banking error, Japan style
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-eight years and a million words
Tokyo, 2010.05.31
Being illiterate sucks. I went to the bank today to pay some bills. I spent ninety minutes at it and .. failed.
One of the funny mistakes I made that sabotaged the smaller transfer was mistranscribing one katakana in place of another. Instead of "コ" I wrote "ユ". That's all it takes. For some reason you need the name of the account holder when doing a domestic bank transfer in this country, and you have to know the way they wrote their name exactly, including whether they used kanji or katakana.