Like most people here, I have an ambivalent love relationship with Japanese ATMs.

I mean, who doesn’t love their ubiquitous salaryman-foodstamp dispensers: after all, they are lovable, sexy and incredibly serviceable.

Until night falls, that is. At which point they suddenly emerge clad in leather, whip you into submission, make you bend over and ram your every orifice, strictly foregoing the use of any lubricant.

Which, come to think of it, does remind me of a few ex’…

Ahem. Anyway.

Japanese ATMs are sometimes very convenient. For example, despite living in an über-residential neighbourhoods where most of the locals are either dead or not too far, and banks an unheard-of commodity, I only have to walk a hundred feet from my door to the closest ATM-equipped combini.

Once there, and still in my pajamas, I can not only withdraw or deposit any of the hard-earned cash I might not have spent on drugs. At the touch of a button, with none of these annoying forms you are supposed to fill in the US: if you’ve ever stood at the corner of Market and 8th in San Francisco, with $2000 in cash, having to ask one of the crack dealer standing next to you if he didn’t have a pen by any chance, then you know what I mean.

But coolest feature of all: ATMs let you transfer money to anybody with a bank account somewhere in Japan. Which is really convenient especially when it’s time to pay the rent. And I love that.

Of course, the love was very much unrequited at first. Seeing how all these tasks imperatively require a master of the local scribbling people insist on calling a language. But this little roadblock aside, ATMs have been making my life easier.

But we obviously wouldn’t be talking about a proper Japanese institution if they didn’t find a way to shove it to you in the end.

There are fees.

Big deal, I hear you say, every bank has fees, nothing new here.

Well, the amount isn’t really the problem (although having to pay anywhere between one and a couple dollars for the mere privilege of accessing your own cash definitely leaves a bitter taste). No, the part where it becomes real first-class shafing, is that the fee varies depending on time.

Let me sum that up for you: you have a machine sitting in the corner of a store, open 24h, and requiring no human attendance whatsoever to do its job. And the geniuses in charge have fancied that, after all, there was no reason the machine shouldn’t get paid a extra for after-hour work. Which you can also interpret as their way of giving you a strident finger with one hand, while the other is busy leafing through your wallet. Use it after 6, you pay double. After 12? even more! On a week-end? Jackpot!

You wanna know the kicker too? Some of these ATMs are even turned off for freaking end-of-year holidays (precisely when all other means of accessing your money are unavailable).

As I said: a very painful love relationship.