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#card#suica#cards#japan#more#pay#tap#apple#used#payment
Discussion (98 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
People not in Japan/Singapore/Korea/China should experience what a proper transit card done looks like.
It's also useful in that you can pre-order a Shinkansen ticket, for example, and link that purchase to your Suica card, which you then use for the Shinkansen gate. If there are other fees (which there may be) they're just deducted from the money the card holds, as usual. Makes everything very simple.
For me a physical card is easier than using a phone. A phone is so much larger so I would need to get it from a pocket somewhere, while the Suica card I can keep in my jeans pocket or some other easy place.
https://www.sony.co.jp/en/Products/felica/NFC
Definitely better than the QR codes used by China.
During my last visit to London (in 2025), it felt noticeably slower than even NYC subway tap-to-pay.
Suica is a whole other beast that isn't even in the same category of speed. It genuinely feels sub-200ms instantaneous.
Took me roughly a minute to create one within Apple Wallet ahead of my trip, and that was it. Didn't need to install any apps or register on any websites, because creating a Suica card is natively supported in the wallet app.
Idk how the situation is like with Suica card on Android though, outside of the fact that unless the phone was purchased in Japan, it will typically lack the necessary hardware for it (which isn't a concern with iPhones, because all regional versions include it).
You just tap Buy Suica and insert two 1000 yen bills. The system keeps 500 yen as a deposit, which is refunded when you return the card, but it's also $3.50 for a little memorabilia.
If you absolutely don't want the keepsake, you can create a virtual card from Wallet on iPhone(7 or later). I believe an app is not needed through that path. Those can be loaded from your credit card, or at pink ticket vendors with the cavity for devices(IIRC the latter didn't work initially).
It used to be easy to get one from a 7-11, then it was hard for a bit, then it was easy again with digital wallets.
Anyway, that problem is long gone.
https://www.jreast.co.jp/en/multi/welcomesuica/welcomesuica....
In NY, sometime i have to double pay because the card that worked on bus doesn't work on subway...
I don't often do transfers, though.
Whitepaper: https://www.jreast.co.jp/e/press/2024/pdf/20241210.pdf
They're planning on moving beyond the ¥20,000 prepaid balance limit, they are adding QR code payments (think WeChat and Alipay), making Suica work across regions and support more touchless and cloud-based systems, and connecting it more with banking, shopping, loyalty, discounts, and local services.
So essentially they want to become your default payment platform which is a huge opportunity given how paper-money-driven Japan is.
Like....somehow they turned a sub 1ms operation into a 4 minute 32 second one. It boggles the mind
I think you might be referring to QR de Kessai [2], which was introduced in 2023 and is targeted more at inbound international tourists who don’t want to download the app and may not have an E-Money card. Basically they aim to support to support the widest possible audience - at the cost of a slow/clumsy experience. These machines should also accept payment via the faster Coke ON app method and often have E-Money tap-to-pay options too.
From that perspective it kinda sorta makes sense. But yeah I wouldn’t bother with it unless I was dying of thirst and I had no cash or other payment options available.
[1] https://szabo.jp/2021/05/16/coke-on/
[2] https://en.ccbji.co.jp/business/installation/qr-de-kessai/
I love it when little everyday things bring a tiny bit of happiness and color into daily life. (for more info: https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2359_003.html)
Allows you to specify up front what passes you have, worked brilliantly on our honeymoon, especially when figuring out which Shinkansen reservations we needed to make.
That's surprising. IC cards are so universally and cheerfully accepted that I assumed they had no per-transaction costs. Compare the US, where merchants can be surly about card payments.
iPhones have it worldwide, so a visitor to Japan can use Apple Pay to stand up a card and fund it.
If you’re in Japan here is a tip though. If you’re not super close to the main cities and you’re in an area without as many tourists and you see a group of Japanese school children and they all are eating something - the same thing or stuff from the same place, copy them. You won’t be disappointed. Probably. Had the best curry pan or whatever it’s called in my life following that trick.
https://matcha-jp.com/en/9482
Anyway it was a great read! Glad to see somebody writing without (obvious) use of LLMs.
* I have no idea how a shortage of hardware would make it better to give out temporary, expiring cards than permanent cards, since I assume they use the same technology (and the temporary ones would cause more churn, if anything). But that was the story at the time.
Also IIRC, relationship between Sony and JRE had soured few years ago and the fab in Japan that manufactured Suica cards was shut down. The contract went to Panasonic, but looks like Panasonic then sold off the smartcard unit to Nuvoton, and likely some security/nationalistic issues around that was the cause of the card supply issue.
There are really subtle cues to tell the model number(smartcards have model numbers!) and manufacturer of cards, most simply in tiny dent created by the cavity to hold the chip. Sony ones were circular and current cards are racetrack shaped.
Now QR code payment seems to be taking off in Japan, but unfortunately you can't access it as a tourist.
Anyway I love my Suica. I got it a good decade or more ago, I have a few thousand yen on there, and it's always ready for me when I go back to Japan. Useful on the Metro, trains and in shops. Easy to top up at the plentiful, dedicated top up machines. I also loaded Shinkansen tickets on it last time and travelled "ticketless".
Remember when the system was designed in the early 2000s the Internet was much less available and reliable, and when so many transactions happen every day, you don't want to get thousands of passengers stuck inside a metro station only because some Wifi router was down.
This is basically a limitation of the CAP theorem, in these situations there's really no choice but to sacrifice "consistency" and settle for eventual consistency.
I think even credit card payments for transit also make that sacrifice. I had a weird experience using a Visa card to pay for a tram ride because they were promoting it and had a discount. The machine indicated success and let me through, but since I rarely used the card, somehow the payment didn't go through afterwards (the credit card was in a very weird state). If they insisted that all the payment transactions complete successfully for a transit payment, it would be too inconvenient and unreliable to use.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43993711
[2] working link since original blog is down https://web.archive.org/web/20250517082035/https://aruarian....
Can confirm that Suica shows the balance in Apple Wallet.
This is not true. It also stores some history on where you have last entered so it can do things like transfers or block you from exiting an area that you never entered.
What are y'all comparing it with?
I’ve tried to find videos online but they all seem… normal?
But it's really quite fast compared to more general balance card services like NFC/tap to pay, etc.
I was floored when I found out you could pay for stuff with my "Japanese MetroCard." It's quite a wonderful system.
Imagine if you could pay with the Oyster card everywhere from Tesco to Greggs to National Rail to Uber
Actually you can find some small family shops, restaurants etc where they don't accept credit cards but Suica only
This is the part that I'd be interested in reading more about. I'd known there must be some data on the card itself (since I can still use smartphone apps to read my cards now that I'm back in the US), but assumed there must have been some server connection too since storing anything authoritative on the card would invite tampering, and wondered why they would've bothered to store a log of recent trips on the card itself in addition to the hypothetical servers. It does make sense for latency reasons that they'd design it for the card itself to be authoritative, but I wonder how they do prevent tampering.
^ that was the official explanation for a long time, but they've reportedly transitioned to more credit-card like online system with no station-level servers, and also raised fees, which was negatively received by many rail operators aside JR East itself(which owns the system). There had been few rail companies experimenting with NFC credit card rides, though I'm personally suspecting it's more of bargaining power development.open threat than those lines seriously considering a switch.
The chips in the cards are secure enough that physical tampering is extremely difficult and software tampering is difficult enough with security by obscurity + encryption - the catch is that, it turns out, early Suica cards used DES(not even 3DES it seems), and they just didn't tell anybody until those went out of circulation. Plus, the prepaid limit of 20k yen(local equivalent of $200) limits abuse potential of the system; it's not worth trying to commit blatant frauds on the train-and-sandwiches card.
I'm getting off-topic here, but I really appreciate it when people get this date right.
Brillant!
But there are two somewhat significant issues with the radio layer in this application: the geometry of tag antenna is somewhat critical (making it into a band would be problematic) and the back scatter is attenuated by salt water blobs (ie. people) almost perfectly.
Brillant!
AT&T showed this in television commercials back in the 1980's.
"Can you go through a toll booth without stopping? You will. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T."
Lots of those things happened (maybe not faxing from the beach), but AT&T didn't bring us very many of them.