Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful(aruarian.dance) |
Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful(aruarian.dance) |
Right now, some ncmc card issuers allow validating the card using your phone so you don't have to go to the kiosk after topping up and they are working on letting people use their phones.
> A lot of this is thanks to FelicaDude (Reddit, Twitter), an anonymous internet stranger who disappeared a few years ago but seems to have a lot of knowledge about how FeliCa works. I can't verify any of this information, but it makes sense to me; and anyway, there's no way someone would lie on the internet, right?
Does this mean that the offline digital cash problem has been solved, as far as in-person customer to merchant payment system goes?
You can trust an arbitrary person giving you money through the card just as well as if they gave you cash. Could you turn this into a pay-anyone-money using cards and card readers?
One other limitation in place is that these transit cards have a limit of ¥20,000 (~140 USD) max that can be loaded on to them. So any transaction larger than that is out of the question.
So to answer your question, no this isn’t really a person-to-person cash replacement. It’s a transit card that happens to be able to be used as an offline payment method, but it’s got various limitations and weirdness that prevent it from being something more.
The primary problems that digital cash has to solve is double-spending. Debit/credit cards solve this problem by confirming the transaction with the central server over the internet. Credits cards used to solve this problem by trusting that someone's signature could not be replicated, but this was obviously insecure. Some cryptocurrencies solve this problem by confirming transactions with a public distributed ledger.
This system is solving the double-spend problem preventing the holder of the card from, as per OP,
> cloning (can't read the keys)
> a successful attack on another card (each card has its own keys)
> replay attacks (per-session unique keys are generated in the challenge/response)
So the secure enclave on these cards prevent double-spend.
However, it seems like the card reading machine has to be trusted in the current implementation, because it can extract an arbitrary amount of cash from your card. This prevents arbitrary peer-to-peer transactions. But this seems like a much easier problem to solve.
The video in London is showing tourists/visitors, since they all have paper tickets and half of them are fumbling around. The Japanese video shows people familiar with the system.
The Japanese gates are certainly faster, but not as much as shown.
But the London Underground gates are fast enough, with enough space from the reader to the gate, that if you’re ready (and the gate isn’t congested) there’s no need to slow down even from a very brisk walk to pass through.
Yes and yes
> What happens if a card is wrong/doesn’t scan/is invalid/etc at the higher speed?
Then the fare gates close in time to stop that person and the next 3 or so people behind them get annoyed and go around.
Stored value cards are optimized for speed and cost, and as a result have shared symmetric keys available in both card and reader. That enables extremely fast transactions.
EMV cards are (also) optimized (at least in the offline case, which transit gates use – the latency to talk to the bank backend would be too high) for security. The security model doesn't trust readers to keep keys secret, which means you need asymmetric cryptography for card authentication. The specs are old, which means RSA – which is very slow to run in cheap ICs embedded in these cards produced at scale.
If the protocol is designed well, high speed doesn’t mean high error rate either.
But I’m with you, with an express travel card set in Apple Pay (so you can just plop your phone down on the reader without opening anything) there is a beat for it to read on the Underground barriers, but it’s basically the same length of time as it takes to do the step and a half from the reader to the gate. At a normal walking speed I don’t feel as though I need to interrupt my stride.
When your card fails in Tokyo, it's such a stressful event, and you have to do that "huff, turn around & stomp off" thing everyone does...
The light rail here in Phoenix was established in 2008. Since then it's been on an "honor system" fare payment regime. There are bright orange lines painted on the ground and you must not cross the line until you've paid your fare! Then, in the station or on the train, you may be approached by a Fare Inspector (these are specialized jobs) who wears blue and wields an electronic scanner box.
If you haven't paid your fare then you may receive a warning, and you're usually expelled at the next station. Personally, I've never seen anyone receive more than a verbal warning, such as a citation or a police visit.
Recently the entire transit system underwent "fare modernization" and now most riders are on the mobile app or an NFC card. The app uses QR codes only, much to my chagrin. The little kiosks that are supposed to scan QRs are very, very reluctant to accept mine, for some reason.
Therefore it may take me 30 seconds up to 4-5 minutes before the kiosk beeps green and takes my fare. (The fare is prepaid in an account, but scanning/tapping will deduct it from that account and acknowledge your presence in the station/bus.)
It is 100% operator discretion whether you can board a bus. So every time I try with my mobile app, there is a rigmarole where the operator shares their favorite troubleshooting steps for scanning (which never work because it's not my fault) and then they wave me aboard, whether paid or not. Because the other passengers hate waiting behind a dude who's fiddling with his phone.
I often see passengers just walk into a train station without tapping/scanning. I have no idea how they do that. I think they're just not bothering to pay their fare. But again, we don't have gates or turnstiles, only some menacing orange lines on the ground, and we're all still on the "honor system", so anything goes.
Honestly it does not seem to me like the stations could be redesigned to have any sort of barrier gates. People would just jaywalk and cross the tracks anyway. I suppose the taxpayer subsidies are so significant that they don't really care about collecting all the fares they could.
However, in Denmark many passengers (commuters with weekly or longer tickets, people with smartphone tickets, people with paper tickets) don't need to do anything at all when they leave a train as there aren't any barriers, and that can't be beaten for speed.
In addition, the annoyance of these gates comes from having to fiddle with the wallet, etc. in order to find the card or the phone, or the fact that multiples tries may be required for the reader to actually read it; not the 200ms it takes for the reader to do so. I'm going to bet that faster NFC bandwidth makes the entire thing even more finicky, not less.
If you really want to speed how people go through the gates, then _remove the damn gates_. It's not rocket science, and there are some European cities that have _no_ gates in their underground systems. München comes to mind, but even in London less central stations have no gates. Beat that.
In addition , the article bashes NXP for using obscurity as a defense, then goes to praise Felica, whose apparently main barrier of defense is:
> the crypto is proprietary, and probably buried underneath a mountain of NDAs, so the public can't audit it independently.
This is literally the definition of security by obscurity. When I read the two examples set by the author, my only possible conclusion is that security by obscurity actually works, but only when you can keep it actually obscure. The only problem is that NXP failed to keep their algorithms obscure while apparently FeliCa did. It is basically the opposite conclusion to what the author is trying to convince me to believe. I find it totally unjustified to blame NXP for trying to keep the algorithm obscure by the courts when apparently FeliCa also does it -- just much more successfully.
Note: I personally consider MIFARE classic being _almost_ trivially clonable a requirement.
Did you mean it reminded you of others you'd seen on HN or just generally?
I don't know enough about these technologies to speak to the authoritativeness or veracity of gpt output, but I appreciate the gesture.
While some people have a reflexive dislike for AI output, I've done maybe a hundred o3 Deep Research queries now and found the reports to be generally high quality as well sourced as most human generated ones. I shared this one since I think it was a particularly interesting review the various systems around the world (I've personally used all those transit turnstiles personally and am generally familiar w/ RFID/NFC/EMV systems and didn't spot anything egregious).
(I find Deep Research reports to on average be high signal to noise than most of the human tokens being output on sites like HN for example.)
(1) it means people pay for usage. Someone going 20km pays more than someone going 1km since they have proof where you entered.
(2) it prevents more accidents/fines? - I had this happen to me in Paris, maybe because I was used to Japan. I was going to Paris Disneyland. I wrongly assumed I couldn't get there without going through a gate. I got on the subway, followed the signs in the tunnels to some train in Châtelet les Halles, was on the train, showed up at Paris Disneyland, was told I had to pay a 3x fine for not having the correct ticket. Or I could get on the train, go back to Paris, get the correct ticket, then come back (2hrs?) In Japan, for the most part, I couldn't have gotten on the train without a ticket and if I did go further than I paid can just adjust my fare at the end. No fines needed or imposed.
For the record, I am French. I used to be proud that nothing physical prevented you from boarding a train you had no ticket for. But, IMHO sadly, people like me have lost, because now trains also have ticket gates in France, which means that I:
A) No longer can accompany my ailing relatives to their train seats if I don't have a ticket myself (/as I could twenty years ago)
B) No longer can board the train when all my hands are full with luggage (since I need a free hand to search for the ticket in my wallet/bags to go through the damn machine).
The NFC readers on the gates in Japan will read cards from several centimeters away. My phone, which has Osaifu-Keitai setup, can be left in my bag and I just wave my bag over the reader as I walk by. It is incredibly rare for a misread to occur. They just work.
The way it's supposed to work is that if you pass your card while the gate is opened, it keeps the gate open longer.
In practice most people wait for the gate to close in front of them before reopening it.
I'm not sure why people do fgaf. I think the reason is that this makes you look like a fraudster going right behind a valid passenger.
That comes with other problems.
Transit gates have the big advantage of providing you with instant feedback on whether your ticket or mode of payment is valid or not.
I've seen tourists get in trouble with ticket inspectors at least once in a very unpleasant way for simply having pressed the wrong button at an inscrutable ticket vending machine.
> I don't understand -- we are talking about 100ms or so of latency? which is almost completely dwarfed by any mechanical action such as the gates actually opening??
As others have already said, Japanese gates are open by default, and are more of a user interface indicator (to you and potentially station attendants nearby) than an actual physical barrier. You could step over or between the "barrier" that extends when the gate rejects your payment pretty easily in most, but it would be very obvious that you're skipping the fare.
So do the validators that are put in waiting areas, inside the trains, etc. in cities with no gates. That you can literally use at the time you want to use them (waiting for the train, inside the train, etc. ) , rather than forcing a bottleneck to everyone.
> As others have already said, Japanese gates are open by default
And this by itself already makes more of a latency difference than the entire IC card system does. Imagine what removing the gates altogether does.
Sometimes people will be low on balance and get rejected. People reroute quickly in normal conditions, but in rush hour that'll be a huge mess and everyone will be pissed at the culprit.
Also, if you use an iPhone (i don't have any experience with Android phone in Japan so I can't speak for it) to scan, you don't have to unlock the phone to use it. You simply reach into your pocket to grab your phone, and put the phone near the gate scanner as you approach the gate, and it scans instantly really fast (I was actually surprised how fast it was compared to the ones in Seoul). The experience feels like you are just walking through a narrow passage without any hindrance.
I also like your suggestion to remove the gates. When I visited Germany and Austria I really liked the subway there (no gates, and it even operates past midnight!). I saw only one ticket inspector out of probably about 20 subway rides when I was there, but it seems to work just fine. I am afraid such system might be abused in countries like Korea or China.
add: I also just realized that no gate system wouldn't work in Japan or Korea because during rush hour there is no way for ticket inspector to check the tickets of passengers on train. You are squeezed in each train unit like sardines squeezed in tin can.
1: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%94%B9%E6%9C%AD%E3%82%A8%...
Like I said, I was used to Japan. I couldn't have boarded a train without passing through a gate for which I would have needed a ticket. As pointed out above, that happened in Paris. At no point between the metro and the train was their any barrier preventing me from getting on the train without a ticket. Just a tunnel with labels directly to the train. Being used to Japan, I assumed therefore I could work out out at my destination since there wasn't even a ticket purchasing place that I would notice, between those 2 spots.
You need to remember, people who have not used your system (tourists) will have to make every mistake possible. I prefer a system that allows less mistakes as well as a system that lets me fix my mistake. You seem to prefer systems that require you to make a mistake once and get fined, and then learn how to use the system from the mistake.
To transform your argument: why do my partially-disabled relatives now need to walk by themselves to their train seats? Just so that people who don't even read the instructions do not make a mistake that is going to result in a slap on the wrist fine (if anything, cause few revisors are going to fine you if you look touristy enough) ?
The only thing I keep hearing is how having no barriers at all is just intrinsically better, and difficulties with getting used which such system look like very minor compared to the difficulties with moving from a system with no barriers to a system with barriers, not mentioning the disadvantages for users.
This argument falls flat give Japan's transit is infinitely more efficient and handles far more people than Paris. No one is slowed down by Japan's system.
Sure, you could spread the readers out a bit better across the platform etc., but that significantly weakens the "impossible to accidentally evade the fare" UX, as it still allows people to forget to tap when rushing for a train.
If you already live in an area where there are no gates, would you make the argument that "I need gates so that I don't forget to tap"? Put yourself in my shoes: you would laugh at the idea.
And it doesn't need mentioning that people who want to intentionally skip fare can do so, gates or not.
> would you make the argument that "I need gates so that I don't forget to tap"? Put yourself in my shoes: you would laugh at the idea.
Yes, I'm making that argument. I've lived in places that don't have transit gates for the majority of my life, and I absolutely forgot buying a ticket a few times (since I usually have a monthly pass).
Being reminded about a monthly pass having run out by the gate, automatically charging for a single ride (if I have enough balance) so I can solve the problem later, is great UX.
In most stations, every available inch of width is used for these ‘gates’, and people move at a walking pace through them except for when people screw up. It’s a remarkably effective system.
On busses they are de-facto soft gates, assuming the bus driver yells at you if you don’t use it - which often they do.
And why would they give up that sweet sweet rush hour revenue?
Your generic comparison is moot anyway, because in Paris the normal metro system has had barriers since forever. It is the regional train system which used not to have gates.
Also^2, Japanese train stations have ads for B2B services, whereas almost every ad in London stations is for a musical. I'm not sure what this means.
(Also fondly remember the surprisingly numerous signs at Kings Cross about how you shouldn't assault any train employees, and how teenagers weren't allowed to buy matcha drinks because they have too much caffeine.)
Osaka's Hankyu trains are full of ads for musicals (it owns the Takarazuka Revue), I think that all this shows is that London has a far more vibrant cultural scene, which is apparent at all levels of society. I'd rather see ads for musicals than the ads for male hair removal clinics.
(And my hometown Warsaw subway is even younger - 50 years, and we don’t have AC whilst temperatures are at a perfect level).
What London underground might need is not AC, but a process to cool down rocks - importing coolness during winters. To maintain equilibrum you’d need to pump out around 1TWh heat every year. To bring it down to normal levels in say 20-30 years you’d need to pump out 2-5TWh a year.
And faster throughput would just increase that.
(Last time I was there I saw a singer from Mali, which I thought was interesting mostly because all of her backing visuals were StableDiffusion AI art and I don't know if anyone else noticed.)
But it's also the capital of a country that should have an industrial economy and increasing doesn't have one anymore, because they've decided it's all sort of beneath them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling#Sou...
They also have the display screens located farther ahead so you don't have to stop walking to see how much fare you were charged.
There's a degree of trust here, too. Trust placed on the consumer to do the right thing and pay. I'd also say there's an additional consideration being put forward by the operator: sometimes people just need a ride every now and then. I've been Japan three times now and I've seen several incidents of the guards letting people just walk through without a ticket because they explained some situation.
Americans are often more rule bound than Japanese people (we have HOAs and Nextdoor), but we just don't respect transit systems as much because we think of them as gifts we give to the poor/mentally ill/homeless.
And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots" or "neighborhood character") which says that anything made for poor people must be kept old and dirty or else rich people will show up and take it away from them.
Another interesting fact is that gates' actuators are not super rigid and it's completely possible to force enter not realizing in time your card has failed (you will be approached by station attendant though).
To summarize, culture may play a role but the main differentiator is the high traffic volume.
I wondered about this and discussed it with an american friend who lived there for a couple decades and whose kids were born there.
He said that they talk about everything in school. They go through scenarios like stealing, and have long discussions in class. They will discuss what happens, how people feel and what is the outcome. so education.
On the other hand, I commented on the nice society with japanese citizens and they have counterpoints, like "japan is too slow to change" and the like.
On the other hand, Android phones only support it if they are Japan-region phones.
When shopping, I prefer to use the Suica app in my iPhone as it’s just a quick touch, but some stores won’t accept it so I have to use the Nanaco app—which requires a face recognition step—or pay in cash. I haven’t bothered to set up a QR code app yet. Twice, when I tried to install PayPay, the most common one, I got stuck on an authentication step and gave up.
Even shops within the same department store accept different combinations of payment systems. In my local Takashimaya, I can use Suica to buy food in the basement but not in the restaurants on the upper floors. Shops in the nearby Sogo Department Store do not accept Suica, only Nanaco, except for the Starbucks on the third floor, which does accept Suica.
Convenience stores seem to accept nearly everything, as you can guess from the number of logos on this sign:
https://news.mynavi.jp/article/osusumecredit-107/images/003l...
Some relatives are arriving in Japan next Tuesday for a three-week visit, and they asked me what they should do about credit cards, digital money, cash, etc. I realized that, despite living here, I barely understood the situation myself, so I had Gemini Deep Research prepare a report for them:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WY4AM0mJS94uwPMK8XjIQMLf...
Another point to add is that in the 1980s and 1990s big security problems emerged with the magnetic cards that were used widely then for transportation and telephone calls. Here is what Perplexity has to say about that:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/i-want-some-information-in-...
I well remember the “open street markets in urban areas like Shibuya ... known for selling counterfeit cards.”
Now it's a fiddle with an app, then try to get the right angle on a smudgy reader. Getting onboard takes much longer and it feels like technology sent us 2 steps back instead of forward.
IC cards are better, and if they could be integrated in the phone then it would be even better and faster for everyone.
I think most QR systems include some sort of rolling timestamp to combat that.
Forcing use of an app and QR codes does seem like a significant step back, although I guess it makes paper tickets much easier to implement with the same scanner.
At least in some cases it is sufficient to change the phone SKU id (which requires temporary rooting) to the Japan SKU id to unlock the Osaifu-Keitai functionality on a non-Japan phone. I'm not sure if this means that the secure element had the necessary keys provisioned all along, or just that the Osaifu-Keitai app then provisions it on first use.
Source - I’m sitting in Kyoto right now having travelled all over Tokyo and then on to Kyoto using only my phone to interact with Japan Rail. Verified with two 16Es and a 12. In fact we were able to add the Suica cards to our phones and charge them fromApplePay while still stateside. That let us skip the Welcome Suica line at Haneda and go straight to the monorail. Highly recommended
Many tourists already get intimidated by language barriers and inscrutable timetables and transit routes; add tariff complexity (and the chance of getting charged with fare evasion!), and many just end up taking a taxi.
With these stored-value systems, you pretty much don't have to ever worry about doing anything wrong as long as you properly tapped in (and have the necessary cash to top up the card at the exit turnstile if you ended up "overdrafting" your card).
Now the remaining complexity is learning about and getting the card in the first place, and Apple Wallet really does an amazing job there in Japan. Not even having to install an app or create any account is absolutely amazing.
They could have a store value card that works worldwide. Effectively bringing Octopus or Suica card to the world.
I even remember there were proposal for future version of Felica that works under 10ms. Although I cant seem to find any reference of it.
There is also a new NFC proposal ( again my google fu is not helping ) that allows multiple NFC card / tags to be read at the same time. So we can do Membership card, discount card and payment card all in one. And hopefully someday we could have electronics receipt right on our phone alongside the payment record as well. Something I wished Apple have done for the past 10 years but they still haven't gotten Apple Card or Apple Cash to work outside of US.
This is already in standard NFC-A/B, usually just called the 'collision avoidance' or 'select' protocol, effectively doing a binary search over the uid space (iirc) asking particular bitmasks of uids to respond. The main thing is that it used on the reader side, not the (emulated) card side so I'm not sure what the support for multiple emulated cards is like (and if there is a different proposal for that).
> Since there's no point in generating keys for a device which will not be used in Japan, non-Japan SKUs don't have Osaifu-Keitai functionality.
AFAIK, all iPhones from all regions since like iPhone 10 (internet says iPhone 7) support Osaifu-Kaitai unless I don't understand what that means. My USA iPhones works everywhere Suika, Pasmo, Icoca, etc work. Every station, bus, vending machine, convenience store, super market, restaurant, and retail store that accept these forms of payment, they all just work.
Given that all of this works, what is it I'm missing?
Actually other western transit system cards are similar to Japan's. For example in Paris the transit passes (Navigo cards) are stored-value systems and hold a record of the last few scans (three I think). You can also read them with any NFC smartphone and see what's stored inside. The tap at the entrance of a transit vehicle is near instant as the reader doesn't need to interact with a backend since everything is stored on the card itself.
And a good chunk of vending machines in Japan accept the IC card. Sometimes even food shops a step above vending machines.
AFAIK, you can go through up to 4 different company networks once you enter paid-area. Beyond that, you'll need to do the override settlement (乗り越し精算) with the help of station staff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...
To avoid large touch area causing accidental touches, places like vending machine requires you to keep your card within sensing area for up to 1 second before completing the transaction.
reference: https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/suzukij/1316685....
Speed test between magnetic ticket / IC Card / Credit Card https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQM5NNnCi4
Buried the lede in case anyone missed it.
When you cut out the network and are working with essentially exact amount cash, things can be processed fast.
PS: For anyone in doubt https://atadistance.net/2017/09/12/iphone-x-keynote-global-f...
If so, this would completely break the offline part of the system. You couldn't rely on hotlists of known-hacked cards any more, you'd need to check each (new) card with a central system to see if its key was ever actually issued to anybody.
This is assuming there's an actual list of currently issued keys anywhere, if such a list doesn't exist, the whole system would be done for.
The fact that some smartphones can emulate NFC-F doesn't help either. If a hacking technique is ever discovered, we can get from the system being fully secure, to anybody being able to issue themselves undetectable cards for any amount, in the matter of days.
With counterfeit physical cards, you can at least try to shut down manufacturers and issue long prison sentences to the dealers selling them on the black market. The criminal activity has to happen in the country where the cards are used by definition, so that country can bring its law enforcement to bear. If all you have is an Android apk and some source code released by three guys in Russia, there's very little you can do.
If such a system were designed in the 2020s, you could establish a CA-like system, where each card's key must be signed by a chain of certificates. This way, thoroughly hacking just one card wouldn't help, as its key could easily be revoked, and you couldn't issue new ones without hacking the (presumably airgapped) card manufacturing systems that contain the signing keys. I don't think a system from the late '80s does this, though.
After charging it once with a decent balance though, I got away (almost) entirely without cash using it in combination with a virtual credit card via NFC, save for street food carts and Gachapon machines.
On the security side, yeah, someone did exploit those Mifare key extraction vulnerabilities and make an app to clone cards and restore dumps. The system collates all data every night so if you mess with your ticket, it'll get banned. So you're getting one day of free rides at most, and forfeit the remaining balance and the cost of the card itself.
They used to (and still do?) work faster with the Oyster fare card. Virtually instant. But paying with EMV cards/devices does add a noticable transaction latency before the gate opens. A few hundred milliseconds, I’d say.
EMV also uses faster symmetric cryptography between the card and the issuer, but the latter is not in the picture in a transit gate transaction – too much latency – so asymmetric cryptography it is.
That's also the reason some (mostly older, mostly international) cards don't work with TfL: Some don't even have the coprocessor (or just additional processing power these days, I suspect) required for RSA to cut cost, and only work for online payment transactions.
That must be one of the things that ISO 14443 has improved on then, compared to FeliCa:
At least 14443-A (and I believe also B) allows addressing each card in the field individually by its serial number, and then selectively "halt" or resume it. Practically, this means that the reader can talk to cards one by one until it finds the one it's interested in (if any).
Unfortunately I don't know any practical system making use of that (it could get pretty confusing with payment cards, for example – charging a random card of several possible ones sounds like an anti-feature), but I still find it very neat.
Contactless cards manage to boot up a JVM and run bytecode with the energy provided by the field, and many also run RSA with fairly large keys. I doubt that toggling some bits in an EEPROM factors in too much.
> I am not sure if single write is enough for making this robust/transactional.
Transactions are usually implemented via some form of two-phase commit, I believe, to support what's called "tear resistance". If the transaction is incomplete, the reader tells you and you just tap the same card at the same gate again.
Not sure about the implementation, but the feature is supported by all contactless stored-value cards I'm aware of.
Japan's transportation infrastructure is great!
Unless things have changed, the ICOCA uses Felica as well. And old Offline Credit Card transactions used to be 200-300ms. Compared to Felica that is sub 100ms. May be offline transactions for credit card have gotten faster? Or may be not latency sensitive enough to notice the lag.
The only time I ever had to wait in line to get into the station was after a stadium event, which is understandable. Rest of the time, you can pass the gates almost without stopping.
Source: I had an iPhone 7, and was friends with one of the engineers who added FeliCa support to the secure enclave. The Japanese 7 was a one-off until the 8 made it ubiquitous.
I love the technology, but I'm not a fan of the culture of security by obscurity in that industry. What's worst is that it's at this point mostly unnecessary! Modern smart cards largely use standard algorithms and would probably hold up just as well or even better with their details publicly documented.
Also, small nit: Secure element. The secure enclave is Apple's cryptography and key management coprocessor running an L4-based OS; a secure element is a (generally not Apple specific) smartcard-like hardened microcontroller that can be embedded in devices, usually as part of the SoC of a contactless microcontroller.
The secure enclave primarily holds the user's and Apple's keys; the secure element can also hold somebody else's, e.g. payment or IC card issuers'. The latter is (somewhat ironically, given the name) somebody's trusted enclave in an otherwise untrusted device.
Otherwise, thanks for writing this article, it is very insightful, especially the whole parallel NFC standards development process in the early days of the technology by Japanese companies like Sony.
Patents hold it back on Android. Apple just got themselves a licensing deal that apparently lets them just have it on all phones.
It's surprising that it can be added back on Pixels, I thought it would use something like factory generated certificates.
I've only been to Japan very briefly, but between an international credit card (Visa or Mastercard) and a Suica in Apple Pay, I never had any issues.
Maybe this is due to having been only to very touristy areas, but almost everywhere I had to pay took at least one of the two, and thanks to being able to top up the Suica directly in Apple Wallet from my credit card, running out of a balance there was never an issue.
Of course you'll need some cash for some smaller food stalls and shops, but getting that wasn't any issue either: ATM fees didn't seem particularly high as far as I remember (and my bank reimburses them).
I was fascinated by the sometimes dozens of different contactless (stored value and otherwise) and QR code based payment methods accepted at some stores, but with the exception of a few vending machines (that also took cash), I don't think I've seen any place taking only these but not also either Suica or Visa/Mastercard.
Quite the opposite, actually – ubiquitous ice cream vending machines on train platforms that accept the same card for payment people need to get into the station in the first place seem like a real health hazard :)
So so many weird quirks, my latest one is, I cannot withdraw cash from any ATM but a 7/11 ATM with a Seven bank card. All other ATMs just won't accept it anymore...how does one even begin to resolve something like this ?
This is a fun thing to keep in mind when people tell you Japan is a "homogenous society".
(It's not high-trust either.)
I really, really don't see how that connects to... payment systems. Surely you're not trying to claim that what people actually mean typically is that Japan is homogeneous in every arbitrary way possible, right? That's a bit too much even for a strawman, even if I factor in the kind of forum this is.
One reason for the success of IC cards as electronic wallets is because what banks offer is so inconvenient.
But really, what works in Japan is cash. You are the odd one for paying electronically.
It is slowly changing though. You can almost go cashless now. 10 years ago, cards were mostly just for withdrawals. 20 years ago, good luck finding an ATM that accepts your card. Personal experience, in 2005, we spent half a day finding one, in Tokyo.
As for being "high trust", it is certainly not as a foreigner, trying to do business in Japan. The "high trust" part is more about petty crime being really low, so you can leave your bag unattended in a café and it will still be there when you get back, in fact, it is a common way of "reserving" a table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...
They are not slow, but it's faster in Japan, still. At least in the Taipei MRT.
The Taoyuan Metro is way worse, though. If you keep walking while going through the gate and the card doesn't scan fast enough, it'll error and tell you to step back outside of the gate area (the in-between part) and scan again. It slows traffic down quite a bit.
If OP never set foot on these other islands it is simply more accurate to say the island rather than the country. But this is just an HN comment, OP might not have given the island/country word choice a second thought.
Magnetic tickets are already slower than IC cards, and are both more expensive to produce and harder to recycle than QR codes printed on regular paper.
It is true that they are expensive to produce and hard to recycle, though, so it’s a good idea overall. But I’ll miss this iconic experience (or hopefully they retain it on some lines at least). (Edit: or just make the whoosh! readers work with QR codes! :)
>It will continue to accept national IC cards such as Suica and Icoca
I'd be sad if they do go or get relegated to some app, I love the little mascots.
Some are cutting back to just Suica and Icoca. Some are switching to, or using from the start, tap-and-pay (Visa, EMV, etc.).
so there's that, I mean if we can optimize QR code system. the winner obviously would be QR because no need to have an dedicated hardware for this
Yes, IC card would be faster but at what point the difference is matters???
Practically, many people however only start thinking about possibly needing to open some app to display it while they’re already blocking everybody else’s way at the transit gate…
The biggest practical benefit of IC cards is that they are by nature always “armed”, unlike QR codes in apps, and are readable from both sides.
On top of that, due to being able to run mutual authentication and being able to store a trusted balance, they are much more resilient to outages of any backend system. QR code tickets invariably need networking and a central backend.
Technically the way to think about latency is that a process has N serial steps and you can (a) reduce N, (b) run some of those serial steps in parallel, and (c) speed up the steps.
For one thing, different aspects of the organization own the N steps. You might have one step that is difficult to improve because of organizational issues and then the excuses come in... Step 3 takes 2.0 sec, so why bother reducing Step 5 from 0.5 sec to 0.1 sec? On top of that we valorize "slow food" [1] have sayings like "all good things come to those who wait" and tend to think people are morally superior for waiting as opposed to "get you ass out of the line so we can serve other customers quickly" (e.g. truly empathetic, compassionate, etc.)
Maybe the ultimate expression of the American bad attitude is how you have to wait 20 minutes to board a plane because they have a complicated procedure with 9 priority levels and they have to pay somebody to explain that if you are a veteran you are in zone 3 and if you have this credit card from an another airline that this airline acquired you are in zone 5, etc... meanwhile they are paying the flight crew to wait, paying the ground crew to wait, etc. Southwest Airlines used to have a reasonable and optimized boarding scheme but they gave up on it, I guess the revenue from those credit cards is worth too much.
[1] it's a running gag when I go to a McDonalds in a distant city that it takes forever compared to, I dunno, Sweetgreens, even "fast" food isn't fast anymore. When I worked at a BK circa 1988, we cooked burgers ahead of time and stored them in a steam tray for up to ten minutes and then put condiments on them and put them in a box on a heat chute for up to another ten minutes. Whether you ordered a standard or customized burger you'd usually get it quickly, whereas burger restaurants today all cook the beef to order which just plain takes a while, longer than it takes to assemble a burrito at Chipotle.
Unlikely, most cities transport systems will run into issues with capacity long before they run into issues with ticket gate latency. No point getting people through the gates faster if they’re just gonna pile up on the platform and cause a crush hazard.
At peak hours in London, the inbound gates are often closed periodically to prevent crowding issues in major stations. If you look at normal TfL stations you’ll notice there’s normally a 2:1 ratio of infrastructure for people leaving a station vs entering. Because crowding is by far the biggest most dangerous risk in a major metro system, and also the biggest bottleneck.
Paris adopted an IC system as well and it is pretty usable, but not pushed to the extremes of the JR system because they weren't ready to invest as much, manage the money aspect and really make it a full blown business.
[0] some lines and areas are definitely money pits. That's where some companies bail out of the IC system altogether for instance, or go with a different, incompatible but cheaper implementation.
There is no practical way to increase the throughput of ticket line, without reducing latency. It’s not like you can install more gates in most stations, the station isn’t big enough, and you can’t make the gates smaller because the people aren’t small enough.
Every transit system measures and has throughput requirements that their gates need to meet. That inherently means latency requirements, because one gate can’t process multiple people in parallel!
Also western systems aren’t that slow. The videos in the article are a decade out of date and show people in London using paper tickets! And almost nobody using a contactless card or Oyster card.
In London the Oyster cards are very fast. Fast enough that a brisk walking pace the gates will be completely open by the time you reach them, assuming you put your card on the reader the moment it’s within comfortable reach.
Contactless payments on the other hand are slower. But there’s not much TfL can do there. The slower speed is entirely the result of the contactless cards taking longer to process the transaction. TfL track contactless cards latencies by bank and card manufacture. There’s a non-trivial difference in latency between different card manufactures and bank configurations. But that’s not something TfL can control themselves.
Japanese IC transaction: Less than 100 ms.
EMV IC transaction: Hundreds of milliseconds.
The person in front of you in the New York subway only realizing that they might have to look for their phone or card in their bag as they're already blocking one of very few turnstiles, and your train is arriving: Timeless.
In the Netherlands, there are cases where this can happen too (notably, Amsterdam South station), but generally there are less passengers and/or bigger stations (= more fare gates).
> Places like Hong Kong and Tokyo have a lot of commuters, leading to a lot of congestion around station gates.
However I think it's actually _population density_ that's the critical factor. The investment in new payment technologies is much more likely to pay off in these environments than in the US.
Governments who think this set speed limits on roads to 45 mph, since that's the speed where most cars pass per second on a busy road.
Those same governments then act all surprised when it turns out their whole population is depressed and overworked when they work a 9 hour workday, commute 1.5 hours each way, and have no free time for life, relationships, hobbies, etc.
I will write a correction for this section to clear up the confusion.
There's a big chance that Apple does not eat the cost for Osaifu-Keitai actually, as they may have a sweet-heart deal, hinted by an article from watch.impress [1], which I found a very long time ago via Twitter.
So the fee is either waived by FeliCa networks, covered by Japanese Carriers, and (as an educated guess) paid only upon enrollment of the first FeliCa-compatible card to device.
I think it would be naive to believe that Apple, of all companies, would be the one willing to pay a couple of cents per device in order to offer a feature that, at best, only a single digit percentage of their users would use.
[1] https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/suzukij/1297656....
I rooted my US model Pixel 9 Pro on my Japan trip last year to enable it. :D Literally a boolean in a config file.
https://github.com/kormax/osaifu-keitai-google-pixel
(The author's write up has more theories on why Google blocks it on non-Japan SKUs)
Since these cards actually "store money offline", the symmetric keys involved are really not something the issuers ever want to see leaked, so I assume it's not only a question of money (i.e. licensing fees), but also trust in the security posture of the secure element of the phone (if it even has one; many Android phones don't).
In Istanbul I think you can use the transport card to pay in some supermarkets, and of course it works on all transportation modes, including ferries. (As an aside, they also have a QR-code based system specifically for restaurants, which I think is used mainly by companies looking to compensate their workers lunches, but you can also use it in Ininal app to get a discount)
Here's an example video to show the gates in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YffjxN3KsD4
Well, a number of smaller transport companies are turning away from IC cards citing the cost of the equipment. I don't know at which point in the stack the greed is coming in - whether it's the IC committees, Sony with the underlying technology, some other player or all of them at once - but it's happening. JR East can probably sustain Suica for decades but you'll notice they've been making a hard push into traditional credit cards and banking; they've seen which way the wind is blowing.
During covid they even stopped checking the validity of the tickets and all you needed was to be in possession of 'a ticket' -- I used the same one for a couple years and still have the thing in my wallet in case I ever go back there again.
Couldn't even begin to count the number of times I saw people get off the train as soon as they saw security get on and just wait for the next train.
The sign said the machine to issue the seat supplements was at the east entrance — the other side of the gates from me, of course.
The guard at the gates understood me, but said I must exit back the way I came, i.e. all the way back to the west entrance. That side of the station 'belonged' to the other railway company, and there wasn't a machine to sell the ticket I needed. I could either walk the really long way around by road (not through the station) or queue at the general ticket office.
So I missed that train.
In general, I found the train ticketing system for regional or long-distance trains needlessly complicated compared to Europe, with base tickets, express supplements and seat reservations all separate fees, and coming as 1, 2 or 3 bits of paper depending on I know not what.
On one occasion a journey with a transfer came on 7 separate tickets. (Of course, the Japanese approach to this problem is not to simplify the ticketing system, but to invent a machine that can suck in all 7 tickets, cancel the relevant ones, and discharge them neatly arranged.)
For example: You'd explain to the staff that you want to use the toilets, and they'll hand you a plastic NFC token coin, limited to enter and exit at the same station. You use that to enter the paid area, go to the toilet, then deposit the coin in a special slot to exit.
>Gate guards usually hand you a slip that explains the situation at the other gate or when leaving again.
That was done in the past, but it's quite nice that they just hand you a token now.
Alternatively, train stations in the Netherlands have done away with fees for entering and exiting the same station altogether. Toilets within stations often charge a €0,70 fee, though.
Another cool thing about the paper tickets is that you can supposedly insert them stacked (i.e. both Shinkansen and regional transit ticket at a transit gate), and the gate will figure out which one to eat and which one to hand back to you!
And yeah, the ticket unstacking feature is really neat! (and probably it’s one of the reasons they want to replace the paper tickets – it’s a pretty complex machine on the inside :-)
But at least if you move to Japan, you can essentially get a Japanese flavored Pixel at the small cost of a factory unlock/relock.
Why is this obvious unsustainable? The IC readers and contactless payment readers are normally built on exactly the same tech, or very similar tech. And they’re pretty much always just a single reader capable handling IC cards and contactless payments locally, with back office processing to manage bookkeeping, and any needed external transaction processing.
TfL in London has been operating paper tickets, contactless and IC card for something like two decades now. The IC system is starting to show its age, but that’s only because the current stored value cards don’t have enough on-board storage to handle the continued growth of TfLs systems, and all the new regions they now operate in. But even if the IC system they have plans to migrate and merge their IC and contactless system into one system that can handle both payment types and provide proper feature parity between them.
I feel like they could combine the IC and contactless reader into one bit of hardware with some engineering.
This is the case in the Netherlands. The same readers accept the old OV-chipkaart (stored-value) system and the new OVpay (EMV) system.
Actually, I feel like when the OVpay system was rolled out, the existing OV-chipkaart readers simply got a firmware update, giving them the ability to read EMV cards and phones.
Both of these systems work across all tranit modes and operators in the entire country (and even at a few stations across the German border), and there are various models of reader that are used.
(note: OV = openbaar vervoer = public transport)
1: A 2021 VISA touch-to-ride demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To5S615UQtU
Google Pay emulates the card on the application processor, so theoretically it could be faster, but I wouldn't be surprised if anything won in terms of more performant RSA cryptography is lost to higher command processing latency between the NFC interface and application processor.
It would be interesting for somebody to do a latency comparison between Apple Pay, Google Pay, and a physical card!
Google Pay only allows a certain number of offline transactions (around three or so, I think) before I'm required to turn off airplane mode and authenticate with their servers.
I believe this also allows it to work with more phones, and get around security and possibly also regulatory requirements, since there's less need for a really secure secure enclave on NFC devices.
Not on a per transaction basis, or you couldn't make any offline payments (i.e. with your phone being offline; the terminal can usually not be offline for Apple or Google Pay in the way that it can for cards). Latency would probably also be too high/variable.
Even if you ignore tourists that's not really true of Tokyo either. Japan doesn't collect ethnicity statistics though - the numbers for this you may have seen are misreadings of something else.
> Surely you're not trying to claim that what people actually mean typically is that Japan is homogeneous in every arbitrary way possible, right?
That's absolutely what people online think about Japan, they think it's a stuffy collectivist society where everyone agrees with each other and there are no immigrants.
Which is all very interesting, but remind me, how does this tie into payment systems again?
> That's absolutely what people online think about Japan, they think it's a stuffy collectivist society where everyone agrees with each other
... and then they play the latest Yakuza and wash that down with a few episodes of Tokyo Revengers? It'd would appear that one generalization doesn't beat another.
> and there are no immigrants.
YouTube has been overflowing with thinly veiled grifts lately about how everything in Japan is going to shit right now, and how it's because of the damn tourists and immigrants (heavily peppered with false crime rate figures and false immigration statistics of course).
Still, pretty unrelated to payment systems. I can't shake the feeling that this is the exact same type of conflict sowing one can see under more mainstream topics. Vague mention of something, then a massive tangent, and all of a sudden we're discussing deeply controversial political topics. If you're not doing this with malicious intent, you might be in an unhealthy loop that I'd advise you try quitting. This is not helping anyone, which is what I intended to be my point.
Whereas I would like to promote the idea that it's a normal place containing normal people (…many of them Chinese tourists, lately), and you can have the good things they have too if you simply copy their policies. Or in other words, there's no need for conflict.
I don't know if payment systems are one of those anymore though. FeliCa is the best because it's so fast, but any kind of tap to pay is IME fine. Certainly better than having to use a ticket machine or buy a special card or work out change to give to the bus driver.
Since it's not free for them, I assume they determined the amount of people in their key demographic that visit Japan was worth providing a stellar experience. Considering 2.7 million Americans visited last year, it was probably a bet that's paying off.
¹ Or, incidentally, people who live there but purchase phones overseas to avoid an obnoxious camera shutter sound forced on at all times.
I'm guessing it's largely the working class and undocumented immigrants. And probably lots of burner phones?
This really comes down to adoption. In China, where QR is ubiquitous, almost everyone has the QR ready to scan well before they reach the scanner.
Systems with fare gates (i.e. most systems worldwide) don’t have these problems, because it’s obvious when you can pass through.
Then factor in lots of tourists/visitors (who aren’t used to this system) + aforementioned small stations.
Most delays with OMNY seem to be due to the fact that people need to unlock their phone or pick a card because they don’t have express transit enabled.
Airline boarding is not the only class system in play. At every level of government, even within transit agencies, transit and its customers are seen as and treated as second class citizens. The idea of investing money, time or energy to shave even scores of minutes off the commute of someone who uses a bus, often seems as if it’s an unthinkable thought in these organizations.
The purpose of the many boarding groups is IMHO, to make those in groups > 1 feel as though they're missing out on some perk that they could get if they paid more. It's an intentional class system where some are encouraged to look down on those who paid less, and vice versa. It's good for revenue, bad for people.
Most flight attendant and pilot union contracts only pay them based on the hours with the door closed or in flight. (This is changing, but it's how it's been for a long time.) This reduces the incentives for quick boarding, as most of the flight crew is not being paid for that time.
Japan has its own versions of these things so I doubt it's this. The whole culture is, in general, not built for efficiency either.
(idk, maybe I was just a clueless tourist who didn’t know how it worked :P)
To your latter point, perhaps the MTA should work together with Apple and Google to improve the experience.
When I moved to my current neighborhood I asked why there was no public transportation and someone said it was so poor people couldn’t be around and I hadn’t connected this to the wider culture.
I had long ago pointed out to them that much of the bike infrastructure connects wealthy neighborhoods with wealthy neighborhoods.
Along the public transit line (ha!), the person primarily in charge of NYC’s road design and public transit planning back in the day made several anti-poor design choices, like ensuring overpasses crossing roads to less-poor (I.e. more-white) areas were just low enough that public busses couldn’t pass under them, as well as planning off-ramps that dumped a majority of the smog-ridden traffic into poorer neighborhoods, and let’s not forget how public parks in poorer neighborhoods had little monkeys adorning the fences. If you’ve ever wondered why a dangerously busy road with little in the way of safety measures for pedestrians cut between a neighborhood and a shopping district, you can thank Robert Moses.
Context please? Which country and city?
But the median age in NYC is 38 and Tokyo is 45. (source: two Google searches I just did). That means a lot!
It's true they don't jump the gates often and they don't have loud panhandlers. Instead the societal transit ills are passed out drunks, suicides and molesters. (Not meaning these actually happen all the time, it's just my impression of what people talk about.)
> it’s pretty much everyone who is not filthy rich isn’t it?
Hmm, it's more about what you're doing, I think? Rich people use transit all the time if it serves their purposes afaik. One thing that helps in Japan is the culture of wearing face masks means you won't be recognized in public. (Obviously this doesn't work if you're like a 7' NBA player.)
For going between cities the trains are actually the nice expensive option, and flying or taking a night bus is cheaper.
But trains are also basically only good at carrying yourself. If you're traveling in a group, or carrying equipment with you, or don't want to walk a lot then you'd still want to drive or take a taxi locally.
Pretty much all?
> And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots"
I think the ideology is in the parent comment. I ride lots of public transit and don't hear or see these things. The largest American public transit system, in NYC, certainly isn't seen as a gift other than by New Yorkers to themselves.
FWIW, I've seen American transit systems that let people board without even being asked to pay. I've seen plenty of bus drivers wave through people who couldn't pay. On one bus a teen boarded and walked straight to their seat. The bus driver, in an authoritative parental voice, kept summoning them to the front. There they lectured them: It's ok, but you need to talk to me first.
I'm just amazed at how considerate japanese society is.
I also retained all the Shinkansen seat reservation tickets (特急券) back when I had the old-style JR Pass, where you always had to enter/exit stations with help from the station attendant - and not use automatic ticket gates. I haven't tried the current style of JR Pass (since maybe 2022?), but I imagine that the exit gate would eat your seat reservation ticket, just like if you had bought the ticket in cash.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Japan has competition in payment systems. Paypay, D-Pay, Meri-pay, Line Pay, Rakuten Pay, etc... Each tries to entice both customers and retailers by offering discounts and bonuses.
Also I'm happy to pay cash as it's private.
Visa and Mastercard charge high fees because their dominant market position forces merchants to accept them. Then they use part of the fees to bribe customers with rewards programs.
A new payment network doesn't have leverage against merchants so can't charge the same high fees and therefore can't offer the same rewards programs, but then they can't get consumers to use their card, which is what they would need in order to get any leverage.
The rewards programs are a grift. The price of everything goes up by 3% and if you get a rewards card you get 1-2% of it back, therefore you get one. Then you're still out the other 1-2% you wouldn't have been if the market was competitive, the people who don't get one get punished by being out the entire 3% (which inhibits competitors with lower fees), and Visa and Mastercard suck billions of dollars out of the economy into their Scrooge McDuck money bin because consumers have been defrauded into thinking this arrangement is to their advantage.
Needless to say, I prefer to use cash in Japan.
For Japanese payments, what's far worse is that so many shops and chains continue to have point systems that require their own point cards (and even the ones with apps seem to have awful slow UIs, at least on my iPhone).
Even here cash is coming back into vogue as costs are pushing small businesses to evade taxes.
I was in Tokyo last week and it was similar businesses i.e. mostly smaller and in lower margin industries.
Do you have any source on that? I find it rather surprising.
In Australia, it helped that there were only about five POS acquirers of note (the big four banks plus Tyro), who owned pretty much all the terminal hardware.
Same thing if your train transit costs 440 yens at base rate but you decide to ride first class or even one of the special luxury trains at a thousand+ yens, you'll only get the base 440 yens from your company.
On profitability, as mentioned by sister comment, they all have a realtor arm and also rent the space surrounding the stations to shopping malls and department stores, sometimes own or revenue share with the attractions in the town that will bring more visitors and they'll talk with he city planners to foster a whole ecosystem, JR famously gets a cut from every Suica transaction etc.
They don't need to make it all from the ride ticket, even if it's price appropriately. Government has little to do with most of it, subsidies only matter on the smaller, super low volume lines where rising prices would kill the traffic.
If that was the reason they would simply not pay for commutes at all, as is normal in most other countries.
> Government has little to do with most of it, subsidies only matter on the smaller, super low volume lines where rising prices would kill the traffic.
Nah. Both the railway companies and the government lean into the myth of their being private operations because it suits everyone, but the "private" railway companies were set up with immensely valuable government funded capital assets and would never have been able to operate without them, they rely on government support for any substantial new capital investments, and they have the relevant governments as significant investors, in many cases the largest investors. Yes JR central is immensely profitable if you accept the accounting fiction that the tokaido shinkansen simply popped into existence one day and is worth nothing.
Paying for commute is mostly a tax thing. It's the same kind of adjustement as doing BYOD or giving employees PCs that have passed their business depreciation value instead of doing leases.
It's way easier to do with train transit, as train companies will give traceability/limitations on the commute and it's way easier to explain that just paying for a week's worth of gasoline or a car's insurance, or other costs.
If a country doesn't have any arrangement to make these expenses easier to pass on the company, I see how commute would just be cover privately by the employee.
> "private" railway companies were set up with immensely valuable government funded capital assets and would never have been able to operate without them,
Fundamentally no business of significant size operates without any gov. oversight nor preferential treatment. Tim Cook shaking Trump's hand is not the outlier, and at the size of a railroad company you better be in good terms with regulators if you want anything done.
Could you clarify this? To my knowledge only 2 things that could qualify as incentive exist:
- commuting allowances are not considered taxable income for employee
- commuting allowance could be used to reduce tax base for the business
But this is not something I'd call 'heavily'.
My understanding is that commute is universally covered as this is an expected job benefit in Japan, and commuting by car is disencouraged in cities due to the increased insurance liability (as commuting time could be considered work time and injuries incurred to 3rd party will expose the company to liability as well).
> - commuting allowances are not considered taxable income for employee
> - commuting allowance could be used to reduce tax base for the business
> But this is not something I'd call 'heavily'.
They do both those things, so commute costs are a free tax discount. But they also just tell companies directly that they want them to act in a certain way, and the companies generally fall into line. While the zaibatsu have nominally disappeared, there are still very close ties between the politicians and big businesses in Japan.
Having terminals be more universal would be good, but good luck replacing old ones and convincing entrenched market participants to offer them..
The newer generation of products like BNPL are even worse; they often contractually prevent merchants from charging a surcharge commensurate with the cost of accepting that payment method.
