Today, I paid the rent for my house. 

Sound exciting?

No?

The cool thing was the way I did it.  Here, there are really funky machines that you can use to deposit money in other peoples' bank accounts (in my case, my landlord's).  The nice "greeting man" in the bank helped me do this, since I am illiterate.

The first thing you do is approach a big scary bank-machine-like monstrosity (actually, it comes up to about my hip).  The screen lights up, and asks you to pick one of two things to do.  I touched the second thing, because the nice guy assured me that that's what I wanted to do.

Then, the Japanese syllabary pops up, and you pick the first syllable of the name of the bank where the depositee has an account (you can pick any bank at all - not just the one you're in).   I picked 'fu'.  Then a list of all the banks that start with 'fu' appeared, and I picked "Fuji Bank" (this was not random, I tells ya, that's where my landlord has his account!)

Again, the syllabary pops up, and you pick the first syllable of the location of the branch you want... blah blah blah, you get the picture.  Then when numbers come up you punch in the account number (after telling the machine if the account is "regular" or "something else" (??)).  Then the syllabary comes up again, and you have to punch in your whole name!!

Incidentally, my name here is ra-ru-fu  a-ri-so-n.  Suddenly my last name is my first ('coz they do it backwards here), and it has three syllables instead of one.

The Japanese syllabary is set up in a predictable order, but it still takes me a long time to peck out my name on the keyboard. Mostly because I almost never have to deal with syllabaric order (if I have to look something up in the dictionary, I usually don't bother - although I did go to the trouble to look up Pizza Hut in the phone book).

Back to my story.  After the 20 minutes it took to punch in my name, I then had to punch in how much money I was going to put into my landlord's bank account (luckily, numerical order is, in general, the same all over the world).  Then I had to select whether I wanted it to go "today" or "some other time" (??).  The guy told me that it was the same price either way, so I figured "today" was just as good as "some other day".  Especially since the rent was actually due on August 28.

Then all the information popped up on the screen that I'd already given it, plus the fee they were going to suck out of me (630 yen) and the name of the account-holder (aka "my landord") of the account into which the money was going.  I picked the yellow box on the screen, which the nice guy assured me meant "OK" (good thing, 'coz I'd been doing that all along, after punching in stuff). 

Then, a trap door slid open and waited patiently till I slipped the bills into the little cubby it had been covering.  I asked the guy how I could pay the fee, and he pointed to another trap door that would take coins, as it was opening.  As it turned out, I didn't have enough coins on me to cover the fee, and the bills trap door had already closed.  But, it found me out, and opened again, waiting for the rest of the money.

So, I dropped in 1.000 yen, and a couple of seconds later, the coin trap door opened... and lying on the bottom of it was my change!  And then another opening spat out my receipt. 

This is one funky place!