So, a while back I applied for the “018support” (東京都０１８サポート) thing, and the website wouldn’t accept my 口座名義 due to an unspecified error, which I narrowed down to the presence of multiple “ｰ” characters, which for anyone taking notes are “half-width katakana prolonged sound marks” (aka 伸ばし棒). So I entered my Shinsei account details, where the 口座名義 is in romaji, and it went through fine. Nice workaround, or so I thought.
Fast-forward a couple of months and I get a notification telling me that’s no good and it must be in half-width katakana, as God intended, but still no luck with the 伸ばし棒. So I phoned the support center (got through quite quickly) and after some back-and-forth it turns out one has to enter a plain ASCII hyphen (“-“).
I suppose that should have been obvious with a little thought (“ｰ” is a multibyte Unicode character, 0xFF70 for anyone taking notes) but it’s 2023 and most systems seem to deal with that transparently these days.
tl;dr: if your name is say “Paul”, enter it as “ﾎﾟ-ﾙ” and not “ﾎﾟｰﾙ”.
by FarRedSquid