In that case, Citi Gold gives you no benefit.

Ok, I see that the regular account also has "no fee" if you hold over 1 million yen.

Yesterday the spread was 1 yen, so you are paying 1/78th, which is quite high. I pay 0.1% in my European bank and can pay with CC and get cash at 0% using US Capital One accounts.

So Citi Gold is pretty worthless for us but we are going to reach it "naturally" soon. The only benefits that I see is that you don't have to pay 2 yen per USD to take out USD cash and the 160 yen domestic transfer fee. It's criminal that you have to pay 3% to take cash out of a USD denominated account. And they also allow "no fee" foreign electronic transfers. We don't have much use for that until we want to close the account!

The only real benefit of having a Japan Citi account is that you can do internal Japan transfers (essential for paying rent) and some places don't take foreign CCs for small purchases. And sometimes you need a PIN at a train ticket machine, which you don't normally have with a US card or they tell me it becomes a cash transfer if you use your PIN and you get nailed with fees and interest. Oh and also getting an ETC card for the car is quite important.

So ETC and being able to make domestic transfers are the only real critical benefits of Citi Japan account. Otherwise we would not need a Japanese bank account.

And if you have filtered 100,000 USD through their account into yen then they have made 100,000 yen off you so far. Not bad for 6 months of "work".

p.s. I also noticed that you get charged a fee at 7-11 if you use a Citibank ATM card there (one of the listed benefits since they have few branches). I actually think it was something bizarre relating to the fact that it was after 10 pm, but my Japanese reading ability is close to nil. If I use my US cards then there are no fees at 7-11.