Last week I read a blog from a guy travelling in China who had gone for a massage and while on the table his stuff had been stolen and was held to ransom…  Here is a Japanese version of that story!

On Saturday I went to the bank to withdraw some money…  I put my card into the machine, keyed in my PIN and waited as it spat my card back out.  After multiple attempts confirmed I hadn’t mistaken my PIN number, the ATM wasn’t closed (ATMs close in Japan!  No really, they do!!) and checking my balance with my passbook to be sure that my account had money in it and hadn’t been victim to some kind of fraud or something I went to another bank and tried again, then another…  But it wouldn’t work…  The machine briefly displayed a message before spitting my card out, so I tried a few more times to get some time to read it.  It simply said, “Please go to the bank counter when the bank is open.”

I resorted to using my British bank card to get some money from a Post Office machine, which worked ok, and got some shopping and went home.  On the way home I was running through all the possible things I could think of in my mind.  Why didn’t the card work?  My Japanese bank card is a little different from my British one, it uses an IC chip when it is put into the ATM, exactly like this one (Japanese).  My British one has a chip, but that is used for Chip and Pin verification when using it as a debit card…  ATMs still use it’s magnetic strip.  So my mind settled on the chip, had it had some kind of a problem?  As soon as the thought entered my head I remembered my two Sony Pocket Bit memory sticks (also Japanese).  I keep them in my wallet and on Thursday I had lent them to Tre (a short term missionary) to transfer a file, after the first one failed to work on his computer, we tried the other, both failed…  I tried recovering them on Friday, but they were beyond salvage…  I thought I must have sat on them badly or something, but they had survived for a long time and I had used both of them on Tuesday night…

I began to think perhaps the same thing had caused the IC in my card and the two memory sticks to fail…  What had happened between Tuesday and Thursday night that might do that?  On Tuesday I went to Oasa Church and helped with English Open House…  Did I stand in the wrong place on the train and a magnetic field from the electric motors damage the sensitive chips?  On Thursday I had classes in the morning, went home for some lunch and to do my homework before returning to JLC for “work day” and prayer meeting, during prayer meeting I was on creche duty…  Had I done something during work day, wet my wallet or something?  Or falled on it while looking after (…playing with…) the kids in the park?  On Wednesday I had had classes in the morning, met with Mr Yagita in the afternoon (and won a game of shogi (English this time)!  Mr Yagita was heavily handicapped though), Emiri, not having many classes on Wednesday, came during the time with Mr Yagita and met him and we went to a Cafe afterwards near my apartment.  When we sat down the table had an announcement saying there were sofas and comfortable chairs upstairs.  So we went upstairs and drank our coffee and ate our ice cream…  Then…  then….

Then… we noticed there was a massage chair.  As everyone knows, when you see a massage chair the only action that is possible is to sit in it and press all of the buttons to see what they do.  And that is exactly what I did.  As I sat in the chair, with my wallet in my back pocket, the electric motors with their heavy magnets and large electromagnetic fields massaged my back, my legs and with a push of the most surprising of the many buttons on the controller, my rear end…  along with my back pocketed wallet… 

As I thought I realised, this is where it all went wrong…  The magnets in the motors of the slightly aging massage chair must have destroyed the chip in my card and those in my memory sticks…

I don’t really like the bank in Japan, it is extremely cumbersome, time consuming and unneccessarily inconvenient…  But today I had to go in as the machine had instructed and filled in some forms and a new card will be arriving in my letter box sometime in the next two weeks (See?  Two weeks!)

Thankfully my British card relies on it’s magnetic strip and I can still use it.  I  can only hope it’s chip has more of a stiff upper lip and has survived the ordeal, although I expect if I phoned Abbey (or their Indian call centre) they would make me a new card and have it sent to Antrim and it could be forwarded on by my ever helpful mum and still arrive before the Japanese one gets here…  I am also a bit concerned about my spiffy new Japanese driver’s licence as it also has a chip in it and the last thing I want is to come down on the wrong side of the traffic police and then my licence to not be up to scratch!

So there you have it,the story of how I was robbed by a massage chair in Japan.  Not exactly robbery I guess, just a bit inconvenient…