RetireJapan

I have a question about international payments.
I am looking for a bank or service that an overseas (UK and USA) contractor can occasionally deposit my payment, and I can freely access within Japan.
Dealing with Mitsui and Michinoku Japanese banks (my current accounts) have not been helpful.
What bank or service do you recommend? Thank you.

Is https://wise.com a good option?
I am now reading the discussions here.

Wise is great, especially if you are dealing with one of the countries they offer 'virtual' bank accounts in.

RetireJapan wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 2:56 am Wise is great, especially if you are dealing with one of the countries they offer 'virtual' bank accounts in.

Absolutely wise!

Yes, we use Wise and are very happy with them. But notice that there are two quite distinct ways in which a person in the Netherlands (for example, but I happen to have examples of both) can send you money.

1: A casual (retail) customer - I can just give the details of our Euro account, and they make a local transfer, which is either free or very inexpensive. We have to calculate the Euro amount, and we are liable for any exchange rate fluctuations.

2: A trade customer - we want to give the maximum possible discount, so we need to know that we will receive exactly some yen amount. This customer sends a yen payment to us through Wise, which they then fund with a local transfer to the Wise Euro account number. This is a bit more fiddle to set up (and I can't immediately recall the details), and in particular they have to be able to copy paste my name in katakana, for example.

The obvious country where I don't think we have yet used Wise is the US. I do not understand the US system (for anything, actually!) very well, but it rather seems there is not a very simple local transfer mechanism - customers always want to use credit cards, with the associated extra costs.

Thank you very much for the informative responses.