How to Move the Money: Wiring Funds Into Japan for a Property Purchase Without Surprises

TL;DR: The money, not the contract, is what most often blows a Japanese settlement date. Funds clear slower than buyers expect, “sending yen” from abroad usually means paying for two currency conversions, and large inward transfers trigger reporting and source-of-funds checks that nobody warned you about. Get the plumbing right weeks before settlement and the transfer becomes a non-event — which is exactly what you want it to be.

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I have watched a clean, fully-financed deal nearly collapse at the eleventh hour for one reason: the buyer’s wire was sitting in an intermediary bank in Singapore while six people waited in a Tokyo conference room. The contract was perfect. The money wasn’t there.

Settlement in Japan is time-stamped. The seller hands over keys and signs the ownership transfer only after the funds are confirmed received in a designated Japanese account. If your money is in transit, the meeting does not proceed, the seller is within rights to charge penalties, and in a competitive market you can lose the property outright.

This piece is the part of the purchase nobody writes about: the actual mechanics of getting a large sum of foreign money into Japan, on time, without bleeding it to fees or tripping a compliance hold. Figures here are directional and as of writing — banks change fee schedules and thresholds, so confirm the current numbers with your own bank before you send.

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Why you can’t just “send yen to Japan”

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding I see.

Buyers assume that because the price is in yen, they should send yen. So they ask their home bank to wire JPY. Here’s what actually happens: your home bank does not hold a meaningful pool of yen. It converts your dollars (or euros, or pounds) into yen at its exchange rate — usually a poor one — then sends that yen via SWIFT. On arrival, depending on the receiving bank and account type, it can get converted a second time. You pay a spread twice and end up worse off than if you’d sent your home currency and let one efficient party convert it once.

The cleaner mental model: money moves internationally in the sender’s currency, and gets converted to yen exactly once, at the best rate you can arrange, as close to the Japanese side as possible. Whether that means sending USD to a yen account that converts on receipt, or pre-converting through a specialist FX provider, depends on your situation — but “ask my home bank to send yen” is almost never the right answer.

One honest caveat: services like Wise are excellent for ordinary-sized transfers, but they get materially stricter on large sums, and you generally cannot push JPY into Japan by SWIFT from outside the country anyway. For a ¥50M–¥200M property wire, a traditional bank SWIFT transfer or a regulated FX house is usually the realistic path.

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The money has to land domestically first

Japanese real estate runs on domestic bank transfers. The seller, the agent, and the judicial scrivener (shiho-shoshi, the licensed registration specialist) expect the purchase funds to arrive at settlement from a Japanese bank account — typically yours, or in some structures a designated escrow-style arrangement.

That means there are two legs, not one:

1. International leg — your money travels from abroad into a Japanese bank account in your name. This is the slow, fee-heavy, compliance-checked step.
2. Domestic leg — on or just before settlement day, funds move from your Japanese account to the seller (and to the various fee recipients) by same-day domestic transfer.

The implication: if you don’t already have a Japanese bank account that can receive a large inward remittance, that is your critical path, not the contract. For non-residents this is genuinely hard — many Japanese banks build their account-opening around residency, and a non-resident account that accepts a large overseas wire is not something you arrange in a week. Solve this early. It is the most common reason a foreign buyer’s timeline slips.

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From the desk — The buyers who sail through are boring about money. Weeks before settlement they send a small “test” transfer — a few hundred dollars — through the exact same route they’ll use for the big one, just to confirm the account details, the intermediary path, and the arrival time. It costs a coffee’s worth in fees and it has saved more than one of my closings, because the time to discover a wrong SWIFT/BIC code or a dormant-account flag is on a $300 trial, not on a ¥120M wire with a room full of people waiting.

What gets reported, and why that’s not a problem

Foreign buyers get nervous when they hear “reporting.” Reporting is routine. It is not a tax, not a request for permission, and not a reason to break a transfer into smaller pieces — doing that (“structuring”) is itself a red flag.

Under Japan’s Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act (FEFTA), a payment exceeding ¥30,000,000 between a resident and a non-resident, or between Japan and abroad, requires a report to the Minister of Finance. In practice the bank handling your transfer files this for you; you may be asked to confirm the purpose (“real estate purchase”). Separately, Japanese banks report international transfers at or above roughly ¥1,000,000 to the tax authorities, and inward flows above ¥2,000,000 are monitored as part of anti-financial-crime oversight. None of this stops a legitimate property purchase. It just means the paper trail exists.

(Directional, as of writing — thresholds and the exact filing mechanics can change; your bank will tell you what it needs.)

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Source of funds: the check that actually delays people

Here is what does cause holds: a large sum arriving from abroad into an account with no history of it, where the bank can’t immediately see the economic rationale. That is a textbook AML red flag, and the receiving bank can freeze the credit while it asks questions.

You prevent this by arriving with the answers before the money does. Be ready to show, in clean documentary form:

• Where the money came from — sale of property, business proceeds, salary and savings, inheritance, investment liquidation. Bank statements, a sale contract, a grant of probate, a brokerage statement.
• Why it’s moving — the Japanese purchase contract or, before signing, the property details and your agent’s confirmation.
• Who you are — passport, and whatever identity documents the Japanese receiving bank specified at account opening.

If your funds passed through several accounts or jurisdictions to get to the sending bank, expect more questions, not fewer. A straight line from an account clearly in your name to Japan is the smoothest story. Tell your sending bank in advance that a large international wire is coming — unannounced six-figure outflows get held on the way out, too.

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The fees nobody quotes you

The headline transfer fee is the least of it. On a large wire, watch four layers:

• The FX spread — by far the biggest cost. On a ¥100M purchase, a half-percent worse exchange rate is ¥500,000. This dwarfs every flat fee combined, which is why where and how you convert matters more than the wire fee.
• Sending bank fee — a flat charge from your home bank, often modest.
• Intermediary/correspondent bank fees — SWIFT transfers frequently hop through one or two correspondent banks, each of which may skim a handling charge. This can leave you short of the exact amount needed at settlement.
• Receiving (“lifting”) fee — the Japanese bank typically charges roughly ¥1,000–¥4,000 to release an inward transfer, plus a conversion charge if currency is converted on arrival.

The intermediary-fee point has a practical sting: if charges are deducted en route, the amount that lands can be a few thousand yen short of the figure on the contract. Send a small buffer over the required amount, or use the “sender pays all charges” (OUR) option where available, so the seller receives the exact yen figure due.

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Timing: work backwards from settlement, with a buffer

Large international wires are not same-day. Build the schedule backwards:

• Settlement day — funds must be confirmed received in your Japanese account, ideally the morning of, with the domestic transfer to the seller ready to execute.
• 5–10 business days before — initiate the international wire. Large sums trigger compliance review at both ends; intermediary hops and weekend/holiday cuts add days.
• 2–3 weeks before — run your test transfer; confirm your Japanese account can receive a wire of this size and that all routing details (account, branch, SWIFT/BIC) are exactly right.
• Weeks earlier — have the Japanese receiving account open and the source-of-funds file assembled.

And mind the Japanese calendar: Golden Week (late April to early May), Obon (mid-August), and year-end (late December to early January) slow the banking system. A wire crossing one of those windows needs extra cushion.

The honest one-liner: nobody has ever regretted sending the money too early. Plenty have lost a deal sending it on time-as-they-defined-it.

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Your next step

If you’re at the stage of moving money, you’re close — which is exactly when the plumbing deserves real attention. Three things to lock down now: a Japanese bank account that can receive a large inward wire, a source-of-funds file you can hand over without scrambling, and an FX plan that converts once, at a rate you’ve actually checked.

A licensed agent who has run foreign-buyer settlements will sequence this with your judicial scrivener and bank so the transfer lands on time and in full. Talk to one at /contact before you initiate anything. To pressure-test the rate you’re being quoted and the total all-in cost, model the purchase against current numbers using our tools, and read the settlement walkthrough so you know exactly what the money is timed to. Get the money right, and settlement day is the calmest part of the whole purchase.

Sources: STICPAY — International Money Transfer Policy: Japan; Wise — Guide to JPY transfers; Tokyo Cheapo — How to Transfer Money to Japan; FSA — Reference Cases on Suspicious Transactions; Ministry of Finance — AML/CFT/CPF in Japan; UNCTAD — Japan Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act.