Benjamin Hourigan

Looking around modern Japan, I don’t know why, but invisible rules have grown up everywhere. Lifestyle, human relations, clothing, deportment—each of these is enclosed in a framework. Just as the audience at a wedding stands up, sits down, and points their camera at the MC, so people are bound up in rules. (Nakano Kiyotsugu, quoted in Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons: The fall of modern Japan, 307)

At the Citibank branch in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, I just deposited 5168¥ in loose change. That’s 8 months worth of living in Japan, plus the contents of a moneybox someone left behind in my old apartment in Gunma-ken. At today’s exchange rate, that’s A$60.37 in individually nigh-worthless pieces of metal, including exactly 1268 individual one-yen pieces. It took maybe 15 minutes for the tellers to count, with the aid of a machine, and at the end of it I had to fill in the amount on a deposit slip I’d already written my name, the date, and my account number on. It was then I made my mistake.

I’d been marking up my copy of Dogs and Demons with a pencil, on the page bearing the quote above. Jung would have been impressed by the synchronicity. I used the pencil to write the first digit of the amount. Realizing what I’d done, I carefully wrote over that 5 with the biro on the counter, and continued on to the 1, the 7, and the 0.

I’d heard about having to fill out forms again if you made a mistake and a correction. This is apparently a common thing in Japan, but it’s never happened to me before. I certainly never expected it to happen in a North American bank, with a mistake that was completely invisible. Completely invisible, except that the teller had seen me use a pencil on the 5.

She reached up to get a new deposit slip from a high shelf in the cupboard behind her, gave it to me, and asked: “Can you fill it out again?” No need for explanation, I knew what had just happened. Fortunately, this was just a deposit slip. I can imagine wasting hours rewriting multi-page forms for the sake of a single mistake. It reminds me of how, at 7 or 8, I used to cross out any word I’d written with a malformed letter, fearful that I’d inadvertently write a secret sign that would summon the devil to steal my soul. I kid you not. It’s obsessive behaviour.

“This is insane,” I raged at the teller. The wait for the counting hadn’t worked me up; no, it was 8 months in Japan that had done that.

“What is ‘insine’?” she asked sweetly.

“It’s crazy!” I explained. “Look at this…” And I showed her the carbon paper behind the form. “Fifty-one seventy, clear as day.”

“Yes, it’s clear, but you have to fill out a new form.”

“Why?”

“It’s the rule.”

“That’s crazy.”

“But still you have to do it.”

And so it continued. I told her, “I don’t have to do this in my country,” which surprised her, and—oh, the eloquence!—I told her: “this is the stupidest thing ever.”

And so it is. And so I filled out a new form.

Still not satisfied, the teller asked me: “Could you write the yen sign here, in front of the amount, please.” And I raged again.

“Why don’t you write it then, since I’m incapable of filling out a form correctly? Why don’t you get a machine to do it, or a robot?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t fill it in.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not allowed to.” More rules.

And so I wrote it, and I got my receipt, and I walked away.

I ought to have got some attitude from the teller, but sadly in Japan people won’t even tell you to go fuck yourself.

I hate this country with unholy passion.