Lately I got fed up with transferring money from the UK to Japan since it is kind of awkward having to use the telephone to do so and explaining every time what the money is for.

So my plan now is to create a PayPal account that is linked to a Japanese bank and verified via a Japanese Visa card deposit.

As a registered alien resident, it’s easy to open a Bank account in Japan. So I will open a new Bank account solely for business transactions and withdrawing cash from an ATM. This is so that I don’t mix personal spending up with business related expenses.

And I will ask (or rather a Japanese friend will) if the Bank will allow smooth transfers from PayPal to my bank account. If they don’t know what PayPal is, I will use another bank I think.

The VISA card is required to fund your PayPal account so it can be used for business. This is vital since you must have a business account to implement the PayPal buy buttons and use IPN (Instant Payment Notification).

For the VISA card, I am applying for it through Suruga bank but am on my 3rd attempt since it is so difficult to provide the application form in the exact format that they require. But I am very close to success now, having got them to adjust the size of their name input field to accept my name.

I am sure many potential customers must have given up applying for this since you have to use the correct version of Hiragana etc when filling in the online web form and it takes minutes for the web pages to load.

But the attraction of earning income from the web in Yen and being able to easily transfer it to my local bank and withdraw it from an ATM is very appealing.

Hopefully I can post news of a successful outcome from this exercise later.

If you have any input on this topic, please add your comment …

Here’s a video of me walking up a Japanese Hill from the ground level by a river right up to the top to get a view over Kanazawa city.

It’s for a weight loss site that I run, that is why I am pushing myself so hard to get to the top as quickly as I can. The path is very steep in places which may not be so obvious from the video. But you can tell by how high above the city I get in such a short time.

This area has a lot of vegetation including bamboo since it is hot and humid in Summer and there is plenty of rain in some seasons. These hills are steep since the land is formed from ancient volcanic activity where the flat land is very close to steeply rising hills and mountains.

So people tend to live near the sea where the land is still flat but those at the edges of the city living on the hill sides can suffer from land slides which can wipe out their fragile homes. But you can buy cheap property or rent cheaply in these areas.

Here are some photos from a Japanese Fireworks Display that I attended in August. It was based in the city of Kanazawa and was free to watch. There was something like 5,000 fireworks that were paid for by local companies and the city council.

They also provide free buses to the event. It’s very noisy, bright and colorful as you can maybe imagine.

It helps to have some wind to blow away the smoke and debris otherwise it showers down on the crowd and some of the fireworks are obscured by a veil of lingering smoke. On this day though, the weather conditions were pretty good.

I know many people loved my blog posts about Japan but I no longer have time to post about it in a diary style. But, I am going to build another site about my area featuring the Geisha district and later another site may be built about the Samurai district.

I have registered the domain name of Geisha Walk dot com for the purpose of building a business about walking tours of my local former Geisha district and more.

Also I am planning to use my own website development software to make this site as a showcase example. So you have the link and with time you can see the new site. Thankyou for your interest. p.s. I have some great photos of the modern-day Geiko’s as they now like to be called to feature on the site. Look forward to it!

I am planning to write some software that helps you learn the Japanese language. It will be based on a flash-card approach where you choose a topic and view flash cards that show sentences or words in English and you have to remember how to say them in Japanese.

At first you may not know anything so you would start with basic symbols (Hiragana and Katakana). There are about 46 of these to learn. Hopefully I can include audio too so you get to hear the pronounciation too.

Next there would be simple sentences shown in English where you learn how to say them in Japanese.

So you would learn by repetition. Using software it should hopefully be quicker to learn than with a phrase book and tapes. One reason it would be quicker is that the software would learn which things you have mastered and cut them out.

This software would not be a substitute for formal lessons but it could be a great way to get your knowledge of vocabulary and basic phrases up to speed.

Update:

Well it seemed like a good idea at the time but there is already very good yet cheap software already in the market so I decided not to persue this idea. Some software I downloaded to try out was from Declan Software and it was very impressive and at a low cost.