Yesterday I had an adventure that exemplifies some of the enduringly unique aspects of the Japanese market.
I left my office at 5:30 pm and took the thirty minute subway ride to Aoyama for my evening dinner appointment. I arrived in Aoyama thirty minutes early and so settled into a cafe with a cappuccino to pass the time. Thirty minutes later I went to pay, intending to scoot right on to dinner. That is when I discovered that I had left my wallet at the office.
First, I need to explain how this mistake was even possible. After all, in New York or Paris, without a wallet you wouldn’t get far. But in Japan, virtually all transportation costs, from the subway to trains to buses and taxis, are settled through an electronic card called a PASMO. You can pay for all kinds of other things with PASMO too such as purchases at convenience stores. It is a very advanced system backed by a legal and technological infrastructure that is years ahead of anything in the US now. But unfortunately for me my PASMO was not accepted at the coffee shop nor at the restaurant where I was heading.
So what to do? I summoned the waiter and apologetically explained my predicament. I expected a furious response but he showed not even a hint of concern or annoyance. Just pay me later, he said. Can you imagine a New York waiter having that kind of trusting and generous reaction when faced with a customer he or she had never seen before? I gave him my business card and left.
I phoned my business dinner appointment and again profusely apologized for the fact that I was going to have to borrow money from him despite the fact that I was due to be the host. No problem he said. He had the equivalent of $600 in cash with him so he could cover it. Not a credit card, but a huge amount of cash was going to solve the problem. This was possible because Tokyo is relatively safe enough from theft that people don’t worry about carrying around that much cash. And so my friend’s usage of cash also reflects the weak power of credit card companies over consumers relative to the United States. If you pay cash you don’t have the temptation to go into debt over ordinary indulgences.
When my colleague arrived for dinner he joked, “but is your wallet safe on your desk?” I realize it doesn’t sound like a joke at all to American ears. On the contrary, if I were in New York or even in Ithaca this concern would have been a serious part of the dilemma I was facing. Would my wallet still be sitting on my desk in the morning when I went to retrieve it? But we both understood that this was not something I even needed to worry about. As we finished dinner I borrowed some more cash from him and we stopped by at the cafe to pay my bill from earlier in the evening. The waiter wasn’t the least bit surprised to see me, and gave me back my business card.
The final episode in this adventure happened early the next morning when I went back to my office to retrieve my wallet. I needed to meet my dinner partner from the night before at 9:00am on the other side of town for an academic conference and wanted to repay him the $500 or so cost of dinner. But my bank–actually not a bank but the local post office in fact–did not open until 10:00am. What to do? I simply walked into the convenience store around the corner, put my card in the machine and withdrew the cash. For this I was charged a fee of approximately US $3.00 I bought a nice envelope, since it would be gauche to hand over cash without an envelope, and headed back to the subway.
Japanese convenience stores, open 24 hours, on almost every street corner, are magnificent consumer centers. You can buy all kinds of things there from deli meals to airplane tickets to cell phone contracts to a clean pair of underwear. Young people have started using them for their banking needs more than banks themselves because you are never more than five minutes away from one and you can do your business at any time of day or night. Of course it did cost me something. But not more than what I would have paid to use another bank’s ATM in the US and I doubt that I could have withdrawn that much cash at most ATMs.
All in all, as a consumer I have to say that this incident was unbelievably low hassle relative to what I would expect at home. In fact you could say that my whole foolish mistake was enabled by how convenient it is, say, to purchase transportation services. I should add that my encounters with service providers at every step, from the waiter in the cafe to the automated cash machine in the convenience store, were courteous, helpful and respectful. No surly staff or incompetent bank employees in a telecenter. For me at least, this all counts for a positive aspect of a market.