In Japan - Creditworthy Binomial

It’s been half a year since my last update, and in total about nine months since I moved to Japan.

While a lot of the early hustle and bustle of setting things up gave way to ordinary everyday life, there are still a few things here and there that I have not been able to check off the to-do list. Two that I now finally managed to get done are registering a legal alias and getting a credit card.

The Name Chaos

Digital systems in Japan provide a prime example of falsehoods programmers believe about names. A typical Japanese name is made up of a family name and a given name, each of which consists of roughly one to five characters. Services in Japan therefore generally provide input masks for names as follows:

  • two fields: [family name] [given name]
  • no spaces allowed
  • number of characters might be limited

Now assume you’re “Thomas Pavel Sawyer”.

  • two fields, so [Sawyer] [Thomas Pavel]
  • no spaces allowed … erm [Sawyer] [ThomasPavel]?
  • “ThomasPavel” with 12 characters is too long
  • … so just [Sawyer] [Thomas]?
    • not if you’re told you have to provide your full name
    • or the system needs to be connected to another system where you are registered as [Sawyer] [ThomasPavel], or [Sawyer] [ThomasPav] b/c character limit, or any other wonky variation

The fun continues when we add Japan’s own peculiarity regarding names into the mix: readings. A Japanese person “健” might either be けん, たけし, or たける. So input masks for names are actually four fields:

  • [family name] [given name]
  • [family name reading] [given name reading]

Assume again you’re “Thomas Pavel Sawyer”. Your name does not have a Japanese reading. So you have to decide on one.

  • Thomas … トーマス or トマス?
  • Pavel … パベル or パヴェル?
  • Sawyer … ソーヤー or ソイヤー or ソイヤ?

When prompted to specify a reading, especially the first time you do official paperwork like this in Japan, you might not be prepared and therefore make decisions on the spot you’re not happy with afterwords. I managed to do that when I first came to Japan in 2015.

Because of the all the stuff described above, I ended up with a the following “Thomas Pavel Sawyer” equivalent for my records:

  • 在留カード (is created based on your passport and has no reading fields)
    • SAWYER THOMAS PAVEL
  • Bank account
    • SAWYER THOMAS PAVEL (ソイヤー トーマス パヴェル)
  • Tax records
    • ソーヤー トーマス パベル
  • Health insurance
    • ソイヤー トーマス パヴェル
  • Phone contract
    • ソイヤー トーマス
  • Various certificates/records from Germany
    • SAWYER THOMAS

To clean up this mess and decrease future frustration, I registered the equivalent of 「ソイヤー トーマス」 as a legal alias. Just the family and given name in Katakana — no middle name. To do this I needed proof that I was already using the name. Specifically, they wanted two pieces of evidence at the town hall. Luckily, my phone contract was on that name, so one done. For the second, my employer was able to provide a certificate of employment under the name (even though in their systems I had to provide a reading for my middle name, which is why my health insurance card includes it).

With the registration done, I started the process of slowly migrating everything over to the Katakana alias. Company records, bank account, … a special one ended up being my driver’s license, which I specifically had waited to create (i.e. transfer from my German one). The details of how legal aliases are handled in this context seem to vary by prefecture, but here in Osaka I ended up with the equivalent of 「ソイヤー トーマス コト SAWYER THOMAS PAVEL」on it, where the コト in the middle functions as “a.k.a”.

At first, I was a bit let down that my driver’s license did not end up being an ID I can show with just my Katakana alias. But I found that it’s actually quite handy the way it is, as I can clearly convey “you see my face and realize I’m a foreigner, on this document you see my forein name and can confirm that I can legally go by 「ソイヤー トーマス」, so please be so kind and set up your records regarding me with that name and we can all be happy.

A Japanese Credit Card

SMBC, Rakuten, and Amazon all had instantly rejected the credit card applications I did online during my first months. Now that about half a year had passed since then, and I got my bank account under the legal alias set and done, I was ready to give an in-person application a try. Specifically, I applied for an EP̈OS card at NAMBA MARUI.

The process started with them having me download an app and enter all my details for screening, at which point I was worried that all I got was someone guiding me through the steps of filling out an application, only to have the result be all the same beacuse of whatever automated screening process that had instantly rejected me before. However, when initiating the process, you select an “apply through representative at local counter” kind of menu in the app and scan a QR code they provide. I assume this (1) let’s them track the number of sign-ups each of their employees gets done, and (2) signals the screening side that you’re definitely a real person someone deemed appropriate to go through the sign-up with. Whatever the deciding factors were, I was approved and now have a Japanese credit card, which means I now finally can:

  • Set my Google account to Japan (requires adding a payment method)
  • Use services like U-NEXT that don’t accept foreign credit cards
  • Build up a positive credit score in Japan

A word of advice if you ever go do an in person sign-up like this yourself: have information on your job ready. Here are a few things I needed that I would not have been able to recall just from memory:

  • Company name spelled out in Katakana (the reading thing from above again)
  • Company phone number
  • Annual salay

If you also go for EP̈OS, they have a gazillion designs that you can choose from. I went with a mofusand design (the second cat from the left on this image. :3

Misc

… just to name some of the things I was up to. Same verdict as last time: life’s good. :)

Enjoying the current moment of meteorological mercy (before death summer heat takes reign again), I’ll do my best to publish the next post with a shorter lead-up time. — #JPpr

2025-04-27