Disney Osaifu Plus

» see disney.bk.mufg.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

To use this you had to open a bank account. Not a game account with a card number attached to it, an actual account at an actual Japanese bank, with a branch number and a monthly fee. That requirement is the first thing to understand about Disney Osaifu Plus, and it is why almost nobody outside Japan has ever heard of it.

The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ and Walt Disney Japan announced the partnership on 28 May 2007 and opened the service the same afternoon at four o'clock. The bank's release claimed it as the first time Disney had gone into online banking with anyone in Japan. The money sat at a branch created specifically to hold it, called Castletown, an online-only branch with no counter to walk into, and using it meant taking out a Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ Direct contract with Castletown as the representative account.

A Castletown account ran 315 yen a month with tax, waived for the first twelve months and waived afterward if you kept enough on deposit. Anyone under twenty could open the ordinary kind and pay nothing at all, which tells you who the bank was reaching for. Its pitch had a word for them: family. What it built to carry that word was a video game.

~ the record ~

~ the bank inside the game ~

The game was called Magical Bazaar and it ran on PCs only. You played a tailor in a castle town, bought materials, made clothes, and chose when to put them out, and the number of customers moved with how well you had judged all that. Ordinary shop management, except for what the designers did with the bank.

There was a bank in the town. You could deposit your takings in it, and the deposit earned interest the way a deposit does. The second effect is the one worth keeping. The bank's own launch document says the size of the balance you were holding there had a large influence on the shop's standing in the town. A savings balance was a reputation statistic. Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ had built an edutainment title whose central lesson was that money left in a bank makes you more respected, and it was giving it away with a savings account.

Magical Bazaar also leaked into the rest of Disney's Japanese operation. Money banked in the game and clothes sewn in the shop could be carried over into Disney Games, the company's free game site, so the balance followed you out of the product that generated it.

~ how the closure was written down ~

On 26 February 2010 the bank published a document headed as a repeal of the Disney Osaifu Plus terms of use and an amendment to the Castletown branch transaction rules. Reading it is like reading the minutes of a committee. There is a table of the current clauses beside their replacements, and the replacement for the clause granting you the use of Disney Osaifu Plus is the single word "deleted", and the clauses below it move up by one.

Buried in the opening line is the actual event: on 1 June 2010 the branch would change the services it handled and the contents of Disney Osaifu Plus would end. So the last day was 31 May. No reason appears anywhere in the document, and none needed to, because on its face the document is not an obituary at all. It is a bank telling its customers that a numbered clause has been struck out.

~ the branch that stayed open ~

Castletown is still there. The page for branch 582 is live on the bank's site today, under the shortened name the company has used since 2018, and it says the branch stopped opening new accounts and that everything already open keeps working. Passbooks and cash cards are still good, and the branch name and account numbers never changed.

What survived, then, is the container. People were sold a bank account on the strength of a tailoring game and a points scheme, and when those were taken away the account stayed exactly where it was, paying out nothing in particular, named after a castle town that no longer exists anywhere.

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