Japan Safety Tips

Precautions for the Safest Country in the World

It was an early weekday morning and I was on my way to a client meeting. Since I was completely out of cash again, I figured that I ought to fix things with the few spare minutes I had to kill. After all, it’s not a good idea to have an empty wallet in a cash-based society! Still, not having had my daily dose of caffeine, I was understandably not what one would consider “awake.” Despite my lack of consciousness though, I was able to stumble into the local convenience store and navigate my way over to the ATM. Here, all I had to do was go through the routine motions I had done countless times before. Input card. Enter PIN. Withdraw 50,000 yen. Even my half asleep brain could handle that, right?!?

Alas, it wasn’t until approximately twenty minutes later when trying to pay for my coffee addiction that I realized what a complete idiot I had been. In my stupor, I had left the equivalent of around USD 500 in the ATM. How I managed to do so is beyond me. Somehow, I had taken my card as well as the receipt while leaving the cash sitting in the distribution slot. Oooops! Fearing the worst, I sprinted out of the Starbucks and back towards the convenience store, hot coffee still in hand. As I was hoofing it back to the ATM, I started to think that this effort was pointless and that there’s simply no way the cash was…