I am sat here at 11:47 on a Tuesday night trying to create an account on a Japanese website so I can order a fucking train ticket, and I have now failed to submit the form six times. Six. I have a master's degree. I have filed a tax return in this country in a language I cannot read. And yet here I am, defeated, by a beige web form that was clearly designed by a committee of absolute clowns who have never once in their lives met a human being.

Let me set the scene properly, because you will not believe me otherwise.

First, the name fields. You write your first name. Then your last name. Then, and I want you to really sit with this, you write your first name AGAIN. And your last name AGAIN. In katakana this time, because apparently the Latin alphabet I just typed isn't sufficiently humiliating. Four fucking name fields. Four. For one name. The name has not changed in the eleven seconds since I last typed it. I am the same man. But the form wants to be sure, and it wants me to suffer, and it has confused those two desires entirely.

Then, oh God, then comes the password.

Why Japanese sign-up forms hate a strong password

Here is the bit that makes me want to put my forehead through the monitor. You go to make a genuinely strong password. Capitals, numbers, a couple of symbols, the works, the kind of thing the entire rest of the planet has been begging you to use since roughly 2009. You hit submit. And the form, this smug beige rectangle of pure malice, throws an error: passwords may only contain half-width alphanumeric characters. No symbols. For fuck's sake. You are actively forbidden from being secure. Some tosser in a meeting in 2003 decided that the exclamation mark was a threat to national security and nobody has been brave enough to overrule him since.

And it's never just one rule. It's a password between 8 and 16 characters, no symbols, must contain a number, must NOT contain three repeating characters, must not match your user ID, and must be entered twice into two separate fields that don't let you paste. You cannot paste. In 2026. They have disabled paste on the password field so that I, a grown man, have to manually retype sixteen characters into a box I cannot see, twice, while my password manager screams into the void. The absolute fucking state of it.

Then you submit the whole thing. And the form reloads, blank, every single field wiped, with one tiny red line at the top informing you that your postcode was in the wrong format. Not the postcode field, mind. The whole bloody form. Burnt to the ground because of a hyphen. Start again, mug.

The error you will always get

I will bet any foreigner in this country, any of you, a full pint that you cannot complete a Japanese sign-up form on the first attempt. You can't. Nobody can. The form is not a form, it is an endurance trial dressed as data entry, and the error message is mandatory. It's part of the ritual. It exists to remind you of your place.

My favourite genre of error is the one that tells you nothing. An error has occurred. That's it. That's the whole message. Which error? Where? On what field? Piss off, says the form, figure it out yourself, that's the game. So you go through all fourteen fields like a deranged forensics officer, and it turns out the problem was that your phone number had the country code in it, which the form demanded on the previous page. These muppets cannot agree with themselves across two screens.

And the design. The proud, laminated, corporate confidence of it. The same nation that builds a train system accurate to the second cannot build a sign-up form that lets me use the @ symbol. They will put an animated mascot at the top of the page, a little smiling rice ball wearing a hard hat, beaming at you while the form behind it does everything in its power to ruin your evening. Tatemae as web design. Everything looks helpful. Nothing is.

I did eventually make the account. Took forty minutes. Then it logged me out and the password didn't work. Goodnight.