OK, so you have decided what your company is going to be called. Submitted all your paper works and congrats you have created your self a new company! The hard part is done! Right?

Not really. The hard part begins when you start applying to open a bank account for your newly created company. Sounds simple enough. You have experience opening your personal bank account. I thought the same. Oh, how wrong I was.

The process of opening a new business account is similar to your personal accounts. With extra information about the company. Such as registration forms etc. Nothing that you cannot easily obtain. The difficulty is the screening that is done by the banks.

Long gone are the days when banks were lining up for you to open a business banks accounts, but now because godo gaisha or LLC can be created with just 1 yen of capital investment (previously you needed at least JPY10K for kabushiki gaisha or JPY3K for yugen gaisha), a lot of fake companies are being created for money fraud such as ore ore sagi.

Now, it’s great that we all can now afford to create new companies but the issues are that not everyone can do business with it as we cannot create a corporate / business bank account (technically you can use your personal bank account but not recommended as you could muddle personal spends with your companies and the tax office will not be too happy). Very contradictory and very Japanese.

Anyway, going back to the opening of the bank account. What options do you have? Well, first, there are 2 main types. Banks with physical stores and ones that exist only online.

Let’s get into these in the next post.