Quote Originally Posted by Amiantos View Post
I've been in japan goin on 4 years now. My US issued card worked at any post office ATM when I was up in misawa for 3 years and it works in any convenience store or post office atm here in okinawa. Might be the fact it was a master card you were using as I have a visa and had absolutely no issue.
My mastercard did work in post offices (any JP national ATM, really) but I couldn't take my JP national card and withdraw money from another bank's ATM.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., I can take my Union Bank card and withdraw from the smorgasboard of ATMs located all over the place (my college has a whole freakin' wall dedicated to ATM machines) with no trouble.
Every prefecture in Japan has their own banks with deals with other banks from other prefectures, and some of those banks do or do not have deals with other banks. Next time you're at the ATM, look at just how many of those silly little symbols representing banks supported by that ATM there are. The fact that MasterCard and Visa are actually treated as separate entities in this case is, for lack of a better word, foreign (i've never seen a place in the U.S. that takes one but not the other. AmEx and Discover being another story entirely)
Now remember that PayPal basically attempts to undo that web of deals by letting anyone pay for things with any card, rather than the company's issued cards. Yeah...