Surprised you're writing checks every week: I haven't written a check in years. ACH transfers, sure, but not physical checks.

I do still receive them occasionally, almost always as printed checks from companies.

Checks never took off in Japan because their 1947 Labor Standards Act (Art. 24) actually made it illegal to pay wages by check [1]. So it's not that checks were made obsolete, it's that they were smothered in their crib. Until the advent of electronic payment, it's said that tens of millions still got paid in cash rather than bank transfer in the early 90s [2].

I think it's easy to forget that societies that adopt a technology early might be doing so because the slightly outdated alternative from elsewhere was never brought over. Japan has no shortage of those, like a lot of dining is still cash only. Who knows, perhaps in 10 years those restaurants will skip credit cards and contactless and go straight to face-based automatic payment.

[1] PDF warning https://www.ilo.org/dyn/travail/docs/2018/Labor%20Standards%... [2] 1991 article https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1991/10/24/japanese-prefer-cold...

I'm only nominally a grown-up, but I've lived in the US my entire life and I don't think I write a check more than once a year. Most stuff I buy is done with credit cards (which I generally pay with their respective mobile apps with bank transfers), my mortgage is automatically withdrawn from my checking account, and I use CashApp or Paypal to send money to people directly.

I think the last time I actually wrote a physical check was when I refinanced my house in 2021.

I don't think cheques are obsolete in Japan, so much as never having been popular and established in the first place. A lot of things are just done in cash (even e.g. buying houses!) and that's not seen as unacceptably risky the way it is in many countries; COD is an established practice that again just doesn't exist (and wouldn't remotely be considered safe) elsewhere. Furikomi is slow and expensive and cheques would actually be an upgrade in many ways.

> When I lived in Japan twenty years ago, everybody just wired money electronically and checks were long obsolete. In the US, I write checks every week or so.

And yet in Japan they're still obsessed with using backwards fax machines and paper.

> They also had a system where you would put your checkbook into the teller machine and it would print your credits and debits into the book for you.

That's intresting to know.

Where I'm at, we had (still have?) a "passbook", a small booklet where you could get all your transactions printed onto.

But AFAIK we couldn't do it ourselves through the teller machine though. Once in a few months or so you go to the respective bank and ask the staff there to update the passbook. They use a machine, however.

Of course, there days it's unnecessary as you can electronically download a list of your transactions for a given period from the bank's website/app.

> In the US, I write checks every week or so.

What the hell? I need 'checks' of some kind (regular check or cashier's check) maybe once a year for something like a deposit on a rental home.

For actual rent payments and the like I use Zelle, since most major banks support it. What do you need actual paper checks for?