J3J Episode 13: Docokaramo, Docomademo

Today's episode will be devoted to a simple story: making an
international call on my mobile phone.

Let's start with a comparison to how things work in Finland.
In Finland, you go to a phone shop, sign up, get your phone,
wait about one hour, and then you can call Botswana and jabber
in Swahili to your heart's content, or at least until the
person at the other end tells you that people in Botswana
generally don't speak Swahili.  End of story.

Well, the first part of the story is similar in Japan: getting the
phone itself is relatively painless, in fact probably much
less painful since phones can be bought for 1 yen, although
as a furriner you'll need to bring along your gaijin card
and convince them about your ability to pay your bills.
(And this too would be exactly the same for a gaijin in
Finland.)

So one day I needed to make an international call on my
new mobile.  I punched in the number and was rewarded with
(the Japanese equivalent of) "We're sorry, your call cannot be
completed as international dialing is not enabled on this line."
A little round of investigation revealed that yes, international
dialing has to be enabled separately; no, NTT Docomo will not
enable it until I've paid my first bill and can show them the
receipt, full stop; and yes, there are other companies that offer
international dialing services, but they also require
filling out membership applications and waiting periods of
several weeks while they poke at their belly lint.

But I was in a bit of a hurry, so I looked at other options
too.  Well, the great majority of Japanese public phones are
incapable of international dialing (and due to the
ubiquitousness of the cellphone they're a dying breed anyway),
and not even the phones in the lab were set up to support
dialing overseas.  Fortunately, in a wondrous leap of technology,
a few years back KDD introduced the "Super World Card", which is
a prepaid card that can be purchased at your local neighborhood
in-convinience store.  With card in hand, dialing overseas is
easy: just dial [special KDD super world access number],
wait for dialtone, [16-digit magical SuperCard ID number],
wait for instructions, [country code] [area code] [number],
enjoy the computer-generated announcement of "5...bzzt...minutes...
clink...and...forty...crunch...seven...boink...seconds remaining",
and then -- a miracle! -- it will finally connect to somebody's
answering machine.  And then you have to run back to the
convinience store to get a new card when your 5:47 is up.
Did I mention that international phone calls in Japan are
a real bargain, with Docomo offering rates of 372 yen ($4) per
minute if you call the right place at the right time?
And calling the US is cheaper than calling Korea...

But I got the call made and forgot about it for a while.
Eventually my first bill arrived (incl. a Y4100 monthly premium),
I paid up (again at my local inconvinience store; for most things
electronic transfer is king here but you can't pay mobile phone
bills at the bank's ATM), and with receipt in hand walked into
NTT Docomo's Shibuya disservice center...  with a date, no less,
as I was expecting the procedure to take about a minute.  (Ha!)
We were guided upstairs into the Department of Hopeless Cases,
where we sat and ate half the kindly provided bowl of candy while
waiting for somebody to call my number, which only took half an
hour.  The obsequiously polite marketdroid's keigo was a bit hairy
to decipher, but it turned out that they still weren't going
to let me get international dialing without activating direct
debit from my bank account.  Fine with me, I filled out the
17 forms in triplicate required, after which the lady behind
the counter informed me that it would take 2 months for them
to process the paperwork and meanwhile I should pay as normal
at the combini -- leaving me entirely baffled to the point of
the exercise, since now there was nothing preventing me from
whoring my phone to Bangladeshi migrant workers and leaving
Japan with an unpaid Y100,000 phone bill.  Then I asked when
my service would be activated.  In one minute, she said,
and apologized for having to make me wait for so long.
(The one minute, that is.  Not the preceding month and a half.)

So my international dialing service was activated, my date
did not have to murder me, and said service saved my butt
when my credit card was stolen in Hirosaki a month later and
I was able to cancel it within minutes.  And all was peachy...

...until, a month later, the Keigo Letter from Hell arrived.
Inside was one of the 17 forms I had filled out, with lots of
illegible handwritten Japanese scrawled onto it, a pristine copy
of the form (in triplicate), and a sickly green paper where the
only sentence I understood was the first line, thanking me for
having chosen NTT Docomo as my provider.  I stared at the title
but 「口座振替申込書再提出」 only made my brain gibber in fear.
I hid it under my desk and had nightmares for a week, until
I finally showed it to my fearless tutor Nakagawa-san, who
scratched his head over it for a while and then revealed the
horrible truth.

My application to activate the direct debit service had been
denied, and not just for one but for two reasons.  First of all,
I had been negligent and forgotten to enter my Safety Code(tm)
into the little 1x1 cm circle along with my signature; you see,
Sanwa Bank is perfectly happy with applications that have your
seal (who cares if somebody steals it, that's not their problem!),
but consideres signatures so inherently unsafe that they must be
backed up with a bank-assigned Safety Code -- which I would
evidently have to have written in the NTT Docomo office, making it
very safe indeed.  Much worse yet, however, was my other blooper:
Docomo sends its bills to a "PATOKALLIO JANI 様" and that's
what it said on the application, but alas, at Sanwa the
account holder is a "JANI PATOKALLIO 様", which, I'm sure
you'll agree, is obviously an *entirely* different person.

So off to the bank we went.  First, of course, we waited for
our turn for half an hour, most instructively spent in dissecting
the contents of aforementioned sickly green letter, which had
lovely phrases like 「預金口座振替申込書の金融機関使用欄」
("yokinkouzafurikaemoushikomisho-no-yuukinkikaishiyouran") and
「ご押印下さいますようお願いいたします」("please").  After
discussing the problem for five minutes with the bank lady,
she graciously agreed that we could correct the existing
form and that she would check with higher authorities whether
our corrections would be acceptable.  Five minutes passed,
she called out and gave precise instructions: I was to fill
out the new form (in triplicate) and enter my name as
"PATOKALLIO JANI" for the Docomo section of the bill, but
as "Jani PATOKALLIO" for the bank's section of the bill.
O-tay.  So I did, and handed in the new form.  Yet more time
passed, and she called out again: "the Safety Number is a
part of your signature, so you have to fill that in three
times too."  "Even on my own copy?"  "Yes."  "O-tay..."
So I did, and she was kind enough not to make me rewrite the
entire form.  A few more minutes passed, and she called
out again, and told me that this time everything was
peachy-keen...  and that I'll still have to pay this
month's bill by hand.

And that, my friend, is how you get international dialing
from your mobile in Japan.  (Or at least I think so -- after
all, they still haven't activated direct debit yet.)  But at
least I've learned one thing: the reason why the university's
Student Affairs Office recommended that I should not pay my
national health insurance premium via direct debit...

Cheers,