ATMs and cops

I just got back from Tokyo, where I slew the GMAT like the tyrannical beast it is, and also saw the first real metal concert I've seen in months, but that's only a lead-in, not the topic of this post. Nay, it's the last leg of my trip home that gets the limelight this time. On the day I returned I first had lunch with a friend, and then hopped on the Shinkansen (bullet train) for the 2.5 hour trip back north. This was uneventful, but when I arrived in Morioka I had to take a highway bus back to the Kosaka region, as no trains go that far out into the Great Unknown. This was planned; being a bit short on cash was not. "No problem," you say, right? "Just use a credit card." I tried that, and got shot down at the ticket window. Japan is not a big plastic payment society. Cash is the way of things, and everyone seems to carry enormous wads of it in their wallets; the almost complete lack of violent crime here makes that a common occurrence, if not one I'm always comfortable with. To put it in perspective, in a bad year you might need to count on toes to figure out the number of murders nationwide.
So anywho, what's your next thought here? Is it something like, "No problem, just go to an ATM?"

From an American point of view this seems like a viable option, and over here it almost is. They of course have ATMs, and in any civilized city it's not hard to find one compatible with your bank. Not all of them cooperate with every bank, but this is hardly the inconvenient part. No, the bitch of this situation is that ATMs close. Yes, just like stores run by living, breathing people, ATMs have hours of operation. Apparently the adorable computer image on the screen does in fact get exhausted after a long day of...being digital...and needs to go home for a hot meal, a bath, and bed. Or hell, maybe it prefers to unwind in a more lively fashion and is cruising the town for ale and whores in the evenings. Point is, it ain't where it should be. In Kosaka, my bank's ATMs close at 7pm on weekdays and 5pm on weekends (despite the lack of ale and whores, as far as I'm aware).

I arrived in Morioka around 5:30, saw that I didn't have enough cash for a bus ride home, and immediately hit up the ATM at the train station. No luck. It wouldn't say why, it just gave me a obnoxiously polite "Piss off, I'm not going to help you" message. It certainly wasn't closed; I was able to get as far as inserting my card, putting in my PIN, and requesting a cash amount before it told me this. Sigh.

Japan has a convenient solution to most problems like this. I stopped by the train station's koban (police box) to get some advice. Kobans are like mini police stations, and they are all over the place. There are usually one or two cops there, they know the area really well, they have maps, and, like I said, they're cops. If you ever find yourself in real trouble, you can also go there for emergency assistance. Anyway, the guy there helped me out by drawing me a map to an ATM that he thought would work with my bank, but alas, it did not. As before, this one was on, but when I asked for cash it told me to get bent.
Here's where I discovered that it's not just the individual machine that shuts down, though, it's the entire ATM-ing network across Japan. As I said, I had arrived at the station around 5:30. It was Saturday. If my bank's ATMs close at 5pm on Saturday, that means that no ATM in all of Japan can touch my money after 5pm on Saturday, no matter how late it stays open. Take some time to contemplate the inconvenience and utter flaming stupidity of this system before reading on.

So, back to the koban. This time the cop totally turns into a ninja. He gets on the phone, calls HQ, and basically does exhaustive research to find an ATM that will be willing to speak with my cash card. Five minutes later he's come up with a single 7-11 in the city that should work (I guess there are some ways to bypass most ATMs' convenience-proofing), but it's nowhere nearby. I've already explained my predicament, that all I need is a train ticket home and that acquiring cash isn't a necessity. Somewhere in all of this I communicate that I have a Visa card, and the relief on his face damn near lights up the room. I get the suspicion he may have been considering taking his own life were he to fail in his mission of getting me to Kosaka.
He leads me to a nearby ticket office inside the train station no more than 20 meters away (the previous one was outside, across the bus terminal) where he informs one clerk of my problem, tells her what we've tried so far, and in general is just an awesome guy. Once the clerk understands what bus I normally take and where I'm going, she is able to issue in short order a ticket that I can purchase with my Visa card. Less than a hour later I am homeward bound.

Stepping back from the details of this mess, the big picture looks something like this:

Morioka Station has a bus terminal. Right near the point where I board my bus home, there is an office selling tickets that only accepts cash. Less than a minute's walk away there is a well-lit indoor office that sells different (in appearance, anyway) tickets for the same bus, same schedule, etc. They have no problem with credit cards. Neither one advertises the existence of the other. This is mildly annoying but hardly the end of the world; I did, after all, get home.

I think I've already suitably expressed my rancor for the ATM situation, but the why of it totally eludes me. The usefulness of the ATM is severely diminished if one cannot actually use it much past normal bank hours. I can't imagine it's done to save power - like I said before, neither of the ATMs I visited were actually off, they just couldn't see my account because my bank had closed for the day. And really, if Japan wanted to save power then you wouldn't be able to find vending machines at absolutely any hour in the most isolated of locations, that serve not just cold but also hot beverages.

I may going out on a bit of a limb here, but this strikes me as representative of a larger issue in Japan, that of covering for big problems instead of fixing them at their root. Now, maybe there is a good reason why ATMs (and their respective networks) close at a given time, but even from asking Japanese coworkers I've not gotten any good answers. We even had a laugh over this recently, how the ubiquitous sells-anything vending machine drains a tremendous amount of power keeping some beverages hot and some cold, all within the same unit, but finding a working ATM in the evening, especially in rural areas, practically requires an act of God.
Anyway, it is far from the first time I've encountered a situation like this, where significant issues/inconveniences are covered up with little fixes here and there, but the source of the problem is never addressed. I'm not going to go into any more detail here, but I'm thinking of a post related to this that I hope to get around to in the next week or so.

I'll leave you with a quote I picked up not too long ago that hit this nail right on the head:

"Japan - the only country in the world where the ATMs get more time off than the salarymen."