Financial disclaimer

Education, not advice

Everything on this site is general information published for a broad audience. It does not take account of your income, assets, debts, family situation, visa or residency status, tax residence, risk tolerance, time horizon or goals — and personalised advice is precisely the exercise of taking those into account. Reading this site creates no advisory, fiduciary, agency or professional relationship between you and us.

Where a page says who a product tends to suit, that is transparent editorial reasoning about the product, not a recommendation to you. Only you know your circumstances, and for a decision that matters, a qualified professional who can see them is worth the fee.

What we are not licensed to do

Several of the activities a reader might want from a finance site are regulated in Japan. We hold none of the registrations they require, and we do not perform them:

• We are not a registered financial instruments business operator and not registered for the investment advisory and agency business under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, so we do not give advice on the value of specific securities or on the timing of buying or selling them for any individual.
• We are not a registered financial services intermediary, not an insurance solicitor or agent, not a money-lending business, not a registered crypto-asset exchange service provider, and not a funds-transfer or currency-exchange business. We never solicit, broker, arrange or conclude any of those contracts for you.
• We are not a certified tax accountant, licensed attorney, judicial scrivener or certified public accountant, and we do not perform work reserved to those professions — including preparing your tax return, representing you before the tax office, or giving legal advice on your situation.
• We do not make an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any financial product, in Japan or anywhere else, and nothing here is directed at a person in a jurisdiction where such material would require a licence we do not hold.

If you want advice on your own situation, the people who can lawfully give it are a registered investment adviser, a certified financial planner working within their registration, a certified tax accountant for tax, an attorney for legal questions, and the provider itself for its own product terms.

Accuracy, sources and dates

Every factual claim we publish is checked against a primary source — a government body, a regulator, or the provider’s own official page — and carries the date it was last verified. Rates, fees, limits, campaigns, eligibility rules and tax thresholds change, sometimes without notice, and a verified date means we checked then, not that the figure holds now.

Where a figure is too volatile to publish honestly, we describe how it works and point you at the official source instead of printing a number that will quietly go stale. Confirm anything that will cost you money at the official source before you act, and tell us when we are wrong — corrections are checked against sources and published.

Calculators, planners and projections

The calculators run in your browser on the assumptions you enter. They are arithmetic, not forecasts: a projection shows what would happen if the assumptions held exactly, which they will not. Returns, inflation, exchange rates, interest rates, tax rules, your income and your spending all vary, and a small change in an assumption compounds into a large change in a long projection.

Nothing the tools output is a promise, a guarantee, a quote, or an offer. Investment involves risk, including loss of principal, and holding assets in a currency other than the one you will spend adds exchange-rate risk on top. Past performance does not predict future returns. Crypto-assets are high-risk, are not deposits, and are not covered by deposit insurance.

Products, providers and eligibility

Listing a bank, card, broker, insurer or lender is not an endorsement, and omitting one is not criticism — coverage follows our research priorities and what we can verify. Whether you can open an account, be approved for a card or loan, or be accepted for a policy is decided by that provider under its own criteria, which it does not publish in full and which we cannot predict. Our finders show their own rules and say when a requirement is unconfirmed; they never model an approval decision.

Terms in Japanese are the binding ones for a product sold in Japan. Where we translate or summarise a product’s terms, the provider’s own Japanese documentation governs, and any conflict should be resolved in its favour, not ours.

Situations that change the answer

Japan-specific facts routinely flip the right answer, and general content cannot account for them: your residency and tax-residence status, how long you have been in Japan, whether another country also taxes you, your visa conditions, whether you are a US person, your employment type, whether you file a return or your employer withholds, your dependants, your municipality, and how a life event lands in a tax year. If any of these apply to you — and for most readers at least one does — treat the general answer as background and get advice on the specifics.

The AI assistant

The Ask-the-library assistant answers from this library using a language model, and can be wrong, incomplete or out of date even when it sounds certain. Check the sources it cites, and never act on it without confirming the facts. It gives no advice, and the whole of this disclaimer applies to it.

Your decisions are yours

You are responsible for what you do with this information, and we accept no liability for a decision taken in reliance on it, to the extent the law allows — the limits and the consumer carve-outs in the terms of use apply here too. If something here contradicts an official source, the official source wins.

If money has already gone wrong — a mis-sold product, a provider dispute, a scam — Japan has free public routes for that: the Financial Services Agency’s counselling office for financial-services complaints, the financial ADR bodies attached to each industry, and consumer affairs centres reachable nationwide. Those services can take up your case; we cannot.