Sony launches a taxi-hailing app in Tokyo
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I feel the Uber service itself has a sort of a 'premium' feeling around it in Japan, with the cars/staff/pricing being higher-class than the run-of-the-mill taxis you can hail. As such they don't seem to be used too often. I only use Uber/Lyft when traveling to the US; In Japan I come into contact with the brand much more often from the context of Uber Eats.
Even for a limo-class car, it's hard to beat the Toyota "JPN Taxi" model. Thoses high roof taxis are so fine!
Besides, being able to pay with a Suica card is very convenient.
EDIT: Thanks for the replies! Seems it's a more full featured version of Chicago's Ventra card.
The only thing I didn't like about Suica/Pasmo when I was in Japan was that, unlike a credit card, there doesn't seem to be a way to get a statement so you can see where you spent all your money. But I was only there for 2 weeks as a tourist, so maybe it's possible to get access to that and I just didn't find it.
I use Suikakeibo [0] for that. The latest 20-ish transactions seem to be stored on the card, so by scanning it using my phone every day I could keep a history of everything I used it for. You can even put in notes, since non-transit transaction don't list what you bought with it - just the amount.
It makes for a nice reminder of my past trips. =)
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mediavrog....
> I use Suikakeibo [0] for that. The latest 20-ish transactions seem to be stored on the card, so by scanning it using my phone every day I could keep a history of everything I used it for. You can even put in notes, since non-transit transaction don't list what you bought with it - just the amount.
> It makes for a nice reminder of my past trips. =)
> [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mediavrog.....
Suica cards are readable on your phone via something like farebot (on Android). I'm able to see all my suica transactions on my phone via nfc.
Pro tip I didn't learn until embarrasingly late, they can recharge it in many (all?) places that they accept it, especially in convinis. Just say "charji" and give them money + tap it.
While this may be overkill performance for other countries, the number was derived from Japan Railways’ rush hour statistics and simulations, which made their target to be processing 60 passengers per minute at the gate.
As Japan has one of the highest train station utilization in the world, using contactless systems like MiFare etc. to make iPhone train payment work would probably clog the gates and not be realistic; hence, when iPhone 7 began supporting station payments in Japan, Apple supported FeliCa instead of the other way around. (The fact that smartphone users here disproportionately favor iPhone over Android also probably helped.)
https://www.jreast.co.jp/e/development/tech/pdf_6/Tec-06-40-...
Privacy: If you care about privacy, Suica is relatively anonymous, unless you (optionally) register it. It's probably possible to link a card to someone retrospectively with CCTV, but your transaction history is not being broadcast in real-time to your bank.
Acceptance: It's also increasingly widely accepted: public transport (the Tokyo metro system is amazing and gets you just about anywhere efficiently); taxis; the pervasive convenience stores + some supermarkets; more and more retail stores. Edit: as another poster pointed out, a huge % of transactions in Japan are made in cash and it's quite common for stores to not accept credit cards, yet some of these do accept Suica.
Discounts: You might get discounts on train fares if you use Suica, too.
No battery required: The SUICA works 24/7, 365, with no need to charge it. Unless I'm mistaken, smartphones require at least reserve battery for NFC payments to work.
I ended up carrying around cash and change anyway since a lot of places in Tokyo were still cash only.
Isn't the average Japanese taxi some big Toyota Crown sedan already? How much more premium than that can you go?
Toyota Century :)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-new-emperor-picks-his-ri...
Edit: Super short TL;DR from the article
> Introduced in 1967, the Century isn’t for the flashy or hasty. Prospective customers can wait months because Toyota hand-builds each one. Background checks ensure the buyer is of an appropriate caliber, and not a member of an “antisocial organization”—a Japanese euphemism for the yakuza crime syndicates.
It's only sold in Japan.
Edit 2: Some more information courtesy of Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Century
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort
The Century was designed for CEOs and heads of state, the Comfort was designed as a general purpose Taxi.
Reminds me of mobsters in America driving Cadillac’s and how much that probably helped sales. I know my dad loved watching mob movies and bought a Cadillac in the 90s that was straight out of the movies.
I’m curious if there was a badass motivation there similar to middle class suburbanites owning a Harley style motorcycle.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%83%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AD%...
Hmmm; From my limited time in Japan / Tokyo, almost all the cars were Toyota Comforts [1]. I have not entered in a more basic and rudimentary vehicle in 25 years.
I mean, it's _fine_. Whatever. Gets you from point A to point B. You get a feeling it'll likely do so reliably, and if not, virtually everything might be fixable with a hammer. But I wouldn't have called it premium...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Comfort
P.S. The "Automatic rear doors", at least in the versions I've been in, is basically a string/lever that goes from driver to the rear door. Again, it _works_, but when I hear "Japan" and "Automatic", my mind conjures a rather different picture. However, that was true of much of my personal experience in Japan - pragmatic and reliable automation, over fancy image. And cassette tapes everywhere... :P
No, it's not that great nor that comfortable, but most of the time a Taxi ride is less than 10 minutes so it does not matter very much.
I don't think it has any sort of feeling around it really - it's very small here and doesn't advertise, so I think you'd be fairly hard pressed to find someone off the street who's heard of it. (Unless they know it from Uber Eats that is, which does seem to be picking up steam.)
Because of this, any kind of commercial activity using a motorized vehicle is highly regulated - services like UberX are impossible to launch in Japan. Even for food delivery, delivery drivers all ride bicycles.
No need to do that, most people don't use cars to commute already - It's probably fair to say that car usage is only for the weekend shopping or driving out of the city - that's why car rental is a thing in Japan for a few years now, you don't need a car every single day of the week.
Distances you often don't realise how large they are when using the awesome public transportation offerings.
Price per kilometer & wait time seems higher in Zurich, for example.
I think Zurich is just a particularly expensive example. At least in the US, most places seem a lot cheaper (I checked New York, Chicago, and San Francisco). Of the few cities I checked in Europe, London is comparable but Paris, Berlin, and Rome are closer to the US examples.
Numbers come from numbeo such as https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/Tokyo?displayCurrency=US... and https://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/in/New-York, just swap the city name for the other cities I mentioned.
e.g. on my last trip home from SF, my ride to SFO cost about a third of my ride home from Haneda – both being roughly the same time and distance. if you arrive in Narita after the last train has left, have fun paying $250 to get into the city.
on the other hand, it's nice that I never feel the need to take a taxi given the great transit system, but it does rule out things like buying bulky items in person and night-time flights.
Back in 2011, it was 710 JPY base fare (but I think for two kilometres?) and exchange rates were also tremendously disadvantageous for anyone USD-denominated.
It was basically 9 USD to sit down in a cab.
Sounds like it could work well with rideshare to save money?
therein lies their brand proposition
>I come into contact with the brand much more often from the context of Uber Eats.
ubers worth is their international recognition as a premium service
Anecdotal perhaps, but that's not my impression among friends & family. (based in Central & Western Europe) Unless you consider "less likely to be totally ripped off" as "premium". Which I guess it is to some extent, but taxi drivers in many western countries have set the bar so extremely low in terms of service that competing services such as Uber just need to meet the bare minimum of expectations customers would have in other industries.
In Japan meanwhile, as has been said by others, you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture, so it's hard to see how other services might differentiate themselves. Plus of course, public transportation in the cities is fantastic and reasonably priced.
(We recently did a trip to Japan with our then-9-month-old, which meant we had more luggage than we'd normally like. So we ended up taking a few taxis instead of dragging it all the few hundred metres from the train station to whatever next hotel/apartment we were staying; in Europe, many taxi drivers would probably not even have stopped to pick us up if they'd seen us with all our stuff.)
>In Japan meanwhile... you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture
This is the stuff that the anti-Uber crowd just didn't seem to understand. Taxis in America will routinely screw you over and drive you in circles, knowing that you probably don't know any better, just to increase your fare, and the customer service level is abominable. Japan just isn't like this: screwing customers over is just something they don't do there, and having extremely high customer service with incredible levels of politeness is just the norm there, even in simple convenience stores.
Uber got where it did in America because the taxi industry was absolutely horrible, so all it took was someone competing with them and not being as horrible and offering decent service to become wildly popular. The same situation never existed in Japan.
There are a few scam stores in Tokyo, there's one that sells paintings to tourists, another one with monks that go around pushing things into your hands, and supposedly some ripoff girls bars. But not many.
Oh, but you can't get food substitutes in any restaurants and they'll deal with allergies by kicking you out of the store.
> and having extremely high customer service with incredible levels of politeness is just the norm there, even in simple convenience stores.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/01/language-japanese-store...
Yes, I saw several restaurants that warned that they don't change their recipe. It makes sense: they've optimized their process in the kitchen for those particular dishes, and aren't going to just change things around for one customer. It didn't seem to be a big problem there. So I just have to wonder: why do so many Americans these days have food allergies? This wasn't a problem decades ago. From a little bit of Googling, it seems that Japanese just don't have problems with food allergies the way Americans do. Honestly, they're right to kick you out of the store: you're too much of a liability, and they just aren't prepared to deal with people with such problems.
>https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/01/language-japanese-store....
I have no idea what your point is here. This is an article about the level of politeness to be used by retain employees (the Japanese language has several levels of politeness built-in). I wasn't talking about any details about the usage of the language by employees, I was just talking about them being polite in general, something you don't see in American stores much.
Cab drivers in Japan usually take pride in their work. It’s not uncommon to see one waiting outside a home and scrambling to meet the passengers at their front door with an open umbrella.
Having said that, in Kyoto, more than anywhere else, a lot of the drivers are crabby I’ve noticed. I think they get tired of dealing with rude tourists day after day.
This is more of a Japanese work mentality than cab drivers being some high-skilled craftsman type class of workers. Cab drivers in Japan are generally very overworked and the demographics look quite bad: average age is something like 55, few newcomers because the pay isn't good and the hours are bad.
Nothing to do with "pride in their work". When there is competition usually what makes the difference is the quality of service or the human touch. A cab ride is pretty much the same from one cab company to the other, so they try to differentiate with other things, such as knowing their regular customers.
Yes, that's the same thing I felt when I saw the article. It seems like an app for the wrong time and place.
Now if they had something to reduce the cost of a taxi, like a group taxi app where you may have to book in advance but you pay 1/5th of the normal fare since you share the cab with other people, that may be somewhat interesting. Such services exist but not as an app, as far as I know.
I've never had issues with taxi drivers trying to scam me in Vienna.
I don't like Uber as a company, but I dislike Taxi's in foreign countries a lot more. It is not the foreign part that I dislike, but not knowing the formal and informal rules. What if the meter starts at 5 euros? Is that a normal amount here? What if the meter isn't turned on and the driver insists that I make a deal? Is that normal here? etc. Uber might be more expensive than local taxi's in some places, but at least I know what I get.
hint: never get into freelancer taxis.
https://www.rbb24.de/content/dam/rbb/rbb/rbb24/2018/2018_10/...
0. Japanese business cards often have beautiful design.
1. They are a good way to remember the cool places you visit.
2. They often have a map on the back that show you how to walk there from the nearest train station(s).
3. They have the address on the front, which you can show your taxi driver--no verbal communication necessary! (besides the obligatory onegaishimasu)
If you're trying to get home in those hours taxis are your only options. Many people that go out at night just sleep on the streets, its pretty crazy!
https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/73172/are-short-t...
Regardless, if people associate your brand with "clunky", they'll find reasons to dislike even a quality app. You really need to be consistent across your product lines to benefit from brand recognition.
Japanese companies tend to accept a lot of complexity and also love paranoid bureaucratic form UIs. There might be one page of fields, then a second page to show you them over again to check for typos, then a third page of disclaimers to shame you in case you still made a mistake… because they're not going to refund you.
Sony's pretty good about this actually, but buying anything on the Nintendo shop takes 5+ clicks even if you saved your credit card.
Because good design is rare in general? Most products are designed very poorly, and big corporations are no exception.
Sony’s software culture has always been a bit lacking, morally, or otherwise.
Point to note, Rakuten owns Viber Messenger as well, so it could integrate taxi service on it for japan, though I presume that it doesn't have as much user base as LINE in Japan. Viber has larger user base overall internationally.
That is illegal wherever taxis are licensed.
Was uber/lyft really stopped in Japan because it's illegal?