This is a real problem.  Next time I go anywhere out of the country, I’m taking as much money as I’ll ever need, and then some.  I panicked today when I went to the post office and was unable to withdraw any money from the ATM.  This was the first time that I had tried since coming to Japan, and is something that I had assumed I would be able to do (my tour book claimed the postal system ATM’s were designed for this).  I did not pack enough money to cover all my expenses for the six weeks that I will be here, so I thought I was in a real pickle.  However on the way back I realized that I may be remembering my PIN wrong.  Here in Japan the ATMs don’t have a keypad; they just have all the numbers lined up in a row.  And since I only remember my PIN now from muscle memory, I had to guess at what it was.

Update:  I managed to find a bank in Kashiwa that could take money off of an international credit card.  This turned out to be way more of a problem than I imagined it to be, as the bank tellers would, one after another direct us to some other bank across the way.  It got to the point where L.F. and I figured that none of the tellers actually knew which bank would work, and true to the Japanese way they were just politely redirecting us to get us out of their face.  But the six or seventh bank we tried actually worked (woohoo!).  I’ll get a picture of the bank and directions so that others won’t have the same problem.

I still don’t know how to get money out of an Bank of America account, and am a little worried about the fees charged to my VISA card.  Of course the potential fees to my BofA account would be similar… yet another reason to bring all the money I need in cash next time.