What really stands out is the difference in design philosophy. In London, the gates are normally closed and only open if your Oyster card is valid. In Tokyo, the gates are open by default and only close if your card fails. You don’t have to wait for doors to open and close every time—it just keeps the flow moving and feels way faster.
It's a subtle but very impactful difference. Japanese faregates also typically have two sets of doors, allowing them to close in front of you whichever direction you are moving. So people can go through at a fast pace and very tightly spaced, and the door still closes in front of the correct person.
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.
You raise a good point here.
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.
That's only enabled by the difference in culture though, right? Japanese culture has a much higher emphasis on order and following the rules - I don't know that this "open-by-default" system would work in, for instance, the US.
You don’t have to wait for the doors to close to be able to scan your ticket in London Underground. The gate will stay open and let you through. It’s a little bit awkward since you have to approach as you scan your ticket leading to your hand lagging behind
Japan has a fascinating environment. It is very uplifting. Japanese citizens do not seem to participate in crime.
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.
In Hong Kong the gates are closed but spring into action much more quickly than in London (though a lot of MTR stations have turnstiles still)
They probably needed that delay to hold back users while payment is processed. Japanese gates were likewise shaped as they are, originally, to buy time to read the magnetic tape tickets.
The iOS and Android part was hard to follow, so I'm not sure if the article is wrong or just unclear. All iPhones since iPhone 7 support FeliCa regardless of the phone region. This is incredibly convenient for visitors to Japan.
On the other hand, Android phones only support it if they are Japan-region phones.
All iPhones worldwide since iPhone 8, Japanese iPhones starting from iPhone 7.
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 didn't make this clear enough in the article, sorry for the mix-up! Yes, iPhones support Osaifu-Keitai, and it's Android phones which have this problem. I've now updated the article to clarify this.
Yes that is correct.
Patents hold it back on Android. Apple just got themselves a licensing deal that apparently lets them just have it on all phones.
Long-time Japan resident here. The IC cards do work quickly and smoothly, but the retail payment system overall is a mess because different stores accept different combinations of dozens of electronic payment brands.
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.”
> 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'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 :)
I heard you can pay a lot of bills via PayPay, so I wanted to use that too but I haven't been able to beat the authentication boss either.
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 ?
I found Suica/Pasmo/Icoca to be the golden trinity for most regions.
paypay to setup for QR code is just 2 minutes, and you get lots of bonuses, just have to suffer the trial by fire of your katakana matching your resident card ID name, which, everyone has their own version of.
> but the retail payment system overall is a mess because different stores accept different combinations of dozens of electronic payment brands.
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 think they are even more useful in Taiwan. Every single transit system across the entire island that I’ve ever encountered accepts EasyCard (悠遊卡). Even ferries. So does every convenience store, and even a lot of proper restaurants and stores. They are also fast, like you don’t even have to break your strike while passing the turnstiles to enter the metro.
I think it's about equal for utility - Japanese Suica/Pasmo cards are also usable in every single konbini, at all the stations stores, across most regional transportation and taxis, and at maybe half of Tokyo shops/restaurants (it's a default option in AirPay and other PoS systems). A lot of vending machines accept Suica, and I use it at grocery or drug stores. You can even use it at some other types of shops like Bic Camera, although for high ticket items you're going to hit the Suica balance limits... https://www.jreast.co.jp/multi/en/suicamoney/shop.html
>They are also fast, like you don’t even have to break your strike while passing the turnstiles to enter the metro.
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.
Technically a gate, not a turnstile (which inherently slows traffic)
>the entire island Is it China's influence that Taiwan is not being referred to as a country.
I love IC cards. They had them on all transport where I live, but a few years ago they changed to QR codes..
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.
It's about fees and control. Whether it's EMV(Europay Mastercard Visa) or JR East, they take 3% commission on every single sales + realtime sales data for your competitors to abuse. So alternative choices gets occasionally chosen to replace them, I think often as bargaining chips and a backup plan.
Would printing out the QR code and putting it into your wallet work or is it a changing one?
iOS supports ICs fine. It has supported Suica since 2017 when I used it instead of the physical card.
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.
Unfortunately transit operators are looking to discontinue the use of these IC cards in favour of QR codes as part of a cost saving strategy: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241015/p2a/00m/0bu/01...
> 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. So even if you rooted your phone and had full access to the secure element, if your phone's secure element doesn't have the key, you can't use it as an IC card.
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.
If I had to ask “why is it so fast?” I’d turn it around and ask “Why are western systems so slow?” and posit that Western capital has an ideology that throughout matters by latency doesn’t. (As Fred Brooks puts it, “Nine women can have a baby in one month”). As an individual or a customer you perceive latency directly though, and throughout secondarily. So it comes down to empathy or lack thereof.
I still remember when Apple announced their FeliCa support. And FeliCa became NFC-F standard there is a potential of Apple Wallet and Apple Cash ( Before both were announced ) for world wide usage to fight against the march of QR Code.
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.
I think I must be mis-understanding something
> 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?
"what makes Japan's transit card system (IC cards) so unique compared to the West"
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.
I really wish China would go the IC approach rather than the QR code approach. Just tapping my phone in Tokyo was much easier than getting into Alipay and bringing up the QR code for metro use. Well, still better than the Seattle which still doesn’t support iPhone transit pay.
Suica has a pretty large sensing distance (85mm). So it can "power up" the card at a distance before getting close to the reader.
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
> When I first read about the fact that the card stores its value on itself
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.
I could use my European smartphone (well, smartwatch) as an IC card in Japan. I don't think it was slower.
I wonder whether it is possible to make a fake card that generates a new key / ID / whatever on each use.
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.
I've recently returned from a trip across the country and liked everything about my (physical) ICOCA card, except that the machines used to charge it, at least the ones I've found, only accepted cash.
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.
I'm not sure about the speed argument. My city uses stored-value cards based on Mifare Classic and Mifare Plus (depending on the type of the ticket). If you live here and use the public transit with any regularity, you don't stop when you're going through the turnstile. The card validation isn't instant by any means, but it takes just enough time that you can plop your card on the reader as soon as you can reach it and keep walking, and it'll be done by the time you need to rotate the thingy that's in your way. On most stations, the bottleneck isn't the turnstiles, it's the escalators.
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.
Since all Pixel phones have the FeliCa build in, I would have loved for GrapheneOS to just enable that in their builds for all phones. It would have been one patch to a library call, so that it always returns true. But I found an issue where the team sadly dicided against it :( I still loved the system when visiting Japan and would wish that Germany had something alike.
> “The London Underground gates don't work nearly as quick with Google Pay or any of my other contactless cards - what gives?”
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.
From the user experience perspective, the Bay Area Clipper card might be the closest to these IC cards in Asia. It's also a stored value card. The official Clipper app allows you to transfer the card to be an NFC card on the phone and inspect the value on it, entirely offline. (Of course to support the use case of automatically adding value to the card when it's below the threshold necessarily requires the fare reader to be internet connected, but such an internet connection is not on the critical path.) From my Apple Watch there is even no need to press any button to activate (unlike Apple Pay EMV transactions): just hold the watch next to the reader and it works. They are weirder than other public transport payment systems like Chicago CTA or NYC MTA, and are also more wonderful.
> [...] conflict avoidance - a reader can detect when it's reading more than 1 FeliCa card at a time, and prevent any reading if so [...]
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.
One problem with fast writing is that it requres more energy to transmit from reader to a card in order for a card that has no internal source of power, to toggle bits. It is harder compared to just reading a bit from a card. Additonaly it is tricky to implement trasaction with single write, given that data transfer can be interrupted (for example user removes card from RF field). I am not sure if single write is enough for making this robust/transactional. It also helps a lot if RFID antenna is well tuned. Proximity of metal and way it is mounted has a big impact, so it is important that RF antenna for reader is tuned for exact environment it is mounted in.
I just got back from Japan. I did not notice a difference in performance between tapping with a Blink credit card and tapping with an IC card. I only used the ICOCA card. There were never lines at the gates. There were only ever brief lines at the ticket counters and terminals. I was there during golden week, which is one of the busiest travel times of the year. My travel partner and I used almost exclusively public transportation to get around, usually riding a few trains per-day. We only experienced one two-minute delay in Tokyo on a Friday evening during rush hour.
Japan's transportation infrastructure is great!
The public transport cards here in Paris also use NFC. This means you can use your phone to recharge them, or use your phone directly to access the subway network. As far as speed goes, your card/phone is detected pretty much instantly when you tap it on the sensor, at least when the gate isn't broken.
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.
In India, The NCMC cards for transit use the same technology. They considered allowing people to use their normal bank issued cards like the public transit in Singapore and decided against it because of potential fraud issues.
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.
Referring to the Osaifu-Keitai part of the article:
> 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?
Late to the party. These cards are stored-value ones. And they seem to be very secure.
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?
> Compare the speed of passing through a ticket gate on the Underground to a Tokyo ticket gate
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.
Just visiting Japan, just realised that IC cards are super fast compared to London, crazy relevant article!
I haven’t noticed any delay in london with a card, phone might be 200ms slower than credit catd. I Haven’t been to japan for a decade, are they really that much faster - and does it make a difference? What happens if a card is wrong/doesn’t scan/is invalid/etc at the higher speed?
They are OK. I find Sydney ones more reliably tap, plus you can use just a credit card to tap, as well as use a credit card to buy the Opal card. You can buy the opal card at 100s of places not just train stations. The actual transport itself is better in Tokyo tho.
NYC subway tap-to-pay via Apple Pay is also instant. Like, actually, instant (<500ms)
Can't they protect the stored value in the card against manipulation by way of digital signature? Or does this not make sense because then readers controlled by 3rd parties would have the private key.
Not mentioned is the cards currently in use in Japan, "icoca". A pun on "ikouka" - "shall we go?"
It is so strange to think that there are places where the trains have gates that close if you can't pay your fare somehow. I've never lived in such a place.
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.
How is it compared to the Danish rejsekort? That works kind of similar, its very fast too
Have you ever considered eliminating gates from public transport entirely, as is done in Vienna?
No they aren't weird. It is a very simple system that doesn't try to destroy the customer.
Japan's IC cards ARE weird and wonderful, a reason I have missed Japan (after only living there three months whilst working for my US-based employer) ever since the day I returned to this cesspit over two years ago.
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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?? This is about as ridiculous as it gets. The videos that compare the UK system with the JP system practically show the same throughput, even when in the UK video most people are using magnetic/paper tickets (which by necessity are going to be much slower than NFC).
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.
This is a great writeup and reminded me of some others I've seen in the past. For those interested on the topic, I used Deep Research to generated a report on turnstile/ticketing systems compared to others like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, London, NYC). Also asked it to do research on a few of the other related things like device licensing and the recent NFC-F chip shortages: https://chatgpt.com/share/6828429c-b618-8012-82a3-b8b992ac83...
