If you have money, you can generally send it somewhere else. If you don't...
They can. Withdrawal of JPY to Japanese bank accounts work fine and arrive next day. JPY has sailed up as the third most traded currency at MtGox now, and the price difference between MtGox and Bitstamp is slowly decreasing. Below 10% for the first time in days now.
Do you know for a fact that withdrawal to a Japanese account is doable? The yen rate for BTC at Gox is as high as the dollar rate which would suggest that it is no more possible to withdraw yen than dollars.
I agree that is a reasonable inference. Yet a few people report no problems with yen transfers and the only complaint so far re yen withdrawals were by joesmoe2012 who complained his withdrawal took 1 week (as opposed to 4-12 weeks for sepa/wire).
This topic has been ongoing for 4 months and no serious problem mentioned re JPY.
It is possible there are problems but japanese account holders don't hang out much on bitcointalk and therefore don't post about them.
It is also possible that there is no problem with JPY withdrawals and active, clued in JPY users don't mention not having problems because they have an arbitrage opportunity.
I wonder what could allow the gap to continue despite an efficient way to extract fiat from Gox.
Perhaps for some reason the JPY exchange still has bitcoin buyers who prefer to use MtGox since it is based in Japan?
The JPY situation is definitely curious.
It would be great if any JPY account holder would confirm that they are effectively arbitraging but of course if they're any good they won't say anything.
Hmmmm....
Yes the JPY transfer went through, the reason it was being held up by gox was that my name in japanese wasn't spelt right, so they couldn't process it. They didn't notify me of this, and the status still just showed confirmed.
Anyhow the mistake was on my behalf, not goxes. I do belive that JPY transfers are going out as normal.