Originally Posted by TemboOne

Well beep88, what you say is perfectly understandable and quite true.
However, we are a couple of seniors (72+) travelling for pleasure. We always stay in 4* hotels for the most part in Japan and on the last two visits (21 days and 27 days) we spent the last week of each at the Intercontinental Yokohama Grand where they were quite happy to accept cash. (We used our gold card to secure the reservation - but why charge hotels when we had cash available!).

While you mentioned ATM's, we've never actually looked for one in Japan, but we've heard that some are even time restricted and shut down at night.

No matter, cash really is king over there. The fun thing is to get and use some 2,000 Yen notes. They seem to love getting them, even when the cash registers are not designed to accommodate that denomination!