I live in Japan and while also not a lawyer I've had experiences with the labor bureau - this is totally false, and even explicitly stated in the Labor Standards Act:
"Article 5: An employer must not force a worker to work against their will through the use of physical violence, intimidation, confinement, or any other means that unjustly restricts that worker's mental or physical freedom.
...
Article 16: An employer must not form a contract that prescribes a monetary penalty for breach of a labor contract or establishes the amount of compensation for loss or damage in advance."
This explicitly applies to contract workers (契約社員) too, and protections for employees (正社員) are so strong that it can often take months of documentation to dismiss someone. Whether people know they have these protections, knew they had them before they sign something their company gives them or feel comfortable actually reporting when a company has violated them is a different story. But basic salary is protected strongly enough that most Japanese companies heavily weight compensation on annual/semi-annual bonuses, housing allowances etc... (which are not protected).
I think this is only a prohibition on liquidated damages clauses though (plus making the act of even writing a penalty clause, which are already unenforceable, unlawful).
It doesn't appear to be an exclusion of actual damages due to e.g. a one year contract worker quitting after 6 months, if it actually caused their employer damages.
I can't show you a specific legislation that says "you cannot hold workers liable for your losses", but the proposition seems a bit absurd to me because that just seems like unlimited liability on the worker; could you sue a worker who has to take extended sick leave because they become disabled or otherwise unable to work?
Again to be clear I'm talking about contract employees 契約社員 who fall under the scope of the Labor Standards act - freelancers who agree to pay a penalty if they breach contract I'm not sure on how enforceable that would be.
The "paper version" is still required - the RFID is authenticated with information from the passport. The idea is at a border the passport itself will be scanned, OCR'd (from the data in the machine-readable zone) and then that information will be used to read the information + signature from the RFID chip to authenticate the document.
No, you're wrong. The person's passport number is a primary key into the issuer's database of valid documents as the ultimate source of truth. The RFID is another means in case the paper version wasn't legible, but at the expense of over-communicating details.
I'm not sure when this post was originally written, but at a quick glance I can see some mentioned stores/restaurants that have since unfortunately shut down (like Deus Ex Machina which I used to frequent when it was in Harajuku but has since moved about 45 minutes away to Asakusa). This might not be the most up-to-date resource if you're visiting Japan in the future.
Also, this list specifically recommends the APA hotel chain, whose president leaves copies of his revisionist history book denying the Nanking Massacre in their hotel rooms, often in foreign languages[1]. There are quite a few nationwide hotel chains in Japan like Dormy Inn and JR METS as well as thousands of independents, most of which are listed on price comparison websites and will come in around the same cost as a room at APA. Please consider supporting another hotel, ideally a local one, before APA :)
* Dormy Inn (almost always has a bath on the top floor!)
* Candeo hotels (same!)
* M's hotels (there are many variations on the "M's" name)
* Unizo
* Smile hotel
* Hotel mystays
* Hotel livemax
* Daiwa Roynet
...and tons of others that are less universal. While there are subtle differences between them (e.g. some have better beds, others have laundry facilities, some have public baths on the top floor), virtually all "business hotels" have the same set of features, down to the layout of the rooms, and can usually be had for $50-$100 a night. That said, they are small, and you will not be happy if you're the kind of tourist who lugs multiple large suitcases everywhere you go, or if you're seeking a "luxury" experience.
Business hotels are cheap places to crash for a night and little more.
Even if you don't care about APA being a very weird business, the other chains that OP recommended are simply better. Cleaner, nicer, better service.
Avoid APA at all costs, especially outside touristic areas. APA is used by everyone for all things, legal or not, and the state of your room may vary wildly.
Not my experience at all... I've used APA throughout the whole of Japan and they are consistently good. Especially in terms of furnishings and soundproofing. They're also extremely cheap and available in almost every city. What you say about the rooms could be said about basically any hotel of course.
I'm from the UK where even a crap hotel costs $80-100/night, so being able to pay under $40 for the quality APA provides (even if the rooms are small) is insane to me.
Notice that I mentioned that they get bad outside of touristic areas. I mean the ones where someone from the UK wouldn't normally stay, like a business area or a local transportation hub.
Meaning the ones used by drunks, drug addicts, and prostitutes.
I've stayed in a bunch of them across the country but maybe I haven't been to any particularly rough areas. They all have a practically identical layout (both building and rooms) as far as I can tell. Any examples?
I am not talking about layout. I am talking about unclean bathrooms and beds, mold, cigarrette smells in the corridors, people falling over in the corridors, weird noises at night, aircons that don't work.
APA does not provide top notch maintenance for its hotels in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, Nishi Kasai, Meidaimae, or any non important area.
If you stay in the hotel close to the central station of a small town - that's touristic. Japanese tourists are staying there.
What I mean is that APA is really bad off the beaten path, and since the article recommends branching off, using APA is a very bad idea.
If I may, I would also like to recommend Richmond and Route Inn here. I have been to the Richmond in Sendai and Morioka in Tohoku on three different occasions. The best thing is that no one wants to take a copy of my residence card, which to the best of my knowledge (statement from the MHLW) they are not supposed to ask you for anyway, but a lot of hotels do ask and then suggest you go find another place if you don’t want to comply.
APA hotel isn't a great choice for most (American) tourists anyway - the rooms are extremely small. Most customers seem to be solo Japanese businessmen.
No, more that American hotels are a lot larger than European ones (I'm from the UK) and I assumed (with no real evidence) that Americans carry more luggage.
Although it is true that Japan is a bit of a struggle if you are overweight or especially tall.
One of the best room I ever had was in Norway. It was at most 3 times as large as the queensized bed, had at least 5 different lighting options and a fantastic black-out curtain (this was needed above the Arctic circle) and tons of small storage places and hooks - and this includes a tiny bathroom. Everything you need, and super cozy.
Americans are very fond of wide open spaces and square footage. Imagine being from Colorado, Wyoming, or Montana...or even California...and staying in a Japanese salaryman hotel. It's going to be claustrophobic for some people not used to the experience.
The hotel advice is if you're paying normal hotel prices you're going to get a room that's not absurd.
It's more that Japan (and many other places) have a product class at a pricing point that Americans do not so Americans think they've gotten a great deal but instead it's a product they're not expecting and not familiar with.
Maybe you want that, just know what you're buying.
There are hotels in Europe with rooms as small as cruise ship ones (I stayed at one like this called the cab-inn in Aarhus). Mountain lodges in national parks tend to have small rooms also, especially if built during the 19th century.
I just meant that you explicitly couched it as a distillation of advice you've given many times before, so it's perhaps to be expected if some of it isn't totally up-to-date.
This is an open & shut case for a card dispute. I'm surprised there is any country in the world where taking money without delivery the promised goods is legal, but I guess the US legal system doesn't care.
Try Japanese business banking - where you have to pick an OS and stick with it when registering (with a paper form), and must use either the ESR release of Firefox or Internet Explorer. If you don't have a user agent of either of those it won't even let you sign in.
For a while Firefox ESR was the only one still supporting digital certificate request/generation (KEYGEN).
My (not in Japan) and other banks used this as one securiy mechanism. With new EU rules they've now downgraded their security to a Phone app + some SMS verification.
Maybe now, not really sure if there are now changes (hopefully, since Microsoft is dropping IE), but in a time where browser plugins are abound you can't place an ActiveX plugin inside Firefox (or vice versa).
Try Spanish online digital administration. The digital certificates only worked in IE. And mid-process they require installing a Java-based program that required a different type of digital certificate. That of course make you restart the browser and lose all the data entered.
Just wow. I couldn't even come up with such a bad process if I wanted.
Oh boy are you wrong. We Spanish people love trash talking our own country, but after 3 years in Japan, I can tell you that the Spanish banks and bureaucracy are light-years ahead of Japan.
At least in Spain we have online administration, even if it's not perfect. Here? Hand written forms, hankos and fax machines. Everything is at least ten times as difficult as it should be.
Not sure if you're referring to something old, I've only been in Spain since 2012 but I'm having zero issues with the digital certificate for various government websites, from hacienda to local city governments websites. Never have I been forced to install Java either. I usually use Firefox on Linux and seems to work fine, at least for me.
That's strange, I've never needed @clave nor AutoFirm (and in fact, I've never even heard of AutoFirma before). I just use the digital certificate (for signing in and for signing documents) received from the government to sign everything directly in the browser, without any Java or anything else really.
This is one thing the Japanese banking system actually handles pretty well. When you send money, you enter the bank name, branch and account number and it will give you the reading of the name on the account (Japanese names/words can be read in many ways). If you keep trying this on different accounts your bank will disable this functionality and require you to enter the reading on the account to send money to it, until you go into a branch to reset it.
There is definitely similar Japanese-specific issues with specifying readings (especially for foreign names), but this works far better than requiring someone to specify the name exactly on the account to see if it is a match or not. I'm not sure if that would work well in the UK given how much more larger the Faster Payments infrastructure is.
Credit scores are not a thing in Japan. Unless you already have a significant amount of debt, a shaky payment history or other risky factory they will give you the card.
I moved from primarily using a MacBook Pro to an iMac Pro a few months ago, and have struggled to find a non-awkward FIDO U2F key due to the ports being on the back. I'm really looking forward to a decent range of BLE U2F keys that are supported on Desktop and Mobile.
I've been living in Japan for about 6 months and recently I've felt a very aggressive local push to get people to use these barcode payment apps. For example I recall in January PayPay were offering a discount at FamilyMart (a konbini/convenience store) for signing up and using their app, then a few weeks ago LINE Pay had a similar promotion. Both apps offer loyalty points for paying with them.
But what's strange is this feels like a backwards step; you can also pay with your train IC card in konbini and now that you can get Suica (one of the train IC cards) on Apple Pay and Google Pay it's significantly faster to use that than unlock your phone, open LINE/PayPay and get the barcode. LINE Pay also have their own prepaid card and Mercari just launched their own prepaid card built into Apple Pay too.
Still, I wonder which (if any) will come out the winner and how many more will pop up in the meantime.
>But what's strange is this feels like a backwards step
Because it really is. And yet this is again the cheaper, arguably good enough alternative won. I don't like this QR Code future either, and I am not sure if anything can be done at this point.
"Article 5: An employer must not force a worker to work against their will through the use of physical violence, intimidation, confinement, or any other means that unjustly restricts that worker's mental or physical freedom.
...
Article 16: An employer must not form a contract that prescribes a monetary penalty for breach of a labor contract or establishes the amount of compensation for loss or damage in advance."
(Source: https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3567)
This explicitly applies to contract workers (契約社員) too, and protections for employees (正社員) are so strong that it can often take months of documentation to dismiss someone. Whether people know they have these protections, knew they had them before they sign something their company gives them or feel comfortable actually reporting when a company has violated them is a different story. But basic salary is protected strongly enough that most Japanese companies heavily weight compensation on annual/semi-annual bonuses, housing allowances etc... (which are not protected).