I tried to get a new phone contract the other day because Line Mobile is being sunset. Since I live in Japan as an immigrant with a non-Japanese name. Closing new contracts can be a difficult experience sometimes. This article is about how I wasn’t able to get a phone contract with UQ Mobile.
I have a credit card with Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company, or
三井住友カード株式会社 in Japanese. They have a sibling company called
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC). For reasons unknown to me, the
card company sometimes calls themselves SMBC Card. See for example
their web address: www.smbc-card.com
On my SMBC Card credit card, they spell my name like so:
FIRST_NAME_INITIAL LAST_NAME
If you are Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., they would probably write your name like so:
J BIDEN
Imagine Joseph Robinette having a resident card in Japan (在留カー ド). The Japanese Ministry of Justice would probably write his name like so on that card:
BIDEN JR JOSEPH ROBINETTE
This is where we head into troubled territory. When signing up for a mobile phone provider in Japan, you have to identify yourself with your full name and provide a government-issued ID for verification.
With UQ mobile, you need to give them two pieces of data: your last name (性) and first name (名). If you are Joseph Robinette, you would give them the following:
- Last name: BIDENJR
- First name: JOSEPHROBINETTE
Note the lack of lowercase characters or punctuation. There probably are some wacky Japan reasons for that.
UQ Mobile ended up declining me. Trying to accurately provide your data isn’t enough. You need to make your circle-shaped name fit into a squared hole: the hegemony of naming convention for people born a Japanese national. They told me:
クレジットカードのご名義がお申込ご本人さまと相違しているため
God forbid someone deviates from the norm. This has been a recurring experience for the last 6 years of living here. Time after time, someone tells me that my name is too long (more than 4 characters last/first each). Or, that my name has too many ゥ, ィ, or ヴ, or spaces between first names. It confuses those poor machines that are still running on Shift JIS.
Neither UQ Mobile nor SMBC Card provide phone support for this issue. I’m back to walking into a physical store and getting an appointment to get a phone number.
It sucks that you need a phone number to perform basic tasks. Short Message Service (SMS) based 2-factor authentication has invaded our personal lives.
Many need it when they want log into their internet banking. SMBC in Japan, and Deutsche Kreditbank (DKB) in Germany need you to have a phone with a phone number. Many remittance services like Wise need you to receive SMS to log in. Many other random Japanese web services think that your phone number is a legitimate identifier and don’t offer any other way to log in.
Those who spend too much time on specific living-in-Japan forums (or
subrxxxits) know this issue too well. Who likes if someone tells them their name is
wrong, doesn’t match, or is incorrect? After all, don’t you or I know our own
name the best?
Japan has had Minister for Digital for the last 3 years. We’ve known about the issue of names being hard to spell for much longer. Refusing to spell your customers names correctly might as well be a data protection violation. There seems to be legal precedent in the EU for this now, at least for banking.
How can this country attract foreign talent, foreign startups, and foreign investors if signing up for an eSIM card online doesn’t work?
I ended up with IIJ Mobile. Thanks, IIJ Mobile.