From our other sites
The story
It has come to light that Sompo Japan will raise auto insurance premiums by an average of about 5% starting in January 2027. The hike comes just months after a roughly 1.8% increase this past July, and is reportedly driven by rising insurance payouts amid soaring repair costs.
On the thread, complaints centered less on the price hike itself and more on Sompo Japan’s ties to Bigmotor and its reputation for stingy claim payouts, along with first-hand posts urging people to add a lawyer rider to their policy.
Published 8/24 (Mon) 18:37
Kyodo News
It was learned on the 24th that major non-life insurer Sompo Japan will raise auto insurance premiums by an average of about 5% starting in January 2027. The company raised rates by an average of about 1.8% this past July, but is moving to hike them further as rising repair costs push up insurance payouts.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
turns out insurance is just feeding the sales reps……
Insurance might be the poster child for commission-based pay.
No wonder insurance companies are hated.
Accountability is supposed to be enforced by the government —
guess the amakudari (retired bureaucrats parachuted into cushy industry jobs) network did its job lol
Accidents have been declining this whole time, yet repair costs kept climbing in this weirdly unnatural way.
To avoid getting ripped off by repair shops, getting a dealer estimate is a must.
Weird that so many people still sign up despite the bad reputation.
It's the sheer size of the Fuyo Group (a major Japanese business conglomerate).
https://greta.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/poverty/1787587265/
They've got reinsurance, right?
Probably less about the money and more that the processing costs from staff handling all the claims are getting out of hand.
Anyone who signed up with Sompo Japan, notorious for being nasty to deal with, only has themselves to blame.
Serves them right.
At my renewal this year they already told me next year's rate is set to go up.
Honestly, no matter how accident-free you are, it's not going down from here.
No wonder people stop signing up.
That's a separate issue.
If you're not getting optional car insurance, don't drive.
It's a nightmare for anyone who gets caught up in an accident with you.
That's how tough the negotiations get.
I'm bracing myself for it to take years.
Why bother with a lawyer rider? Because 0:10 fault-ratio cases are a hassle?
If you're 100% not at fault (対物100%), isn't that enough on its own?
There are cases where treatment gets forcibly cut off before you're even healed.
Plus it lets you claim damages at the higher court-standard rate, so it's definitely worth having.
Insurers have internal payout standards, and the amount goes up once a lawyer gets involved or it heads to court.
So there's no downside to having the rider.
Background and Key Points
Sompo Japan is one of Japan’s “big three” non-life insurers, part of Sompo Holdings, itself a core member of the Fuyo Group keiretsu — the old Fuji Bank-centered business network that also includes Nissan and Canon. That conglomerate lineage matters here: several posters explicitly credit Fuyo’s sheer institutional weight for why customers keep signing up despite the company’s reputation. The bigger context is Bigmotor: in 2023 it emerged that the used-car and repair chain had been deliberately damaging customer vehicles to inflate insurance claims, with Sompo Japan implicated as an enabler that kept referring business to Bigmotor even after red flags surfaced. That scandal is why “rising repair costs” as a stated cause for a rate hike lands so badly with Japanese readers — accident counts have been falling for years, so cost increases read as self-inflicted rather than external.
The thread didn’t really argue about whether 5% is too much; it split instead over who’s to blame for costs rising and whether Sompo Japan’s claims-handling reputation is deserved. Some posters treat the stinginess as folklore validated by the Chiba flood-payout delays; others push back that comparison shopping (dealer estimates, avoiding shady repair shops) is on the customer.
What outsiders will likely miss is the mechanics of Japanese fault-ratio claims (過失割合) and why a “lawyer rider” (弁護士特約) is such common advice here: insurers pay out according to internal schedules that are lower than what courts award, and simply having legal representation shifts negotiations toward the higher “court standard” amount — a structural quirk of the claims system, not a comment on any one insurer.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “[Sompo Japan] Auto Insurance Premiums Up 5%, January 2027.”
Leave a Reply