When I arrived in Japan 20 plus years ago, if you wanted to have a land line you had to pay NTT 70,000 yen as a non-refundable deposit.
There was a thriving business amongst the Gaijin community selling landlines to each other.
Eventually NTT discontinued the system and everyone lost their 70,000 yen!
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Getting fingerprinted when registering as an alien.
Puzzling out hand-drawn maps to get anywhere.
For me it was dial-up internet, no YouTube or social media. At least I could keep in touch with family and friends via email.
When I came to Japan, J-Phone (now Softbank) was the only carrier that provided a phone with an English menu. 20 years later, unfortunately, I’m still with Softbank.
It’s the tiniest detail now but like, there was a time when smartphones didn’t instantly change keyboard language formats as needed, and even more incredible – there was a time before smartphones!
Big shoutout to the days of 1Seg, Felix’s, I-mode or whatever it was called, and animated emoji.
https://preview.redd.it/6bn73db842tb1.jpeg?width=2583&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5daee008493f8b196855b1c61791a0d26f6ceb2b
I had to get a magic jack cable to get internet access and it was the biggest pain to get installed.
Oh, going down to the port to change my single entry visa to a multiple entry visa and having to take a half day of PTO since it closed at like 4:30 and was in the middle of nowhere with only a single bus route that had the worst time schedule.
20+ years ago, I had to use email on a mall kiosk to contact family back home because my host family didn’t have Internet access.
Also a bit of an outlier as a story, I hope, but when I arrived in Haneda 20+ years ago, I saw a Japanesr husband physically assault his wife in front of everyone in the airport and no one batted an eye…very scary first impression of this country. I’ve never seen it again since, but at the time, I just assumed it was commonplace.
ATMs only being at banks, and only open during banking hours.
And this mattered because nowhere took credit cards.
The entire country shops and all basically shutting down over the New Year holiday.
If you didn’t pre-purchase a week’s worth of food, you were in trouble.
Vodaphone feature phones without English options.
No IP phones, just long distance calls of friends and family at home for exorbitant prices.
No delivery of simple everyday tasks tens from overseas vendors like Amazon: if you wanted to buy something foreign you needed to go to a specialty shop and be lucky they might have it.
Having to pay to call family back home, sans video. Also, no YouTube. Using Mixi.
The now defunct company Wilcom! Gave me one of my first ever garakei (in my life)
Trekking over to the (free!) Internet cafe to email family back home and update my Live Journal. But that wasn’t until I had been here for a few years. Before that I bought phone cards to call my family. I still have my tiny beat up little paper English->Japanese dictionary I used before my keitai could look up words on the internet (at like ¥200 a minute).
I can’t imagine getting anywhere today without google maps and my car’s Navi.
Gala kei navi.
When I got here 20 years ago, all the eikaiwa or ALT jobs paid a measly 250,000 a month. This would shock new arrivals today because it seems that that number hasn’t changed much despite the fact that prices have gone up a lot since then.
Also, people were smoking everywhere.
Finding a job in the Japan Times.
There was only one international pay phone in my town so I had to bike to that one and either put in a bunch of coins or use a calling card to phone my parents
You could buy magic mushrooms legally.
PHS phones – many countries had something similar but Japan seemed to take to them more. I really liked mine.
International calls via callback. The only way to communicate other than letter and finally Hotmail around 1996.
Cash for everything. Only a single ATM would take my UK credit card in Fukuoka.
Being forced to read The Daily Telegraph at the free KDD internet place as it was the only online UK newspaper circa 1995/1996.
Paying to access internet at a business (not really a cafe) and downloading as much news as I could in half an hour, manually, to a floppy to read at leisure later on at work on their ancient PC.
ATMs used to only be open the same days and roughly the same times that the bank branches they were attached to. Branches used to be open every other Saturday so that meant some weekends you could get cash on Saturday mornings, some you couldn’t. If you got that wrong you got to spend a weekend being poor. Most people didn’t have or accept credit cards back then either.
> non-refundable deposit
That’s called a charge.
No cell phones, payphone prepaid cards, no internet, no English signage, the Bubble was crashing, buying stamps to send handwritten letters, waiting weeks for replies.
On the positive side, Nagoya was ground zero of the bodi-kon craze.
Well when I came the yen was higher than the US dollar and I was making bank working at an eikaiwa. I used to live so bougie, paying off debt while still traveling abroad at least once a year and partying every weekend.
Actually, this is sad.
If you did a bank transfer at 3:01pm, it got to recipient the next business day. Nowadays it’s almost instant for vast majority of the banks.
On the other hand, you could open up an account w/o all this KYC/AML bullshit.
I have blacked out the dark years before I could ask google the train schedules and routing. I remember when you had to carry a whole book of train maps and schedules and figure that shit out manually. It was… Challenging.
Waiting lists for parts of your airline ticket back home. For example if you used Korean Air, you could get a seat on the Seoul-London flight but you would be put on a waiting list for the Fukuoka-Seoul connecting flight. You only know a few weeks before if you could get the seat.
Phone cards and a paperback map book of Tokyo in 2006!
Having to pay money at Narita (No international flights out of Haneda) to leave Japan. Forgot if was it an exit visa or some airport service fee.
Struggling to find an ATM which would accept non-Japanese cash cards (remember, kids: back in the day we didn’t carry the internet in our pockets, we had to go to a séancer if we wanted to find information).
FWIW, should anyone find themselves whisked backwards to the 1990s, you will find one in the post office on the top floor of “My City” next to Shinjuku Station.
The two worst things about my arrival time:
1) All Japanese being Yankees fans because of Hideki Matsui.
2) ゲッツ！！
Only ONE thing made life here tolerable: ヤンクミ。She taught me all my Japanese.
The actual residence cards issued literally said “Alien Card” on them.
Is it me, or do I remember having to “deal with” the sight of very scantily clad young ladies on late-night TV? (By “TV” I mean a cathode-ray tube box with a fuzzy picture boasting resolution way less than your smartphone).
Being surreptitiously approached around stations by slightly dodgy-looking middle-eastern guys selling doctored phone-cards for the ubiquitous green public phones.
Those unsettlingly pink little pay phones many shops and businesses had tucked away in a corner somewhere.
Cigarette vending machines in gyms. People smoking in the gym lounge areas.
On the weekends Ueno park was full of mostly middle-eastern and almost exclusively male ‘guest workers’, known collectively as ‘iraqui-jin’. They mostly just hung out chatting but I remember a few little businesses selling haircuts or food, etc.
Beer tickets and taxi tickets being given away like confetti.
People in the trains, etc openly commenting about you to their companions because, of course, foreigners can’t understand.
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Edit: changed ‘tax’ to ‘taxi’
Japan being shut down for New Years. Everything was closed. No access to money or food. It was 3 or 4 days of nothing. Hotels were open, but prohibitively expensive. and yes I paid my 70,000 yen. I ended up giving my landline to my wife’s aunt who wanted one just for her dial up internet connection.
I remember when my contractually-mandated payday fell before the company could get my bank account set up because my gaijin card took a ridiculous amount of time to set up, so for my first payday I got handed a fat envelope full of cash and got warned not to lose it.
If you installed an English OS on your computer, all the fiddling you had to do with sketchy add-on software just to get Japanese to display.
How often you’d receive an email only for none of it to be readable because the Japanese character encoding wasn’t compatible
Riding a train for 90 minutes to go to Maruzen in Nagoya so I could buy English books
Waiting for Monday so you could continue your job search, only to scream in frustration when you discovered it was a newspaper holiday
Before reddit, before gajinpot, before the internet forums,,,, there was no Metropolis and [Tokyo Classified](https://cliffworks.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/interv11.jpg) was pretty much the cornerstone of the English speaking community for a couple years at least.
Electronic dictionaries. And before that, paper dictionaries.
I don’t know how anyone could survive without IC cards/ pasmo and google maps. I literally cannot read a paper map to save my life. Figuring out train transfers and busses? Did you just have to wait in line for the ticket machine for an eternity every day? Not being able to search kanji on your smartphone? Y’all are too powerful
I was in Kyoto. I thought it it was the free tissue/ad handout. Young woman doing it ghosted me. I yelled at her in Japanese: Gaijin don’t need tissues? She was handing out tampon samples. She kindly said どうぞ. Errrrr……
Went to a trip from Kyoto to Tokyo using seishun 18 kippu, and wrote down all the train schedule in my notebook. Can’t miss even one transfer if we want to arrive in Tokyo on the same day. No smartphone, no internet.
Does anyone remember the Gaijin Party Train?
Random people wanting to buy me food and drinks. I think my record at the local izakaya was five times in a row. The salaryman at the next table would talk to me and just pay my bill. It was such a novelty being the first foreigner they ever met.
Paying a ridiculous amount of money for a landline.
Sending letters and postcards home because few people had access to the internet.
Traveling overseas and feeling like a millionaire playing with monopoly money.
I moved to Nagoya in Summer ‘93, from the States. Pre-Internet. Very early mobile phones. But we had fax. If you had to be somewhere for a meeting, you received a map by fax.
going around and around a block, because you have found the adress down the the 丁 and block,but the numbering of the actuall buildings are totally random
There were quite a lot of sexy ladies on normal TV channels later in the evening.
There were a lot more products being advertised by western stars on TV… one I remember is Sean Connery advertising Japanese whisky… I was surprised that even he had sold his soul for yen.
The “let’s praise waga kuni Nippon to the high heavens” trend of TV programs hadn’t started yet. There were even some programs that featured foreigners criticising Japan (Koko Wa Hen Dayo, Nihonjin).
Sodai gomi days. I think everyone has heard the stories of the “big garbage” days and us dirty gaijin furnishing entire apartments from garbage pickings, but it’s something not possible to understand without actually experiencing it.
There were also businesses that would drive around the rich areas to stock up on stuff they sold to dumb FOB gaijin who didn’t know better. *Top Recycle* in the Kansai area was one such company.
Having to call the house landline of your Japanese girlfriend, quite possibly having to speak to one of her parents with your limited Japanese.