I would like to send some money to someone in Japan. US dollars would probably be about as annoying to them as Canadian dollars are to me. So, I’d like to send the money in yen. You’d think this would be simple.<\/p>\n
Well, I could walk into the local bank, ask to buy some yen. If I’m lucky, they’d have yen on hand and I’d pay a small premium over the exchange rate. I can’t believe it’s really that dangerous, but everyone<\/a> tells me not to send cash through the mail. OK, I won’t.<\/p>\n How about a check drawn on a Japanese bank? Well, I don’t live near a Japanese bank. Some banks offer the ability to buy money orders in other currencies, but I don’t live near one of them either.<\/p>\n OK, how about Western Union? Their technology became obsolete in the late 19th century, but they’re still around selling the transfer of money. Hand money to an agent at one Western union and they tell another Western union (via telegraph?) near the receiver to have the money ready. I tried to set up a transaction with them online. They would have charged me $15, but I gave up when it appeared that my Japanese friend would have to pick the money up in Missouri. I guess that must be their closest office to Japan.<\/p>\n I realize there are convenient ways to transfer money from one virtual account to another (PayPal<\/a>, E-Gold<\/a>, etc.), but I’d really like my friend to receive something easy to accept. Cash would be ideal, but a check would also be OK.<\/p>\n Does anyone have a good solution to this problem?<\/p>\n Update: The consensus from the comments below seems to be that an international money order purchased at the post office is the best approach in most cases.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I would like to send some money to someone in Japan. US dollars would probably be about as annoying to them as Canadian dollars are to me. So, I’d like to send the money in yen. You’d think this would be simple. Well, I could walk into the local bank, ask to buy some yen. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}