Now QR code payment seems to be taking off in Japan, but unfortunately you can't access it as a tourist.
* 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.
iPhones have it worldwide, so a visitor to Japan can use Apple Pay to stand up a card and fund it.
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.
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.
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.
insane_dreamer•1h ago
Brillant!
trescenzi•54m ago
dfox•39m ago
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.