The cheapest and easiest way to send money home.

There are a lot of forums discussing which way is best to send money back home. I did a lot of research and decided that using http://www.xe.com/ was not only the cheapest option, but also the easiest. However, it was time consuming trying to work out how to do it so here's an outline.
First of all you will need an address in Japan and your alien registration card.
If you have that you can go ahead and apply for a power flex account with Shinsei Bank.
www.shinseibank.com/english/
They have no fees, just say you're interested at the above site and they will send you out an application. You fill it in and return it and they send you an ATM card and all the info you need to log on to an English Internet banking site.
-I don't live any where near a Shinsei Bank or ATM but you can deposit and withdraw money for free via post office or 7holdings ATM's in shopping centres or 7/11's so you can use the account free, anywhere in Japan.
Next you will need to open an account with Xe trade.
http://www.xe.com/fx/
This is also easy you need your new bank account details and also the details of the account you will be sending the money to in your home country, it can be any ones account including your own.
The only problem I had setting up the Xe account was when they asked for a letter from my bank in English with my name the bank name and the date. They did accept the letters the bank sent in the welcome pack, in Japanese, I just had to point out the date, which was written as a string of numbers like 090512, and my address which was written in Japanese.
Once you have both accounts up and running you will be ready to make your first transfer. You just use the basic trade option in Xe.com and then send them the money via a free domestic transfer online using your Shinsei Internet banking page.
I was pretty nervous about this because of all the confusion on the Internet, it does sound quite difficult to make the transfer to Xe from a Shinsei Bank, so don't bother doing it that way use the Internet banking transfer option instead. You go to Transfers and then you have to search for the bank. You need to enter the bank in katakana using the screen keyboard input.xe.com will tell you there bank is the Bank of America and they even sent me an email with that written in katakana. But Shinsei will not accept that. You need to type 'amerika' only, in katakana, and you will see it is displayed with a couple of kanji after it. Next you need the branch which is Tokyo write it as toukyou and it should come up and then you will need the account details they give you.
You should allow about a month to have both accounts working
That's all there is to it. There are no fees at all. Xe makes their money by changing the exchange rate slightly by about 1 yen. So if their site quotes $1 is 100 yen you should be able to send money home for 101yen to the dollar.