Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card

https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/the-story-of-suica

27•zdw•1h ago

Comments

insane_dreamer•45m ago

> The cards have no battery and aren’t self-powered in any way. Instead, the reader on the gate emits an electromagnetic field that powers the card just long enough to complete the transaction.

Brillant!

trescenzi•37m ago

This is how all passive RFID works. It's pretty cool. There's even systems that are both passive and active. For example, as a Disney adult, I'm familiar with their magic bands which do have a battery but also work passively. For tying ride photos automatically to you the battery matters because you're either moving too fast or are too far from the camera for passive to be consistently effective. But for simply using it as payment or a ticket you're pressing the device up against a reader and no matter how old the battery is it'll continue working.

dfox•21m ago

At a first glance passive RFID would be a perfect match for ride photos, the whole mechanism is ridiculously fast so speed of the ride would not matter much (the technology works at highway speeds just fine) and can work over ~15 meters.

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.

ButlerianJihad•18m ago

I suppose Splash Mountain is shut down now, and therefore "Flash Mountain" along with it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200807112208/https://www.latim...

So, do girls still flash the camera at other "ride photo" opportunities? Does Disneyland have mammary-recognition AI that automatically suppresses boob exposure on ride photos?

jjice•44m ago

Suica was excellent when I had the chance to use it. I used the Apple Pay version and it worked flawlessly. I think I do prefer what I'm seeing more and more in the US with a tap-to-pay so I don't have to learn a new system, but Suica was so universal that I really couldn't complain. Makes sense especially with the larger diversity of digital payment methods and cash prevalence in Japan.

TulliusCicero•40m ago

The really nice advantage of Suica is its speed. Yeah credit card tap to pay is alright, but it's relatively slow, taking multiple seconds.

Now QR code payment seems to be taking off in Japan, but unfortunately you can't access it as a tourist.

kubb•41m ago

One thing that surprised me was that certain ramen and soba shops didn’t accept cards at all and the only non-cash payment option was the IC card.

trzy•33m ago

I still have my Passmo card from my very first visit to Japan in 2008. I went back in 2018 and it still worked and had a balance. I used it as recently as 2025. Pretty cool!

forthwall•25m ago

Suica is incredible, I remember when I first visited Japan in the 2010’s I was amazed at the speed and ubiquity, now in America that tap to pay on transit terminals are becoming more ubiquitous I feel somewhat disappointed at the “lag” I feel compared to the suica transactions

ben1040•17m ago

It's a bummer that while Google Wallet on Android phones supports Suica, they only offer the feature if the device was sold originally in Japan. Presumably they didn't want to pay Sony the licensing fees for the technology on non-JP devices.

iPhones have it worldwide, so a visitor to Japan can use Apple Pay to stand up a card and fund it.

panny•5m ago

Cringe. Cards are fun, collectable, and never run out of battery. Mine is a custom limited edition card from a Japanese chocolate factory.

https://matcha-jp.com/en/9482

taeric•13m ago

Huge shout out that if you are going to be in Japan, you need one of these cards. I had thought I could just buy a two day pass in Tokyo. Which, you can, but you are almost certainly going to be limited to what routes and lines you can use, then. Which is brutal when you can't tell google maps which card you have.

usrnm•9m ago

What happened to buying a single ticket at the station, when you need one? That's what I did when I was in Tokyo, but it was a long time ago

sowbug•12m ago

When you pay with Suica, the merchant pays a transaction fee of between 2 to 3.2%, similar to a credit card.

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.

speak_plainly•7m ago

Sad to see the mascot going in March. Apparently this entire brand reset is tied to something JR East is calling 'Suica Renaissance,' which is about a ten-year effort to turn Suica into a lifestyle brand.

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.

jacobgkau•7m ago

> When you tap your card on a terminal, it reads and rewrites the card locally in an instant, with the entire transaction processed in under 200 milliseconds. For each tap, the card and terminal mutually authenticate each other and generate a fresh encryption key to prevent spoofing.

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 to really only be on the card itself, but I wonder how they do prevent tampering.

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