproofing, it’s less a matter of modernity than of price. Foreigners often will only get access the super low and middle-high offers, so there is a higher chance to land on a pretty well soundproofed building. Your random Leopalace built this year will still have paper thin walls, and so do cheaper appartments in general,

> Didn’t you still have to stamp the actual lease contract ?

Not a big deal, it plays the same role as signatures do in the US. Only very recently did we stop having to sign credit card receipts here!

I was mostly reacting to the “we did everything by chat” part.

There are countries were this is a mundane thing, and you can go through the whole process digitally, including all the contracts signing. Sadly in Japan this is far from being the norm, and the stamping culture is one of the cause among many others.

There is a good 99pi episode on this, in extreme cases people need to physically go to the office just to stamp their papers.

(otherwise making a stamp is a matter of 30 min at any shopping mall, it isn’t a barrier in any way)

Yeah, I had to sign the paper lease and various addenda probably ten or twenty places, which was a bit much, but I thought the process was smooth and reasonable. It's pretty neat the agent is required to explain everything you're signing in plain language. It means the lease is written clearly in the first place, doesn't have a bunch of extraneous items, and the lessee knows exactly what they're agreeing to.

I don't have a stamp and haven't needed one for anything in many years living here. I understand it's basically required for purchasing real estate, but I haven't done that yet.

I think the ATMs just close if they're in a building that closes; it's not because the ATM itself can't function at night. It's been years since I personally saw an ATM that was physically accessible but unusable. But I typically just use conbini, so I can't claim to be an ATM expert. I just know it's never been a problem for me.

Good point on apartments; I've been fortunate to not have experience with those paper-thin homes, but I do hear a lot about them still on Japan-based forums and such.

For ATM, anyway we can use ATM at 7-11 that's available 24/7. Banks want to reduce ATMs, so encouraging to use ATM at convenience store.

Soundproofing would be still a problem if it's an cheaper apartments even if relatively new.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com