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Comment by b4je7d7wb | Hacker News Reader

I would be careful with his advise on money. If you came to Japan in the past 3 months with no cash and a Visa card, you would be in deep shit. Visa cards are just not working here and it seems nobody cares to fix it.

Japan is very safe so it's probably fine to just bring your budget in cash. Also outside of the beaten path like he advise people to go it's still very cash heavy society.

Your taxi driver will not be happy when you pay 1200 yen trip with 10000 yen. So please keep some change with you.

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Yeah, I really doubt that would be issue for more than few days, any source to this wild claim?

Only thing I could find is that foreign cards might not work in some online payments or mobile payments, which is quite normal everywhere in world, but giving bold statement that your foreign card is useless and you can't even withdraw money from ATM seems like spreading fake news.

https://atadistance.net/2022/09/19/foreign-visa-cards-blocke...

I literally landed in Japan today for the first time since COVID:

Had problems creating and topping up Suica/PASMO with multiple foreign Visa cards (ended up using Amex), but had absolutely no problems paying with Visa in stores that accept the usual myriad of cards.

That’s because you generally can’t use foreign credit cards to top up Suica.

This is interesting... when I visited recently I realized that Suica on Apple Wallet was more convenient than the physical card. The top reason is that you can use Apple Pay to top up your Suica whenever and wherever you are, without downloading any special app or needing to login to something.

However, one of my credit cards didn't work for that with no clear reason given, but a different one worked almost every time.

YMMV but my visa worked perfectly fine during my trip there last month.

Interesting, perhaps it has been fixed. I need to try tomorrow. In August it was definitely broken for several weeks for multiple people.

I still recommend some cash. In many cases cashiers have hard time using foreign cards since there might be prompts they are not familiar with. It's sometimes slow and awkward to pay with foreign cards. But if you prefer it and stay around Tokyo you are 95% fine with a charged IC-card and a credit card.

Actually I have even noticed some places and events in Tokyo do not even accept cash.

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