ATMs Need Vacations, Too

Thanks to Citibank and the competition presented by its 24-hour ATM machines, ATMs in Japan now provide money outside of regular banking hours. But this wasn't always the case.

Back in the early 1990s, ATM machines had limited hours. Although they were open later than banks, their hours were only slightly longer -- usually until 7:00 p.m. They were also closed on Sundays and holidays. There was many a time when I tried to withdraw cash after work or on a Sunday and found the doors to the bank locked, with me cursing the stupidity of ATMs ever being unavailable.

According to my Japanese friends, the reason was the need for maintenance. In the US, if you went to an ATM outside banking hours and it was out of money, you would go to the next ATM down the line and think nothing of it. Apparently, in Japan, causing a customer to go to the next ATM would cause a shame worthy of ritual suicide with a long, sharp blade. So, rather than inconvenience customers by forcing them to go to the next ATM if the first one was out of money, Japanese banks elected to deny their customers all access to their money after 7:00 pm on weekdays and all day on Sundays and holidays.

The lack of access to ATM machines nearly caused me to starve over the new year holiday in 1993. New Year's Day is probably the most important holiday on the Japanese calendar. It used to be celebrated on the lunar new year -- what we in the west know as "Chinese New Year." However, when the Japanese began to adopt all things Western in the late 19th century, they adopted the western calendar and the January 1st New Year's Day along with it. Most businesses throw in a couple of extra days off at the holiday, so with the weekend, you usually get at least five days off. During the 1992-1993 new year holiday, I forgot that the ATMs would be closed. I went to the bank and found not only that it would be closed that day, but that it would be closed for two more days after that as well. Having spent all my cash on hand in the expectation that I could just go to the bank, I literally ran out of cash.

My savior was the fact that doing laundry in Tokyo was so expensive. Each load of laundry at the local laundromat cost 600 or 700 yen ($6-7), so I got into the habit of saving all of my 100 yen coins for laundry. After striking out at the bank, I went home wondering how I was going to eat that weekend and discovered my stash of 100 yen coins. The bowl contained 2000 yen or so, which was enough for me to buy food at the supermarket for the next couple of days. Needless to say, the cashier was quite surprised when I paid entirely in coins.

Why it did not occur to me to borrow money from a friend until the ATMs opened again, I do not know. Perhaps it would have dawned on me eventually if I had not discovered my laundry coin hoard. Nevertheless, I would never found myself in that predicament in the first place if Japanese ATM machines didn't need holidays, too.