Best banks in Japan

[MBK]

Yeah, that`s a good point. At the end of the day, unless we are talking tens of millions of JPY (which I`m just trying to make my way towards ; D), 0.1 or 0.01 does not make that much difference, it`s mainly psychological.

[zeroshiki]

Rather the interest rate (which is bad either way) I would look at the perks they give you. Rakuten has the "happy program" that gives free ATM withdrawals and bank transfers. A hundred here and there might not sound like a lot but it adds up! And with Rakuten's synergy with other parts of its ecosystem (Ichiba, Securities, Pay, Edy) I do feel that Rakuten Bank is a pretty good deal if you're going for the online banks and forgoing banks with branches.

I will say though that I needed to present proof of financial state recently and they would only accept a bank book (which Rakuten does not have) and instead of going back and forth with them to ask if a PDF or screenshot of my Rakuten Bank account was good enough, I just transferred some of my money to my SMBC account then got a statement of account from a branch. Its very one-offy but it might come back on you in the future.

[regular]

> Rather the interest rate (which is bad either way) I would look at the perks they give you.

One perk that is potentially useful for foreigners in Japan is to be able to borrow in another currency by keeping your yen deposit as collateral. For example, if I want to borrow foreign currency, I can do it from SMBC Prestia (former Citibank N A), though at a steep annual interest rate. I can then withdraw those currency in cash too. I used cash USD, Euro this way for my travel outside Japan.

Is there any other bank that let us do that? Mitsubishi UFJ, at least the bank of Tokyo part that was acquired, should have been able to do this as a specialist foreign currency provider, but I did not hear of them doing anything related while I was an account holder for many many years.

[MBK]

Rather the interest rate (which is bad either way) I would look at the perks they give you. Rakuten has the "happy program" that gives free ATM withdrawals and bank transfers. A hundred here and there might not sound like a lot but it adds up! And with Rakuten's synergy with other parts of its ecosystem (Ichiba, Securities, Pay, Edy) I do feel that Rakuten Bank is a pretty good deal if you're going for the online banks and forgoing banks with branches.

I will say though that I needed to present proof of financial state recently and they would only accept a bank book (which Rakuten does not have) and instead of going back and forth with them to ask if a PDF or screenshot of my Rakuten Bank account was good enough, I just transferred some of my money to my SMBC account then got a statement of account from a branch. Its very one-offy but it might come back on you in the future.

Thanks you for your reply. As you say, in the end, rather than interest rate, being in one "financial universe" does offer even higher benefit, so I moved large part of my finance to Rakuten Bank to be able to smoothly accomodate NISA, iDeco and generate some points through that too. Seems to be working well so far.