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In Japan, citizens will punish you if you don't respect their law (e.g.: by not using your service). One of the reasons of why Uber had a hard time in there initially.

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Hmm, I used uber in japan when I was traveling there and it worked quite well. What kind of problems were they having?

Uber has not been successful in Japan for many reasons. 1) the public transportation system is excellent. 2) the taxis are ubiquitous in the major metro areas. 3) the taxi companies have worked together to compete against Uber Japan successfully (Japan Taxi app, etc.)

Taxis in Japan had already solved the problems that pushed me towards Uber/Lyft in the first place. Credit card readers work properly, virtually every payment method is accepted, the drivers use GPS, availability was good (for my use case), and they are polite.

It's hard to get public support of law breaking when your solution is just incrementally better than the existing system.

When I tried using Uber in Tokyo, I was only able to call a licensed taxi through the app, which was incredibly expensive. The one time I actually needed a taxi (in a tiny town in Tohoku) I had to walk around hoping to physically hail one (getting a SIM card that can make phone calls is apparently very difficult in Japan, so I didn't have one).

A pocket WiFi and Skype-Out resolved the issue for me.

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