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So I get an advertisement from Rakuten for their new mobile phone service and a promise to get the first year free. Yeah, that's what I though too but upon further investigation it seems that you actually have to pay just like 3.000 yen for the setup and there are no cancelling fees after the first year when it jumps to 2.980 or something per month.
Long story short there I find myself filling their web application and sending a picture of my driver's licence as they ask. Except it refuses to be send telling me I need to send jpg and less than 5M in size. Which it is. So I do what every frustrated person does with a web form and reload it it.
And success! I get an email telling my application was successful and the SIM card will reach me in no time.
Three minutes later I get another email telling me oops, because you are a smelly gaijin you actually need to upload your gaijin card to fulfil our requirements. Which is funny because they don't even have that as an option in their pull-down menu.
All the other options require you to send proof of address too so I select the "driver's licence" again and send them the pictures of front and back of my gaijin card. And I do confess, I was slightly tempted to send my first ever dick pic already at this point.
And success! I get an email telling my application was successful and the SIM card will reach me in no time. Except three minutes later I get another email telling me oops, because your name with your Rakuten account and your gaijin card do not match our relationship is not going to work.
This time I actually figured it out immediately, I never use my middle name (and those who need to ask it is Augustus) so I also don't have it in the Rakuten account. So I go and fix that and resend.
And success! I get an email telling my application was successful and the SIM card will reach me in no time. This time I wait with bated breath for three minutes but nothing happens. So it's a real success! Hurrah!
Except now four hours later I get another email saying, sorry this won't work as you didn't select the correct option in the pull-down menu for your documents. For people who followed this far the requirements then are 1) you need to send pictures of your gaijin card to them, 2) you need to select the gaijin card option from the pull-down menu, 3) there are no pull-down menu for gaijin card.
Which brings us to one of my favourite books of all times; Catch-22 by Joseph Miller.
EDIT: I talk to a friend working for Rakuten who confirms even some of their employees haven't been able to order the mobile service; not even after contacting their support. But he advises me to try another browser, as everyone else in Japan they are optimising for Microsoft.
So I do and voila; the pull-down menu is longer and has the needed option. I happily submit everything again and clickety-click away. And finally I get to the end and see the happy results in front of my eyes: "server error".
Long story short there I find myself filling their web application and sending a picture of my driver's licence as they ask. Except it refuses to be send telling me I need to send jpg and less than 5M in size. Which it is. So I do what every frustrated person does with a web form and reload it it.
And success! I get an email telling my application was successful and the SIM card will reach me in no time.
Three minutes later I get another email telling me oops, because you are a smelly gaijin you actually need to upload your gaijin card to fulfil our requirements. Which is funny because they don't even have that as an option in their pull-down menu.
All the other options require you to send proof of address too so I select the "driver's licence" again and send them the pictures of front and back of my gaijin card. And I do confess, I was slightly tempted to send my first ever dick pic already at this point.
And success! I get an email telling my application was successful and the SIM card will reach me in no time. Except three minutes later I get another email telling me oops, because your name with your Rakuten account and your gaijin card do not match our relationship is not going to work.
This time I actually figured it out immediately, I never use my middle name (and those who need to ask it is Augustus) so I also don't have it in the Rakuten account. So I go and fix that and resend.
And success! I get an email telling my application was successful and the SIM card will reach me in no time. This time I wait with bated breath for three minutes but nothing happens. So it's a real success! Hurrah!
Except now four hours later I get another email saying, sorry this won't work as you didn't select the correct option in the pull-down menu for your documents. For people who followed this far the requirements then are 1) you need to send pictures of your gaijin card to them, 2) you need to select the gaijin card option from the pull-down menu, 3) there are no pull-down menu for gaijin card.
Which brings us to one of my favourite books of all times; Catch-22 by Joseph Miller.
EDIT: I talk to a friend working for Rakuten who confirms even some of their employees haven't been able to order the mobile service; not even after contacting their support. But he advises me to try another browser, as everyone else in Japan they are optimising for Microsoft.
So I do and voila; the pull-down menu is longer and has the needed option. I happily submit everything again and clickety-click away. And finally I get to the end and see the happy results in front of my eyes: "server error".
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