Japan’s IC Cards Are Weird and Wonderful
17th May 2025
While I was in Japan over winter, one thing that stood out to me was the incredible public transport system. Efficient and reliable, as expected, but the tap-in-tap-out gates at the stations were suspiciously fast. The London Underground gates don’t work nearly as quick with Google Pay or any of my other contactless cards – what gives? I spent some time researching what makes Japan’s transit card system (IC cards) so unique compared to the West, and all of the interesting bits I learned along the way.
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What’s interesting about Japan (and Asia in general) is that they have their own type of NFC which basically does not exist in the West: FeliCa, a standard developed by Sony, officially classified as NFC type F (as opposed to MIFARE, which is type A). In fact, FeliCa came first, being developed in 1988; as opposed to Philips’ (now NXP) MIFARE which was introduced in 1994. FeliCa started getting widespread adoption initially not in Japan, but in Hong Kong, through its public transport Octopus cards in 1997 – only later did JR East adopt FeliCa for its Suica transit cards in November 2001, and Rakuten started using FeliCa for its Edy cards (the name reminds me of something…). After that, a bunch of Asian countries adopted it, like Vietnam and Bangladesh. They fill the same niche in those countries as they do in Japan: contactless prepaid cards and transit tickets.