Back to Japan
After a little more than one year I'm finally back to Japan. Hooray!
Although the price was considerably higher, I decided to get a non-stop flight to Kyoto and it was totally worth it. Until I checked in with my hotel it still has been a 25 hour journey. Mostly because hotel operators in Japan tend do be a little bureaucratic. If check in time is 4 pm you cannot check in at noon, no matter how dark your rings around the eyes have grown.
After 12 hours flight I encountered a few hurdles. First my beloved Suica card did not work. (If you don't know what this is about, please read my post about IC cards.) So I decided to buy a ticket to Kyoto in the JR ticket office at the airport. They do accept credit cards, but you need the actual physical card. The one on your watch or smartphone won't do. Since I never use that piece of plastic I did not remember to take it with me. Unfortunately I did not have Japanese cash either and obviously could not use my credit card to get some. So no ticket and no idea how to get to Kyoto.
Was I to spend my entire tree weeks of my holidays at Kansai Airport, like Tom Hanks in that Spielberg movie?
With little hope I tried to feed my German Girocard into a few ATM, however none of them would accept it. Luckily enough I had 90 Euro cash on me, which I traded at an exchange booth for 13,000 Yen. More than plenty for a train ticket, but not at all what you need to get around three weeks in Japan.
So I paid the fare and decided to get to my hotel first and then figure out what to do about money. To go from Kansai International Airport to Kyoto with Japan Railway you need two tickets, because that's the way it works here. When I tried to change at Osaka, I left the gated JR area, which turned out to be a mistake, because the second ticket did not work at any gate I tried. After a conversation with the helpful station officer, I learned that I should not have left the premises of JR, which makes sense, as both of my tickets were issued by them. She would have searched all the gates for my ticket to give it back to me, but I was not at all able to remember in which part of the station I passed one of the gates, let alone which one. So I passed and gave up the ticket.
The more interesting question was, why the heck did none of the gates let me in when I presented my watch to them? So I asked her that as well. And she found out! Apparently the Suica card will be automatically disabled if you don't use it for a longer period of time. At least that is, what I concluded from the fact that she could simply fix it with one mouse click. So if you ever come back to Japan with a Suica, or any other IC card, go to the train operators office at the airport and let them re-enable it.
After arriving at my accommodation where I could not check in yet, but store my luggage until I could, I did some online research about how to get cash in Japan, without a physical credit card. Don't underestimate the power of a German Girocard! Not all ATMs accept them, but some definitely do. For instance the one at the 7-eleven near my hotel.