Documents You Need to Send Money Abroad From Japan

Most first transfers do not fail at the payment screen. They fail two days earlier, at the moment somebody realises they cannot find the notification card, or that the address on the certificate they just collected is the flat they moved out of last spring. The remedy is boring and effective: gather everything before you open anything. This article is organised around what you actually have to produce, not around which company you choose, because the same three piles of paperwork come up whichever route you take. The first pile proves who you are. The second identifies the person on the other end. The third is about the money itself, where it came from and what it is for. Miss an item in any of the three and the transfer stops, usually after you have already paid.

Pile one: proving who you are

This is the part everybody expects, and it still takes the longest, because the documents are issued by different offices at different times and have to agree with one another.

Photo identification

Wise publishes a verification page specifically for Japan, and that is the one to follow. What counts as acceptable photo ID depends on your residence status.

The line that matters for most readers of this site is that the residence card works. It is accepted for permanent residents and for mid-to-long-term residents alike, so a work visa, a student visa, a dependent visa or any other mid-to-long-term status is not an obstacle on the photo-ID question. You do not have to obtain a Japanese driving licence or a My Number card first.

My Number: required, and a step of its own

Submitting your My Number (the individual number issued to every resident of Japan, including foreign residents) is mandatory. It is not covered by uploading your photo ID and it is not something you can defer. Plan for it as a second document task.

Three forms of evidence are accepted:

• Your My Number card.
• Your notification card.
• A certificate of residence showing your My Number, issued within the last six months.

There is one shortcut: if you used the My Number card itself as your photo ID, the number is already on the back of it, so this step is skipped. Everyone verifying with a residence card or a driving licence has to supply My Number evidence separately.

If you never collected a My Number card and cannot find the notification card, the fallback is a trip to your city or ward office for a certificate of residence with the number printed on it. Ask explicitly for the version that includes My Number, because the standard printout usually leaves it off. And note the six-month rule: a certificate you obtained a year ago for some other purpose will not do, even if nothing about your circumstances has changed. If you are also about to move house, collect the certificate after the move, not before.

The exact-match requirement

This is the requirement that quietly causes most of the delays. Your name, your date of birth and your address have to be an exact match across three things at once:

• Your photo ID.
• Your My Number document.
• The profile you filled in on your account.

Three sources, three fields, one consistent answer. It sounds like a formality. It is not, because these documents are produced by different institutions at different moments and drift apart without anyone noticing. Four drifts account for most of the trouble.

The order of given and family names. A residence card prints your name the way your passport does. Web forms ask for "first name" and "last name" and assume an order that does not hold for every nationality. If your card reads family name first and you typed it the other way round, that is a mismatch, however obvious the intent. Copy the card, field by field, in the order it is printed.

Middle names that appear on one document but not another. Plenty of people have a middle name on their passport and residence card but have never typed it into an online form in their life. If the ID shows it and the profile does not, they do not match. Enter every given name that appears on the document you are submitting.

An address that was never updated after moving. You moved, you had the reverse side of your residence card updated at the ward office, and there it stopped. The profile still carries the old address; the notification card in your drawer shows an address from years ago; the certificate of residence you are about to upload shows the current one. Any two of those disagreeing is enough to stall the application. Before you upload anything, look at all three and make them say the same thing.

Dates written in the Japanese era calendar. Documents issued in Japan often print dates using the era calendar, while your passport and residence card use the Gregorian one. The underlying date is identical, but transcribing between the two is exactly the kind of small task where a digit goes astray. Check the date of birth you typed against the Gregorian date on your ID, character by character.

Two practical notes to close this pile. A Japanese bank account is not formally stated to be mandatory, but it is close to necessary in practice, because funding has to come from an account in your own name. And the account-opening process itself is covered step by step in our guide to opening a Wise account in Japan with a residence card.

Pile two: the recipient's details

People treat this half as an afterthought, a few boxes to fill in once the real paperwork is done. It is not. A missing or wrong detail on the recipient side fails just as hard as a missing document on yours, and it usually fails later, after your money has left.

What you need to collect from the person receiving the money, before you start:

• Their full legal name, spelled exactly as their bank or wallet holds it.
• The account or wallet identifier, in the format the destination country uses.
• The receiving institution, and whether that particular institution can actually be paid by the route you are using.
• Any national identifier the destination requires the account to be tied to.

The spelling point is the one to slow down on, because there is no soft landing if you get it wrong. Wise cannot issue a name-amendment letter if a recipient's name is misspelled. Some transfer routes let a bank correct a small discrepancy on request with a letter from the sending institution; here that option does not exist. Ask your recipient to read their name off the bank record itself and send it to you in writing, rather than typing what you assume it is.

Which details count as complete varies sharply by destination, and this is where the "just fill in the boxes" attitude gets expensive.

• Vietnam. Wise pays into bank accounts only; cash pickup and wallets such as MoMo and ZaloPay are not supported, and several receiving banks cannot be paid at all, including HSBC Vietnam, Industrial Bank of Korea (Hanoi branch), NH Nonghyup Bank Hanoi branch, ANZ, Co-opBank and Citibank Vietnam. From 1 April 2026, a Vietnamese bank account name must match the holder's national ID exactly, which retires the informal nickname accounts many families have used for years and makes name mismatches more likely, not less. Our guide to sending money from Japan to Vietnam goes through this in detail.
• China. Personal transfers through Wise cannot reach an individual's Chinese bank account; the available routes are a UnionPay card, Alipay or WeChat. For Alipay the recipient's name has to be given in pinyin with a space between surname and given name, the recipient must be an adult holding a mainland Chinese national ID or Hong Kong or Macau residency, and they have to link a bank card within 72 hours or the transfer cancels and is refunded. WeChat has a 48-hour confirmation window with the same consequence.
• The Philippines. Wise reaches both bank accounts and a list of wallets, but wallet receiving caps are set on the recipient's side and you cannot see their remaining monthly allowance from Japan. A GCash account on Basic verification can receive only 5,000 PHP a month; fully verified, 100,000 PHP. Exceeding a cap gets the transaction rejected, and a refund can take two weeks to a month while the transfer fee is not returned.

None of this is exotic. It is simply that "the recipient's details" is a real document-gathering task with country-specific answers, and it is worth an hour of messaging back and forth before you send anything.

Pile three: the money's own paperwork

The third pile is about the funds rather than the people. Two rules and one near-document.

The funding account must be in your own name. Payments from a third party are rejected. This catches households that run everything through one partner's bank account: that account cannot pay into the other partner's transfer account, however obviously married the two of you are. Cash is not accepted either, and credit cards are explicitly refused. The workable methods from Japan are a bank transfer, which can take up to two business days, or a debit card.

Salary, bonus and cryptocurrency-exchange proceeds are refused as a source of funds. This defeats the plan a lot of people arrive with, which is to have pay routed straight out of the country. It is a rule about where the money comes from, not about how much you send. The ordinary path still works: your salary lands in your Japanese bank account as normal, and you fund the transfer from that account, in your own name. Money coming directly out of a cryptocurrency exchange is likewise not acceptable here.

The purpose of the remittance. Mizuho publishes a standing notice that transfers to Vietnam and India must state the purpose of the remittance specifically and in English, at the request of the receiving banks, or the money may be delayed or returned. That is a bank requirement rather than a Wise one, and it is not a form you download, but in practice it functions as a document: a sentence you have to prepare in advance and phrase properly, with a real cost if you improvise. If you are sending to either country through a Japanese bank, write down your purpose wording before you sit down to make the transfer. Our comparison of what Japan Post Bank and the megabanks really cost covers the rest of the bank-side procedure.

The legal layer

There is exactly one Japanese reporting threshold worth putting in a checklist article. Under the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act, the reporting obligation applies to payments above the equivalent of ¥30,000,000. Below that, it does not apply.

That is the whole statement, and it is deliberately the whole statement. Thresholds circulate in expat forums that we could not confirm against a primary source, and an article that repeats them would be doing you a disservice, so this one does not. If your transfer is anywhere near the ¥30,000,000 mark, that is a conversation to have with your bank or a tax professional rather than with a website.

A gathering checklist

Work down that table before you start rather than during, and the transfer itself becomes a five-minute job. For the wider picture of which route suits your situation, start with our overview of how to send money home from Japan.

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