alt Hacker NewsSuica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
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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.
Maybe it was advanced for the time being created, to me it's just any other RFID card that is issued everywhere else in the world in the matter of read speed, from every public transit card that I find in every EU country I've visited (maybe for a US citizen not used to public transit it seems something special, I don't know), to skipasses, to even your gym card.
Having the option to also pay with credit card would be much more convenient to tourists, when I visited Japan I've had difficulties finding the right place to get a SUICA card (being that my Android phone didn't have Felica chip, as most phones sold outside Japan), and on top of that you almost everywhere need to charge it with only cash. And you can charge it only by 500 or 1000 yen at the time (depending on the machine), and of course tickets always have not round prices like 110 yen. And you have 500 yen of deposit for a card that probably costs to them 10 yen to manufacturer, unless you get the red SUICA card that you can get only in some special machines at the airport but with that you don't get back the unused credit when you leave (you can spend it at vending machine tough).
So the speed saving of a couple of ms of not having to pay by tapping your normal credit card is completely vanished by wasting time to charge that card.
BTW even if they don't want to put credit card POS on every station (I get it, it's expensive and they need to pay fees if someone uses a card, compared to cash) they could make a system that uses regular NFC (would be 100ms slower, who cares) at least for tourists so they can use it with a regular NFC card in their phone wallet that they can charge with an app without requiring a technology that only works in phone sold in Japan?
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.
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.
I live in Tokyo and use my Suica almost every day. Suica is very convenient because it makes entering station gates very smooth. I have a question: how do people enter stations in cities outside of Japan? I have never been outside of Japan, so I was curious.
I’ve visited Tokyo four times, and I’ve been using the same Suica card since my very first trip! I love it, and I’d really like to collect all the Suica-like cards, such as PASMO, ICOCA, Kitaca, and more.
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)
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.
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.
It's depressing that some transport systems around the world delivered decades later couldn't match this (using a proprietary card not a credit card), looking at you Myki.
I was hoping the author would also discuss a bit more about the security / encryption side of it. If transactions are done only between the card and the reader, could one use a reader at home to alter the balance? If you can load the card on you phone I assume you can use the phone to read it, but that might not be true.
Anyway it was a great read! Glad to see somebody writing without (obvious) use of LLMs.
I’m in Japan right now on a holiday and I was blown away by how easy it was to get set up with Suica through Apple Wallet / Apple Pay. In fact, I did the initial set up back home in Toronto just by tapping a few buttons in the native Apple Wallet app. Took probably 30 seconds.
It is so convenient to use Express Transit Cards on iOS… I also just found out that there’s something similar for Presto cards in Toronto so I’m going to have to set that up too.
The combination of its speed and universal acceptance across Japan makes this by far the best system anywhere. Despite being decades old, it’s still better than “new” systems being rolled out elsewhere.
Want to buy a drink while waiting for your train? Just tap the same card. It’s magical and way faster than ApplePay or similar tech.
I am literally on a flight to Japan right now, and one of my main goals is to add a Suica card to my collection of transit cards from around the world (currently 31 cards large).
Sadly physical cards may only have a few years left, for the most part using tap-to-ride is superior. So I really have to get out there and grab them while I can.
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.
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!
In the past I've purchased a rail pass because I figured it'd be more economical but last trip we just got a couple of IC cards and just booked our shinkansen and that was honestly the best experience. The problem with the rail pass was that it could only be used on some services, and the IC card was usable on most. The most confusing thing is just figuring out which local transport companies have a slightly different network, but it was honestly not bad.
The best thing that you can add a Suica, PASMO, ICOCA, or TOICA card anytime to your Apple Wallet. You don't even have to be Japan. Just add transit pass and that's all, when you are there you can start using it instantly. But it works with a lot of cards all around the world (Hong Kong Octopus, Korea Tmoney, SF Clipper etc.) it's in the Wallet app itself.
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.
Even though I've never been to Japan I have one of these loaded onto my phone so I can use it to sign in to beatmaniaⅡᴅx arcade machines lol
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
Wait, the balance is stored on the card? I'm fairly sure the balance is shown in the JR app too, so presumably that cannot be the case. [Update: or maybe not? I opened the app now and it's asking me to enable NFC and hold it up to the card.]
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".
Coming from NYC and being used to swiping once to pay a flat fair, my first Suica lesson was they vary the fair by the distance traveled. This means you have to tap in AND out of buses and subways. It was a bit embarrassing and frustrating when I almost could not board a bus in Sapporo with my friends after they all tapped in and my card was rejected. WTF? Thankfully the bus driver showed me a sign in English telling me I forgot to tap out of a station or bus. Oh. He let me board the bus with my friends. Found a train station and the woman at the counter began holding up a series of English signs so we could figure out where I forgot to tap out to ensure the correct charge is applied then sent me on my way. Turns out I goofed up transferring between the Tokyo subway and Shinkansen where I didn't tap out of the subway, got stuck, and a frustrated transit worker just opened the gate to let my dumb tourist ass through meaning I didn't tap out of the subway.
I was floored when I found out you could pay for stuff with my "Japanese MetroCard." It's quite a wonderful system.
The FeliCa NFC standard made its way into more than just transit cards in Japan. One notable user is the Amusement IC network, which lets you quickly log into arcade games across multiple manufacturers using a single card. Some implementations (Konami's e-amusement most notably) even go as far as to allow any FeliCa-compatible card or device to be linked to a profile, including transit cards, phones (with no app required!) and certain models of Sony Bluetooth earbuds which use FeliCa for quick pairing.
Suica is amazing until it isn't, recharge with credit cards can be a miss. Doesn't work everywhere in Japan too.
If you get a children’s card, they print your kids name right on it. It’s a nice little souvenir to keep.
There also seems to be some state logic as well. The card knows when I’m in the middle of a trip and doesn’t update the balance until a future tap when it can determine the extent of the trip (presumably). Very cool that it’s all done locally.
For me, other than the speed and convenience, I was amazed that I could use my same Suica card (on my iPhone) in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Fukuoka. Even though each region has their own card, they have mutual use in most areas.
> fast
What are y'all comparing it with?
I’ve tried to find videos online but they all seem… normal?
Weird romanization, wouldn't it be "suika"? There's no "ca" grapheme in common Japanese romanization systems iirc.
I’m going to Japan soon. Should I just use the iPhone Suica version or get the physical one?
How is it different from the Oyster card in London?
FeliCa (or called NFC Type-F) is so great and the fact that it's dominant in Japan even made Apple to include FeliCa support on global iPhones!
i imagine not being reliant on american payment networks for your nation's retail economy has lit a fire under their asses.
>Project leader Akio Shiibashi originally set a symbolic launch target: January 1, 2001, the first day of the new millennium.
I'm getting off-topic here, but I really appreciate it when people get this date right.
> 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 for the card itself to be authoritative, but I wonder how they do prevent tampering.
>Every Suica card has a chip storing two things: a unique card ID, and your current balance.
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.
> 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!
If you haven’t experienced suica, it’s like magically fast. Faster than NFC, faster than Apple Pay, faster than tap to pay, faster than Disney magic bands, faster than your work badge. It absolutely floored me every time I used it in Japan and it’s a full payment transaction.