Wife and I bought a mansion (condo) in Osaka. We are still resident in the US, but we're working to get the mansion set up so we can live in Osaka part-time after we retire in a few years, and also during our vacations between now and then.
We are currently in Osaka (at an Airbnb). My wife has the water bill for the mansion set up for automatic credit card payments, but the very first bill has to be paid in person with cash. We thought we'd be OK since the billing cycle ended on June 15, leaving us with a couple of weeks to get it paid. But it turns out the first bill won't get mailed out until 7/1 – the day we fly home. The bill will be sent to an unoccupied home in a neighboring prefecture, where it will be collected by Alsok and sent to a mail-forwarding service, who will in turn send it to us in the US. Which will of course be useless, since we won't be physically in Japan to pay it with cash.
We've already been through one cycle of this: water bills this spring were getting nicely paid by credit card, but after a few months of the very first bill going unpaid, the city shut off water service and suspended the account. My wife had made phone calls (from the US) to try to get them to pay the first bill with the credit card info, but they just couldn't/wouldn't do it. We really don't want this to happen again.
It's now June 23, so we've got one week left on the ground here in Osaka. How can we sort this out before we leave?
by GhostOfTheDriftless