Wise vs Japanese Banks: What ¥100,000 Really Costs

Ask a Japanese bank what an international transfer costs and you will get a clear, confident answer with a number in it. Ask what your recipient will actually receive and the conversation gets vague, because the bank has answered only half the question. Every cross-border transfer is priced twice — once in a fee you are shown, and once in the exchange rate you are given — and in Japan the second price is almost never published. This article takes one amount, 100,000 yen, and works through what each layer of a bank transfer costs, what can be calculated and what genuinely cannot. Then it does the thing a bank transfer will not let you do: reconciles a real transfer receipt, line by line, until every yen is accounted for.

The half you see and the half you do not

A transfer moves your money and converts it. Those are two separate services and they can be charged for separately, but only one of them has to be disclosed as a fee.

The stated fee

This is the number on the fee page, and it is the number every comparison article uses: 3,000 yen at Japan Post Bank, 7,000 yen at a Mitsubishi UFJ counter, 5,000 yen in the Mizuho app. It is a real cost and it is easy to compare, which is precisely the problem. Providers compete on the figure customers can see, and the figure customers can see is not the total.

The exchange-rate margin

Somewhere in the transfer, your yen becomes dollars or pesos or dong, and someone picks the rate at which that happens. There is a reference rate — the mid-market rate, the midpoint between what buyers and sellers are quoting each other in the wholesale market, the number you get if you look up USD/JPY on a financial site. If the rate applied to your money is worse than that midpoint, the difference is revenue for whoever converted it. It never appears on a receipt. It has no line item. It is simply a smaller number arriving at the other end.

Scale matters here. On a 100,000 yen transfer, a margin of 0.5 percent is 500 yen and a margin of 2 percent is 2,000 yen. That is the same order of magnitude as the fees themselves, sometimes larger. A provider can charge nothing at all and still be expensive.

What a megabank actually charges on 100,000 yen

A megabank transfer is priced in three separate places. They are genuinely separate — different charges, levied for different things, and in two of the three cases not necessarily levied at all. The temptation, which almost every comparison article gives in to, is to add them up into one impressive total. Resist it, because the sum does not exist, and understanding why it does not exist is more useful than the fake number would have been.

1. The published transfer fee

This one is straightforward. Mitsubishi UFJ Direct, the bank's online channel, charges 2,500 yen to the bank's own overseas offices and partner banks and 3,000 yen to any other bank, with a ceiling of 3,000,000 yen per transfer and per day and 5,000,000 yen per month. The Mitsubishi UFJ counter charges 7,000 yen and takes around three business days. Sumitomo Mitsui's counter charges 7,000 yen to its own overseas offices and partner banks and 7,500 yen elsewhere, per its February 2026 schedule. Mizuho charges 8,000 yen at the counter for transfers to a Mizuho branch, 8,500 yen to other banks, and a flat 5,000 yen including tax in the Mizuho Direct app. Japan Post Bank's web-only service charges 3,000 yen per transfer.

Two caveats on this layer. Sumitomo Mitsui's online personal pricing cannot be stated as fact: the bank's own PDF schedule and its personal-banking web pages disagree with one another, landing somewhere around 3,500 to 4,000 yen. When a provider publishes two numbers for the same product we are not going to pick one for you — check it inside your own online banking. And Japan Post Bank changed shape in 2025, ending international transfers at post office counters on 29 August 2025 and through Yucho Direct on 31 August 2025, so any advice you find about walking into a post office is now wrong.

2. The yen exchange handling charge, which most readers will never pay

This is the layer where comparison articles usually go wrong, and it is worth reading slowly. Mitsubishi UFJ publishes a yen exchange handling charge (円為替取扱手数料) of 0.050 percent with a minimum of 2,500 yen; Sumitomo Mitsui publishes the same structure at 0.05 percent with the same 2,500 yen minimum. It looks like a mandatory surcharge sitting on top of the transfer fee. It is not.

It is a lifting charge, and it applies to transfers where no currency conversion happens at the Japanese bank. SMBC Trust Bank's definition is explicit: it is the charge for carrying out a foreign exchange transaction in the same currency, where no exchange takes place. Hokuriku Bank's schedule lists it against exactly two situations — a yen-denominated remittance, where the yen travels abroad and someone at the other end converts it, and a transfer out of a foreign currency deposit account in the same currency.

So if you are doing what an ordinary personal remittance is — handing the bank yen, having the bank convert it into dollars or pesos, and sending the foreign currency — you should not expect this charge. The bank earns on the conversion instead. The lifting charge and the exchange-rate margin are alternatives, not additions, which is precisely why banks scope the charge the way they do. Nothing is being given away here: whichever route you take, a conversion happens somewhere and somebody prices it. Sending yen abroad and letting the receiving bank convert simply moves the margin to a bank whose rate you can see even less of, and adds the lifting charge on the Japanese side.

3. Correspondent bank charges, which change who pays rather than whether

A bank-to-bank transfer usually passes through at least one intermediary institution, and that institution takes a cut. What Japanese banks offer you is a choice about who absorbs it. Elect to cover the correspondent and receiving bank charges yourself — the OUR option — and Mitsubishi UFJ bills you 3,000 yen, Sumitomo Mitsui 2,500 yen and Mizuho 2,500 yen. Decline, and the charges come out of the money while it is in transit, so your recipient receives less. The money disappears either way; you are choosing which side of the transfer notices.

Neither figure is necessarily final. Sumitomo Mitsui states that up to 4,000 yen more may be billed to you afterwards, and Mitsubishi UFJ that it may bill separately if the shortfall exceeds 100,000 yen. Japan Post Bank publishes what the deduction route looks like when you do not prepay: usually nothing for the United States, 4.50 EUR for the eurozone on 100 EUR or more, 5 GBP for the United Kingdom on 101 GBP or more, and 10 USD for many other countries on 100 USD or more — and it warns that this can be taken more than once on a single transfer.

Which means the table has no total column

The full schedule for all four institutions, including the limits and the branch-level restrictions, is set out in Japan Post Bank and the megabanks: the real cost.

The number nobody outside the bank can compute

Look along the last column of that table. For an ordinary yen-to-foreign-currency remittance, the first column is published, the second usually does not apply, the third is a choice you make — and the fourth, which is the one that scales with the size of your transfer, is blank for three of the four institutions.

Mitsubishi UFJ does not publish the size of the margin built into the rate it gives you. Neither does Sumitomo Mitsui. Neither does Japan Post Bank. Each will show you a rate at the moment you transact, and you are free to compare it against the mid-market rate if you happen to know that number. But there is no published figure, no disclosed spread, no schedule you can consult in advance. State the consequence plainly rather than dressing it up: for three of the four institutions most foreign residents in Japan actually use, the total cost of your transfer cannot be calculated before you send — not by you, not by us, not by anyone outside the bank.

That is not a gap in this research. It is the finding, and it is the reason this article does not hand you a grand total for Mitsubishi UFJ. An article that tells you a Mitsubishi UFJ transfer "costs about 3,000 yen" is quoting a fee page and calling it a price; an article that adds up every charge on the schedule and announces a total is doing something worse, because it is manufacturing precision about a figure one of whose terms is missing.

The one bank that shows its work

Mizuho is the exception, and it deserves credit for it. Mizuho states that its TTS rate — the rate at which it sells foreign currency to you — includes an exchange handling charge of 1 yen per US dollar and 1.50 yen per euro. That is a disclosed margin, in currency units, published in advance.

You can turn it into a percentage yourself, and this is the one place in this article where a rate margin can be worked out from published information. If the dollar is at 150 yen, a 1 yen charge is 1 divided by 150, or about 0.67 percent. At 160 yen to the dollar it is about 0.63 percent. So on 100,000 yen converted to US dollars, Mizuho's rate margin is somewhere around 630 to 670 yen depending on where the market sits that day. We are giving you the range rather than a single figure because the exact answer depends on the day's USD/JPY, and inventing a precise number would be exactly the sin this article is about.

Now put that together with the fee. A Mizuho app transfer of 100,000 yen into US dollars costs 5,000 yen in fee plus roughly 630 to 670 yen of rate margin — call it around 5,650 yen, or a little under 6 percent of the amount. Correspondent charges sit on top of that as a choice: 2,500 yen if you elect to prepay them, or an unknown amount taken out of the money in transit if you do not. So even at the one bank that discloses its margin, the last element is not a fixed number, but everything Mizuho itself charges you is knowable in advance. For Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui and Japan Post Bank, the equivalent calculation cannot be performed at all, because the margin term is missing.

A transfer where every number reconciles

Everything above is an argument about absence — about a figure that is not published and a total that therefore cannot be assembled. Here is the opposite case, and it is the strongest evidence in this article because it comes from a completed transfer rather than a quote.

Wise is not a bank. In Japan it is a registered funds transfer service provider, Kanto Local Finance Bureau No. 00040, registered on 18 August 2015 and now holding both Type 1 and Type 2 registration. What it claims about itself is that it charges a stated fee and then converts at the mid-market rate with nothing added — that the second half of the price, the half Japanese banks do not publish, is zero. That claim can be checked against a real receipt, and we checked it against one of our own.

On 18 March 2025, euros held in a Wise balance were paid out in yen to a Japanese bank account. These are the four numbers the transaction detail shows.

Now do the multiplication yourself. It takes about ten seconds and it is the entire point of this section.

147.98 × 163.080 = 24,132.58, which rounds to 24,133 JPY.

That is the number that arrived, to the yen. The fee came off first, as its own separate line. What remained was converted at the rate on the statement. The result matched. There is no residue, no unexplained shortfall, nothing sitting between the stated rate and the money — which is precisely what a margin would look like if there were one, because a margin has to show up as a gap between the rate you were told and the amount you got.

The headline rate, the effective rate, and the gap between them

There is an even cleaner way to read the same transaction. Divide what arrived by what was sent: 24,133 ÷ 150 = 160.89 yen per euro. That is the effective rate, the rate this transfer really happened at once everything is counted. The headline rate on the statement was 163.080.

The gap is 2.19 yen per euro, and that gap is the fee. Not the fee plus something. Not the fee plus a spread. The 1.35 percent Wise charged, expressed in the exchange rate instead of in euros. If you want a single sentence to carry away from this article, it is that one: at Wise the difference between the headline rate and the effective rate was the fee and nothing else, and at three of Japan's four largest institutions you cannot perform this comparison at all, because they do not tell you what their headline rate contains.

What this one transfer does not prove

It is worth being strict here, because a single receipt is easy to over-read.

• It is one transfer, in one direction, on one day. Euros to yen, March 2025. It does not test yen going out to Vietnam, the Philippines or anywhere else. Every other fee figure in this article remains what it was: a live quote taken on 16 August 2026, not a published price list and not a guarantee.
• It is a small amount. 150 EUR is roughly 24,000 yen — a modest transfer, and we are not going to dress it up as anything else. Though it cuts the other way too: rounding and fixed costs have proportionally the most room to hide in a small transaction, and the arithmetic still closed to the yen.
• It does not prove the rate matched the mid-market rate exactly. Daily reference rates for EUR/JPY were 162.93 on 17 March 2025 and 163.37 on 18 March 2025, so the 163.080 applied falls inside the range the pair traded across those days — consistent with a live rate captured at a moment on a moving market. That is as far as the evidence goes. Daily reference figures also differ from one data provider to another, so treat any single published day rate as approximate.

Set that against the megabank comparison one more time. Here, four published numbers, one multiplication, an exact reconciliation. There, a published fee, a correspondent charge you can choose to prepay, and a rate margin that does not appear anywhere — so no amount of effort by a customer produces a reconciliation at all.

The same pattern shows up in the quotes

One receipt is one data point. The supporting evidence comes from the quotes, and it uses a test you can run yourself in a browser without sending anything.

Ask the same provider for quotes on two very different amounts at the same moment, and compare the exchange rate offered on each. A margin inside the rate is charged as a proportion of the money converted, which makes it the part of the cost that grows with the size of the transfer while staying invisible. So if the rate moves with the amount, the rate is being used to charge you. If the rate does not move with the amount, then whatever varies with the size of your transfer is varying somewhere you can see it — in the fee.

On 16 August 2026 we pulled live quotes from Wise's public comparison interface for yen to US dollars at 100,000 yen and at 500,000 yen. The exchange rate applied was identical at both amounts. The fees were not: 987 yen on 100,000 yen and 3,887 yen on 500,000 yen, with 1,000,000 yen quoted at 7,510 yen. The fee rose with the amount but not in proportion to it, which is what a charge with a fixed part and a variable part looks like. The whole of the cost that scales with size showed up in the number Wise displayed, and none of it in the rate — the same conclusion the March 2025 receipt reached, arrived at from a different direction.

What neither piece of evidence establishes is that Wise is cheaper than everything else, or that today's fee is tomorrow's. Rates move; fee schedules get revised; specialist operators beat Wise on particular corridors. The practical meaning is narrower and more useful than a ranking: a Wise quote can be added up, because fee plus amount equals the answer. With Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui or Japan Post Bank that sum cannot be completed at all, because one of the terms is not published.

The fees, and what they were on the day

Wise's fee depends on the destination currency, and the spread between currencies is wide. These are total fees for sending 100,000 yen, all quoted on 16 August 2026, from live quotes rather than a published price list.

Sending to Chinese yuan cost more than twice as much as sending to euros on that date, so "Wise costs about 1 percent" is not a statement you should carry around. One more charge to know: sending from a yen balance over SWIFT adds a fixed 181.75 yen. And a separate constraint worth checking before you plan anything large is the set of 1,000,000 yen limits that apply to the Wise balance rather than to sending, which is a distinction almost every article gets wrong; it is unpacked in Wise's 1,000,000 yen limit in Japan: what it actually applies to.

Speed, which is the one axis with a clear answer

Cost is the hard comparison because half of it is unpublished. Speed is the easy one, and it is worth spending a paragraph on because readers care about it just as much and here the answer is not buried.

On the bank side, a Mitsubishi UFJ counter transfer takes around three business days. That is the bank's own published figure for that specific route, and it is a commitment about the thing you are actually doing. Japan Post Bank does not publish a transit time for its web-only service, and we could not confirm one, so we are not going to invent a range for it.

On the Wise side, we are quoting rather than measuring, and the difference matters. Wise publishes that 74 per cent of its transfers are instant, meaning completed in under twenty seconds; that 87 per cent take less than an hour; and that 96 per cent take less than twenty-four hours. Those are Wise's own figures about Wise, not something we timed, and they belong in a different category from the 18 March 2025 receipt earlier in this article, which is a transaction we reconciled ourselves. Keep the two apart in your head: one is measured, the other is published.

The caveat on those percentages is not a small one. They are company-wide figures covering every currency pair Wise operates, not figures for money leaving Japan — and the routes out of Japan run slower than that average. Wise into a Vietnamese bank account is zero to one business day after conversion, with the conversion itself taking up to two business days. So "74 per cent are instant" is a statement about Wise's global book of business, not a promise about your transfer to Hanoi or Manila. Check the timing for your own corridor rather than carrying the headline number away.

With that said, the honest comparison still favours Wise clearly. Against roughly three business days at a megabank counter, Wise is faster on any plausible reading of its own numbers, and that gap is real rather than marginal. The thing to be precise about is that these are not the same kind of number: the bank is publishing a commitment about one specific route, while Wise is publishing an average across everything it does. A global average and a route-specific estimate cannot be laid side by side as if they were measured the same way — which is the same distinction this article has been making about fees all along.

Where the bank is the right answer

Cost is one axis and it is not always the deciding one. There are situations where a megabank is the correct choice and a cheaper provider simply cannot do the job.

Reach. A bank transfer over the SWIFT network can reach essentially any bank account in any country that has one. Wise pays into a defined list of destinations, through specific routes, and where a route does not exist there is no workaround. The starkest example: a personal Wise user cannot send yuan to an individual's bank account in China at all — the available routes are a UnionPay card, Alipay and WeChat. In Vietnam, Wise sends to bank accounts only, with several receiving banks not supported. If your recipient's country, bank or account type is not on the list, the bank is not the expensive option, it is the only option.

Account types and purposes. Tuition paid directly to a university, a payment to a company account, a property transaction, a transfer that a receiving institution will only accept over SWIFT with full sender details attached — these are bank territory. So are transfers where somebody at the other end wants documentary evidence of where the money came from.

Size. Bank fees are largely flat; Wise's fee rises with the amount. On 100,000 yen the gap in published fees is wide — 987 yen at Wise against 3,000 yen for a Mitsubishi UFJ Direct transfer to another bank. On 1,000,000 yen, Wise quoted 7,510 yen on 16 August 2026 against the same flat 3,000 yen, and on the published numbers the bank now looks cheaper. Whether it actually is depends entirely on the margin, which Mitsubishi UFJ does not disclose. Mizuho's disclosed margin gives a sense of the scale involved: at 1 yen per US dollar, a 1,000,000 yen transfer carries roughly 6,300 to 6,700 yen of margin, which dwarfs the fee. That is the honest shape of it — a flat fee looks better and better as the amount grows, while the invisible half grows in step with your transfer. Mizuho's 5,000 yen app fee, which looks steep against 100,000 yen, is 0.25 percent against a 2,000,000 yen transfer and entirely defensible. Whether a bank is expensive is a question about your amount, not about banks.

A person checking the details. At a counter, someone reads the recipient's name and account number back to you before the money moves. If you are sending a large amount to a new recipient for the first time, that is worth something.

Mizuho's 5,000 yen app rate, and the condition that traps new arrivals

The Mizuho Direct app charges a flat 5,000 yen including tax, which is the cheapest megabank channel published anywhere, and it comes from the only megabank that tells you its rate margin. If you have been in Japan a while and bank with Mizuho, that is a genuinely defensible product. But five conditions gate it, and they are worth reading in full before you get your hopes up.

• You must be an individual rather than a company, and you must have lived in Japan for six months or more.
• You must already have made a transfer of the same kind at a Mizuho counter within the past year.
• You must have registered a debit card in the app.
• You must have submitted your My Number.
• Your registered address must match where you actually live.

The second condition is the one that matters, and it is worth reading twice. To qualify for the cheap channel, you must first have used the expensive one. Not a similar transfer, not any international transfer — the same kind of transfer, made at a branch counter, within the previous twelve months.

Work through what that means for someone who arrived in Japan this spring and needs to send money to family this month. They cannot use the 5,000 yen app price, because they have never made a counter transfer. To become eligible they must go to a branch during business hours and pay 8,000 yen to a Mizuho account abroad or 8,500 yen to another bank, plus the rate margin, plus correspondent charges either way. And the six-month residence requirement means that even the expensive route to eligibility is closed for their first half-year in the country. The cheapest bank channel in Japan is structurally unavailable to precisely the people who most need a cheap bank channel.

There are further limits on the app once you qualify: two transfers per month, 3,000,000 yen per transfer and per day, 5,000,000 yen over any thirty days, and coverage of seven currencies across 32 countries. None of that is unreasonable. The catch-22 in condition two is the thing to plan around, and the practical advice is simple — if you expect to be sending money home from Japan for years and you bank with Mizuho, making one counter transfer deliberately, early, is what buys you access to the cheaper price later.

How to compare two providers honestly

• Compare received amounts, not fees. Enter the same send amount at each provider and write down what the recipient gets. This is the only method that captures both halves of the price at once.
• List the bank's charges separately rather than adding them. The published transfer fee, the correspondent charges and your choice about who pays them, and the margin. Then note which of the three you cannot find a number for.
• Ask whether you are sending yen or foreign currency. It decides whether the yen exchange handling charge applies, and it decides which bank sets the exchange rate. Converting in Japan and sending foreign currency is the normal case.
• Quote your real amount. The ranking at 50,000 yen is not the ranking at 1,000,000 yen, because bank fees are flat and Wise's fee is not.
• Do it on the day. Live quotes move, and published schedules get revised. Nothing in this article is a promise about tomorrow.
• Reconcile the receipt afterwards. Amount, minus stated fee, times stated rate, compared against what arrived. If it closes, the price was what you were told. If it does not, you have just measured the margin for yourself, and you should do that measurement before you use the same provider again.

If you are still deciding between providers rather than between channels at one bank, the full landscape including the specialist remittance operators is mapped in how to send money home from Japan, and the verification steps and documents on the Wise side are in how to open a Wise account in Japan with a residence card.

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