It’s day SIX since TEPCO cut my power, over (literal years old?) fraudulently issued bills that were already paid years ago.

Trouble first began in April. They suddenly reissued about a dozen bills at random, all at once, over a period spanning the three previous years. A single envelope arrived in my post with all 12 or so full sheet bills, including conbini pay slips, neatly printed and folded.
(They looked just like the standard bills we all get each month, with orange printing, only when you looked closed, you would realize that the year for each billing cycle ws off by one or 2 or 3 – That TEPCO insists on utilizing only pure Yamato date systems that means you could easily overlook that aspect, what is it now, Reiwa? They don’t include the kanji, but for the year, they will put a 2 or a 3 or 4 to designate Reiwa 2 Reiwa 3 etc et al – pretty easy to miss if your mindset is to be searching for Gregorian dates)

Naturally, I figured single a 2-3 minute phone call ought to have cleared up what I assumed to be a glaringly obvious database error on their part. Talk to an actual human being, and once they have eyes on it, surely they will immediately laugh in shock over the whole ridiculous impossibility of it all. Right. We will be smiling to one another through our voices on the phone and laughing about it. I’lll graciously accept their simple on the spot apology without asking for any further sanctions. Thanks for clearing this up, let’s get on with our day, I would say. Sorry to have troubled you. A few key board clicks or escalation to their internal hierarchy (customer service manager) and situation resolved, yes?

Well, their response was that I had to pay these bills.

ummmm….

Upon my insistence that of course these were already paid literally years ago, with nothing but a muted inhuman sort of NPC reply repeat the same thing back to me, that these are bills I haven’ paid.

(follow the logic here, you can only get away with delaying a single payment by a few weeks or possibly a month beyond it’s initial due date, After that, they will cut your power, period, until the specific oldest bill IS paid, Doesn’t even matter if you’re paying newer more recent bills early. That other bill , irregardless of how low or high value a price it may be IS past due and your power WILL BE CUT. This is their system, so of course they know better than us how it works.

SO, HOW COULD YOU HAVE ANOTHER 11 BILLS OVER A SPAN OF THREE YEARS BEING ISSUED FOR ELECTRICITY TAHT WAS MADE AVAILABLE FOLLOWING A SINGLE NONPAYMENT OF A DELINQUENT BILL? It simply isn’t possible. Either I had been paying these bills and that’s why I had a record of using electricity, or I hadn’t paid that bill, and there would be no further record of electricity use, because they would have cut the power falling a single delinquent payment.

I had multiple Japanese friends and acquaintances all calling them every couple of weeks, just to be sure I’m reminding them that I have paid these bills already, and that another deadline is approaching, and please don’t cut my power. While they would never admit to any mistakes on their part, various deadline seemed to have come and gone, as I would begin receiving these smaller postcard sized warning letters one at a time, every two weeks or so, with a warning to pay this particular bill by this date or power will be cut, we would call them, and they would say again the same thing, that I need to pay, but after this call, the power woudn’t be cut, even though that particular deadline for that single bill had passed, then in another two weeks, I would receive a different postcard for the next bill in the line, with again the scary warning of final chance to make a payment before it gets cut, this went on repeatedly over the past several months. TEPCO never admitted anything on the phone, only to basically accuse me of being a deadbeat to each one of the people I asked to call on my behalf. Insisting I needed to prove That I had paid these bills with receipts from 3 years ago. Until then it was assumed I as in the wrong, period. Yet after each of these calls, the specific date in the angry red postcard would come and go, and the power would still be functioning.

I figured, well this is annoying and stressful, and when I go away for business travel or just a few days of a getaway, there’s always this pit in my stomach that I may return to a home without power.

It seems to be just some weird anomaly their software, a nasty little bug to be sure, but it isn’t causing any real world harm beyond being an annoying time waster, and causing a little stress over the fear of possibly having power cut and the uncertainty of it all.

Also, I’ve lost some relationships over this, or lost face with some of my Japanese friends, I can hear in their tone after a while, that some of them are taking the side of TEPCO, or at least of the attitude that I should just pay to make it go away, but it feels like the TEPCO customer service people are saying something in such a way that it really denigrates my standing with these friends who were I should mention kind enough to spend some of their own precious time dealing with the auto-no-mataun customer service reps at TEPCO.

Perhaps the safest tragedy of this all, is that it’s over such a stupid tiny amount of money, Yes, many bills – 12-14 of them on total, but most are around 3000-4000 yen, I don’t spend much time at home, and live alone.

I could pay it all, but that store stop them form doing it all over again in another years time?

Theres more so much more to say, but I have to get this initial bit out.

I can’t believe that they followed through with their fraudulent billing menacing threat andnactually cut the power.

I returned home form a few days trip on Aug 28 or 29, can’t remember now and things are getting into a daze, but the power was off when I got home at 11pm. Luckily that night it was cool weather – I could sleep with the windows open, but most days I have to get outside by 9am or risk heat exhaustion form staying inside an unventilated hot box

Here I am sitting at a family restaurant, charging my usb batteries, and wondering how much longer it will be until they relent, admit their mistake, and restore my power. But are the going to make things right? What would you stand to lose if your power was cut while you were out, and you had a totals loss of refrigerated and freezer goods, not to mention how awesome its going to be to open that fucker ip after 10 days and see the permanent mold damage. I canT do laundry , but fortunately I was caught up on most of that before my trip, although I’ve got some nasty items from beach and rain travel from a week ago that still have been laundered that are just grossly sitting in my apartment.

Are they going to reimburse me for hotel stays?

weather is getting hot again in tokyo balmy and humid. Summer vacation is over and its back to work on Monday, this shit is akin to camping in my home – fine if you don’t have to be presentable at work and prepare for that each day.

What if I just say fuck it an camp along the river side or a local park and then the cops come by and I end up somewhere fun for 30 days, well at least I’d get power including bright lights 24 hours a day in my cell, which is more than TEPCO is currently offering.

And I wonder, its possible. that I may actually owe them one of the bills, but all 12 13 14 or however many that they batch processed and sent out, no fucking way, TEPCO can Pokemon GO FUCK Themselves.

I know this must sound so fantastical a story a story be made up, but I assure you I’m being forthright here, and I have all the bills to share with someone who may have a blog or a reporter interested in covering this.

I thought about opening a Twitter account, not familiar with it though. I wish we were more integrated into society here, as permanent outsiders, otherwise this is the sort of thing I could contact a local city government representative about, another reason that its asinine tax paying foreigners can’t participate in a more meaningful way with their local governments and towns, by voting.