I'd gone over by ferry from Shanghai, rather than by plane, which meant that rather than arriving at an airport, I arrived at the Osaka ferry terminal. Through a series of mishaps, I had not brought any Yen with me from China, so when I arrived at the ferry terminal, I had with me not a single coin of the local currency. There was also no ATM or money changing facilities at the ferry terminal.
"Oh, that's ok," I thought naively. "Japan's a developed country. I'll be able to get some money out at any ATM just like I can in China. There's a subway station about 10 minutes walk away. I can get some cash out there."
Those who are familiar with the Japanese ATM withdrawal "facilities" can already see that I clearly hadn't researched my destination country carefully enough. I had fallen into the classic rookie error of assuming that a country with a GDP of $33,000 per capita and was world renowned for its creation of high-tech technology goods would have at least the same kind of banking convenience that could be found in a country with less than a quarter of that per capita GDP, and which had only been opened to the west for about 30 years. Silly me. Japan sure showed me what I deserved for making assumptions, when I tried using the ATM by the subway station, only to discover that it didn't accept my card.
