Rejection without Explanation

One morning last week, my boss walked in to the office to show off his new iPhone XS. His purpose was primarily to show off… or to share his excitement of his new toy, but he also told us something that made him worried.

“I was switching from Docomo to AU, and I have used AU before, but this time they told me that they could not let me pay for my phone monthly, but instead I had to pay for the entire phone up front!”

That was not new to me, as I had to do the same when I first came to Japan with my one year visa. Companies must have had issues with people signing up for a 3-year contract, pay for the phone month by month but leaving the country with the phone before their contract is up.

However, my boss is not just another guy with a one-year visa. He has been in Japan for over half his life, permanent resident in the country, has a family here, owns a really nice house that he built with the help of bank loans, and has his own small but successful business plus a secure income. He continued:

“The lady at the shop was very nice, but she could not tell me why it was rejected. Essentially, what is happening is that AU was loaning me money for the phone and asks me to pay them back for the phone month by month, and they have done that with me before, but this time when the lady checked the paperwork, it was simply rejected without any reason.”

This is quite an issue that I feel we face in Japan. Sometimes we are rejected of certain options simply because we are foreigners, but more importantly, I believe that some places would reject us without telling us because they did not want to admit to racial discrimination, but they were still doing it.

“This is outrageous because I checked with my credit card company afterwards. My credit limit is 1,500,000 yen, PER MONTH! A credit card company is willing to lend me 1,500,000 yen per month with no questions, and the phone company that I have used for years did not want to lend me 100,000 yen for their phone?”

The situation is worrying my boss mainly because no reason was given to him. He does not know if there is something going on in the back and he does not get to find out, but what about when he wants to get another loan from the bank? Will something related to this issue cause more problems in the future? Again, it is the worry that there might be something against him without his knowing.

Of course, for my boss, he had no problem putting his card down to pay for the phone at once, but if someone like him with a family, a house, a respected job cannot get the option to pay for the phone month by month, how in the world will someone like me ever get to the stage of my life that I can do that?

From what he is saying too, about how he had never experienced such an issue with AU, Docomo or SoftBank before might suggest that their requirement for checking is getting stricter and stricter (which is crazy considering the increasing amount of immigrants nowadays), if it was not because of something he did, which I do not believe is the case.

At the end of the day, he (and us alike) just want an explanation of why sometimes we are not approved of certain things. If it is in fact discrimination, then I would rather companies own up to it and admit it, rather than giving us the “NO” from a distance and zero explanation.

This post was created by a blogger on City-Cost through the blogging themes