Photo credit: shibainu

An Inkan is a small stamp that has your name on it.  It accompanies or replaces your initials and/or your signature on all major documents, such as bank account forms, cell phone account documents, and various other important things you need for daily life in Japan.  All of this would have been fantastic information to have when I moved to Japan, since an Inkan really does end up being the key that unlocks the door to a normal life.  Those who find themselves without an Inkan find themselves wandering the world in a state of semi-hoboism, finding creative ways to circumvent daily necessities since they cannot get the through legal means.

For example, if you do not have an Inkan, you can not get a phone.  This leaves you with the choice of either hunting down the people you want to talk to, leaving you to feel a little more stalkeresque than usual, or not talking to people when you need to, which leads you to quickly realize how much better your life would be as a stalker.

I never really thought much about Inkans before I was told by my boss that I needed to get one.  Now my boss didn’t really tell me that I needed to get an Inkan.  She just mentioned its existence in passing when I asked about opening a bank account, so that I would have account information to give when I tried to get a cellphone.

“All you have to do is bring your passport, gaijin card, Inkan, and some money to the bank and you will be able to open an account,” she said as if it was the easiest thing in the world.

“Oh, okay,” was my answer, and as soon as she left the room, I turned to my fellow foreign coworker and asked, “What’s an Inking?”

I had a sneaking suspicion that I had either misunderstood what my boss was saying or I had failed to get some vital document that would make my stay in Japan legal, and in case my legality in Japan was questionable, I didn’t want to call it to the attention of my employer.

“Inkan, it’s a stamp with your name on it.”

“How do I get one of those?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “The school I worked for when I got to Japan had one already made for me when I arrived here.  Try asking one of the other teachers.”

One by one, I asked all of the foreign teachers and one by one they all told me the same story.  They had all worked at other schools before working at this one and without fail each of them had received an Inkan from their previous employer when they arrived in this country.  So I had the choice of quitting my job, going back to the U.S., getting another job in Japan, and hoping that my new job would provide me with a name stamp, or asking my current employer to get me one.

I was full aware of the fact that I might have to go to a store and buy the Inkan myself when I approached my boss with this question, but I thought that perhaps I would get directions to a store, or at least a store name that I could google.  Instead I got a surprising bit of advice that I never fully understood.

“To get an Inkan,” my boss said, “You go to an Inkan store.”

The conversation would have ended there and that might have been better.  But having no idea what an Inkan store looked like, I continued on with my questioning.

“Where can I find an Inkan store?” I asked her.

“Just walk around, there is one somewhere.”
 Those were quite possibly the vaguest directions I had ever received in my life.  What my boss was expecting me to do was, without being able to read of speak the language, walk around one of the biggest cities in Japan and somehow, somewhere find an Inkan store.  And oddly enough this was the least of my problems, because even if I did somehow find an Inkan store, I would have no way of telling the shopkeeper what I wanted or how to spell my name.  Something I thought my boss would write out for me on a little note prior to receiving her brilliant directions.  Before I could ask anything else, my boss walk off.  Clearly she could not be bothered with my stamp finding dilemma.

When I told one of my coworkers, Stacy, about my dilemma, she shrugged it off.

“You can totally open a bank account without an Inkan,” she said.  “People do it all the time.  You just sign instead of stamping.  No one really cares. You should just go to the bank and open the account and then worry about getting the stamp.  The banks all speak English here so just tell them you don’t have one yet.  That’s what my friend Claire did when she opened her account.”

Well, that certainly seemed a lot easier than wandering the streets aimlessly, staring at signs I couldn’t read, and looking into windows for Inkan-making machinery, which I was sincerely hoping would look like some giant fighting robot.

Needless to say, I turned up at the bank without an Inkan, hoping for the best.  The first thing I learned was that not all of the banks speak English.  In fact, no one at this bank did.  I was left looking at the friendly greeter who after listening to my random assortment of words that I fished out of my dictionary, nodded her head and said, “Hai, accounto.”

She handed me a stack of papers and said, “Passport?”
 “Hai.”  I showed her my passport and my gaijin card.

“Ah, so,” she said.  “Inkan?”

I knew that question was coming, I had only hoped that it would have been asked to my by someone who spoke enough English to understand my problem.

Instead, I turned to my trusty miming skills and said, “Sign, okay?”

The woman looked at me as if I was crazy.  Granted I was trying to open a banking account with an imaginary pen at the time, but having her question my sanity wasn’t what I was going for.

“Inkan?” she asked again.  She pantomimed stamping something on the outlined Inkan circle on the form.

I mimed signing on the circle and asked again, “Sign, okay?” which lead her to mime stamping again.

“Inkan?”

“No, Inkan,” I said.  I had to admit my defeat.

Then the woman was kind enough to mime leaving the bank, buying an Inkan, and coming back to the bank.  I smiled, said “Arigato” and left.

So I was back where I started.  I reported my failed attempt to Stacy, who said, “I could have told you that was going to happen.  Not all the banks speak English.”
 “I thought you told me they do speak English.”

“They do, but not that one obviously.”

That bit of information would have been so much more useful had it been given to me a little bit earlier.

“The downtown bank speaks English,” Stacy said.  “I know that one for sure.”

“How do I get to that one?”

“You catch a subway downtown.”

“And?”

“And it’s somewhere downtown.  Just walk around and you’ll find it.  That’s how I found it.”

Once again, I was back to aimlessly wandering the streets of Japan.  So instead of trying my luck with the bank again, I decided to ask my boss for better directions.

“I haven’t been able to find an Inkan store,” I told her.  “And the bank won’t let me open an account without an Inkan.”

It was the truth, I had walk around quite a bit since I last asked.  It wasn’t aimless wandering in the hopes of finding an Inkan store though.  It was specific wandering, trying to find buildings I actually had directions to, but keeping my eyes open for an Inkan store along the way.

“Oh,” she said.  “Just go to the Hyaku-Yen shop and buy one there.”

The Hyaku-Yen shop being the Japanese equivalent of a dollar store led me to be immediately suspicious about the likely success of my excursion.

“I don’t think they will have a stamp with my name on it,” I said.  Even in America, I was never able to find anything with my name on it.  My cousin once suggested I could solve that problem with a permanent marker, but that did little to solve my problem.  I knew that in unvandalized merchandise my name was a hard find.  I was sure that the name I couldn’t find in America would be impossible to find in Japan.

“It doesn’t matter what name is on the stamp,” my boss said.  “Just buy any of them and it will be fine. The bank won’t care.”

That sounded like terrible advice.  The bank won’t care what name is on your name stamp.  Wouldn’t having a random name on your name stamp defeat the purpose of the name stamp?

My suspicions were confirmed when I told Stacy what the boss told me to do.

“She’s right you know.  It doesn’t matter what name is on the Inkan.  You can totally just buy one at the Hyaku-yen shop.”

“But won’t they be suspicious when the name is a Kanji and I am obviously white?”

I had already been to the store and looked at the stamps.  None of them seemed promising.  Kanji is only used for Japanese words and Japanese names.  Foreign words and names are spelled in Katakana.  So being an obvious foreigner with a Kanji stamp didn’t seem like a plan that would work.
 “Oh no, it really doesn’t matter.  My friend Claire bought some random Inkan at the store and used it when she opened her account.”

“I thought she signed instead of stamping.”

“No, she bought a random Inkan.  It said something like happy flowers.”

I was slowly beginning to realize that logic wasn’t a strong point of the school’s employees and figured that since I had already embarrassed myself miming at the bank once, there was no harm in doing so again.

I bought a random stamp at the hyaku-yen shop and put it in the pouch that held the name stamp I had purchased in Korea during a festival.  Then I showed up at the bank again.  The greeter remembered me despite my two week absence.

“Inkan?” she asked.

I produced the stamp from the stamp pouch and she helped me fill out my paper work.  She led me to a teller, who spoke to my great relief some English.

We had gotten through all of the paper work when she asked me for my Inkan.  I handed it to her and she stamped it.  She looked down at the Kanji and then at me and quickly noticed that I wasn’t any kind of Asian, so the name on the paper couldn’t possibly be mine.

After being polite and comparing the name on my passport to the name on my Inkan, the teller said, “This is not your name.”

“I know.  My boss said it didn’t matter.”

“But this is not your name.  It says Wakatoshi.  Where did you buy this?”
 “At the hyaku-yen shop.  My boss told me I could buy any stamp there and it wouldn’t really matter.”

“But this is not your name.  The Inkan should have your name.”

This was the moment when I realized that the common sense people thought they had within my school did not apply to the people outside of it.  It was a great relief to know that I wasn’t the only one who thought that your name stamp was supposed to have your name on it.

I apologized and asked the woman if it would be all right if I could use my Korean name stamp.  Under any other circumstances, I wouldn’t have asked, but my student loans were almost due and I needed a bank account in order to transfer money home.  The teller asked her boss who asked her boss.  They inspected the Korean name stamp and told me that as long as it had my actual name on it, I could use the stamp.

When Stacy asked me about my trip to the bank the next day, I told her I ended up using my Korean name stamp instead of the random one I bought.

“I told you it wouldn’t matter what name was on the stamp,” she said.

“It did though.  They didn’t let me use the stamp that didn’t have my name on it.  I had to use my Korean name stamp.”

“See?  I was right.”

“The Korean name stamp had my name on it.  The Japanese one didn’t which is why I had to use the Korea one.  Because it had my name on it.  My name.  Not somebody else’s.”

“But it was in Korean.  So it really didn’t matter what name it had on it.”

I smiled and nodded, not wanting to explain the variety of problems in that statement.

Eventually, I did get an Inkan.  A couple of months later, I was eating lunch with a Japanese friend I had made and told her the story of my bank account.  She laughed and said, “You can buy one at Tokyuu Hands.” before taking me two blocks down the street to the popular chain store and, out of compassion for my long ordeal, bought me an Inkan that had my name on it.