Rakuten nonsense

[KCLenny]

The Government really should mandate - either by law or by “guidance” from the MoF/MLHW/MoC that all banks, financial services, pensions, mobile phones providers are required to fully support all legal foreign names with no requirement to bastardize them into katakana.

Would remove so many hassles for providers and customers - how many millions of man hours a year are wasted on this sort of bullshit?

I do think we as foreign nationals should maybe force this issue a bit more. It makes no logical sense why my name can accepted in one place of a company, but not in another, and changed in another.
The whole IT system of japan needs overhauling but obviously that’ll never happen. But at the bare minimum we need to kick up a fuss about text box length, full width/half width character BS, and katakanaisation of names (that last one wouldn’t be as much of a problem if they’d allow us to have a katakanaised name on our zairyu card I guess).


It’s interesting to note that on Rakuten mobile’s website, it says if you contact them, you’ll be able to request a gender change on your account. But doesn’t mention anything about changing a name. So you can transition and change your gender ID on various services account but you probably can’t also change your name.
Such a strange system I really do wonder what is going through their heads when they make these rules/systems.
I’ll be calling up Rakuten Mobile now to attempt a name change (deletion on middle name).

[zeroshiki]

When I tried to get Rakuten to match up my card, securities and bank names it was quite an interesting experience. As sutebayashi said, they're basically different companies with different systems just operating under the same name. Calling up securities was the easiest because they were used to it and made changes on the backend immediately. Card and Bank required snail mail application.

I assume Mobile because its one of the newer Rakuten businesses are more accomodating there although I can foresee the argument that they already have your name correct and its the card thats the problem. In that case you have to ask Card to change. I made that change and my name is pretty long so I don't think its impossible for you.

[adamu]

See also https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/fa ... out-names/

[captainspoke]

See also https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/fa ... out-names/

That's great!

Some years ago I had a 'chinese' student from inner mongolia. He had one name.

[zeroshiki]

I work in IT and have designed systems that take names. One of the reasons we put restrictions on name length is no matter how modern your system is, there's a system down the line (like say Kuroneko Yamato's) that takes a fixed number of characters for their interface so instead of breaking this connection (which wouldn't make sense) we'd design our own system to have the restriction.

And pedantically, in Japan, there IS a fixed name and thats what is written on your zairyu card/juminhyo.

[TokyoWart]

See also https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/fa ... out-names/

That's great!

Some years ago I had a 'chinese' student from inner mongolia. He had one name.

I had several work colleagues in Indonesia who also had only one name.

[Deep Blue]

And pedantically, in Japan, there IS a fixed name and thats what is written on your zairyu card/juminhyo.

But we can not use this name in all instances. Even in some government systems like NPI they won’t accept your real name and force you to make up a katakana version.

So there is not one fixed name! It’s a clusterfuck.

[KCLenny]

When I tried to get Rakuten to match up my card, securities and bank names it was quite an interesting experience. As sutebayashi said, they're basically different companies with different systems just operating under the same name. Calling up securities was the easiest because they were used to it and made changes on the backend immediately. Card and Bank required snail mail application.

I assume Mobile because its one of the newer Rakuten businesses are more accomodating there although I can foresee the argument that they already have your name correct and its the card thats the problem. In that case you have to ask Card to change. I made that change and my name is pretty long so I don't think its impossible for you.

I contacted Card last week and was told it would be impossible to add my middle name as their system only accepts 12 characters and my full name would be 15.

And yeah, definitely not only one name or system here in Japan. My zairyu card name isn’t the same as my
Health insurance, nor my credit card.

As an update, I contacted mobile again and explained the situation (through one of their English translators), and said “look I just want to sign up to this campaign plan”, basically the take my money meme.
To my surprise they said they’d actually talk to other departments to see what could be done.
Called me back this morning to say their “fix” was to temporarily remove my middle name from the phone contract, allow me to apply for the campaign, then change the name back to having the middle name again.

Yet to see if this will work but just checked my contract page and what do you know, they’ve removed my middle name.
So tomorrow I’ll be back of the shop to try and finish the application.

[Bubblegun]

When I tried to get Rakuten to match up my card, securities and bank names it was quite an interesting experience. As sutebayashi said, they're basically different companies with different systems just operating under the same name. Calling up securities was the easiest because they were used to it and made changes on the backend immediately. Card and Bank required snail mail application.

I assume Mobile because its one of the newer Rakuten businesses are more accomodating there although I can foresee the argument that they already have your name correct and its the card thats the problem. In that case you have to ask Card to change. I made that change and my name is pretty long so I don't think its impossible for you.

I contacted Card last week and was told it would be impossible to add my middle name as their system only accepts 12 characters and my full name would be 15.

Ok, Well my name is 18 characters. 19 if you include the space.Rakuten squashed my first name and middle name together.Then 1 space then surname.
So my first name according to Rakuten looks very very long, but everything works. Especially with IDECO, NiSA, Amazon. Etc. ask them to squash you first and middle name together. Or ask them to contact someone higher up the chain. Good luck!

[zeroshiki]

My name is also 19 characters without the space and the solution on Rakuten Card was LASTNAME FIRSTNAMEMIDDLENAME. Its definitely possible.