u/-sakuranbo

Last month, I applied for the so-called "easy to get" Rakuten Card.

After 1-2 days in the inspection period, I was rejected. Out of curiosity, I decided to check my credit report at the three agencies (CIC, JICC, KSC). They're all completely blank. No past applications appear in any of the three credit reports.

Name is inputted exactly as it appears in my bank accounts, residence record, etc. JICC also lets you provide a residence card number as additional data for the inquiry, so I provided it there (Rakuten Card also required it, and I expect that would at least JOIN properly in whatever database they all use). Nope, JICC report came back completely blank.

Am I just eternally screwed out of a credit card here? Or should I try applying for a cash-secured credit card and use that for the next 6 months to build history?

---

EDIT: HSP 1(b) residence status, lived in Japan for approximately 1 year, income above the median household income of Tokyo, full-time permanent employee at a mid-size company.

I have zero use for PayPay Points. Consumption just to use points seems sub-optimal to me.

Apparently there's this gambling "investment" feature on PayPay where you get to select from a short list of leveraged ETF-like entities (e.g. gold, 3x tech, 3x short tech). You "invest" points into these funds, and you may gain additional points, or lose your whole "investment".

It's technically not an exchange under Japanese laws, and I have zero use case for these points anyway. Something about this feels like a trap for US tax payers, though...

I have an individual account with Schwab and the option to add a "global account", which will let me buy stocks directly from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

I'm considering buying 2-3 lots of railway companies I use often, mostly for the shareholder benefits. If I buy the stocks through Schwab Global, will I appear on the shareholder register? Or will I have to hold the stocks at a proper Japanese brokerage?

Just got the notification on my phone and found it a bit amusing.

The specification for these cards has been public for about 2 years at this point. link: https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/publications/resources/120424_01_00003.html

Presumably whatever devs exist at ゆうちょ couldn't be assed to even try getting a sample card for testing and throw the spec at Claude.

Keep this in mind when you see a bunch of services over the next few weeks announce they can't support a card with a 2-year-old public specification (with sample cards available as of this April).

---

Extra info for nerds: If you compare the above spec to the My Number Card spec, you'll find that the commands and virtual filesystem are near-identical to the My Number Card. This is intentional. It allows you to re-use the exact same logic for reading data off the card. The only thing that meaningfully differs is the authentication method. Your residence card number is essentially the "PIN" for readers to authenticate and read protected information.

Most of us know a middle name is very un-Japanese and breaks many of the hacked-together, vibeslopped computer systems in Japan.

The next mortal sin apparently is having U.S. citizenship.

You tick "yes" in having more than one tax obligation. Then Mercari makes you write your Japanese address as if it were an American address under "Country 1". Then under "Country 2", you must fill in a free-form text field (in Japanese) explaining why you have a Country 2 at all.

Also, if you even dare to report your tax obligations, the ID verification can take up to 3 months :)

...then I realized: Mercari sells shitcoins and NFTs on their app. If you do ID verification at all, apparently they'll sign you up for their crypto gambling side business and some "Merpay" thing used by all 0 QA testers at Mercari.

Oh and before even getting started with scanning my residence card, I had to swap phones since my main phone would constantly error with "failed to detect face photo".

They have managed to unseat JP Post Bank in my book for having the clunkiest, dysfunctional ID verification form.