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Comment by razorbeamz | Hacker News Reader

These mixed companies can be very confusing to tourists especially. I'm always answering questions from tourists who are confused why they can't buy a ticket to where they want to go.

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If you intend to do a fair amount of travelling and your stay is <3 weeks, it may be worth getting a JR Pass[1]. It doesn't work for all lines, but does include the Shinkansen and several of the major inner-city lines. Buses too.

Probably not worth it if you're only visiting one city as the pass is quite expensive. There are regional tourist passes though.

[1]:https://japanrailpass.net/en/

Unfortunately the 70% price rise on the JR pass back in 2023 made it much less likely to be economic for most people compared to just buying tickets as you go, even for trips that visit more than one city. Last time I was there I did a loop up from Tokyo to Hokkaido and back by rail, and it was still cheaper to buy individual tickets. (There are obviously still some itineraries where it works out cheaper, but it's much less of an "obviously good idea for most people" than it was back before 2023.)

Having followed some tourists coming to Japan, a large amount of the people appreciate convenience, and the rail pass gives them that. The price is secondary.

Hell, there are even people paying the equivalent of 100 USD just to have someone pick them up from the Haneda airport and accompany them to the hotel. Not even a taxi service, just to be with them to buy them the train tickets, etc.

Almost everything works with Suica, no? Although to be fair I guess tourists are _more_ likely to use the heritage lines with slightly different rules.

Tourists are often buying paper tickets. There's no way for a foreign Android phone to use a digital Suica, so people with Android are stuck with a physical card or paper tickets, and there's a lot of outdated information online that the physical cards are in low supply (They were last year but this year they're not).

Is this an Android thing? My US iOS works fine with digital Suica.

Apple doesn't make regional variants of the phone, so all models have the technology built-in, even if it's disabled by default. Android phones outside of Japan lack Suica support.

And Pixel phones have the tech, but you need to flash a Japanese ROM to be able to use it.

Ahh interesting. I wonder why they (non-Apple) did that?

There's a chip required for it that they cheaped out on.

Suica uses the Sony FeliCa NFC standard (which predates the international NFC standards) which they charge a license fee per device for.

Apple has the margins to just pay the license fee for every iPhone, Android makers try to keep their costs down more.

When we visited Tokyo last year, what stopped us from even trying was the online information we came across was unclear and suggested we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport... I don't know if that is correct or not, but compare Oyster in London which is advertised at practically every corner store, so even if you get into town not knowing the system, it's hard not to find somewhere you can get a card (or you can just use contactless - I haven't had an oyster card in years).

The UK is completely chaotic ticket-wise on a national level, though.

The card mentioned in the guides you read is the "Welcome Suica" that's only for tourists.

You can get a normal Suica just about anywhere.

I wish we'd known that ahead of time... It looks like the only difference is the deposit and expiry? Which seems like it makes the tourist-only version pretty much pointless.

> we could only get the physical cards at the airport and at some tourist office, and we forgot to look for it at the airport

Little over a decade ago I did exactly the same. I ended up buying a Suica card at Ueno station from a clerk, which was a bit of an adventure since she was eager to help but barely spoke any English and I barely spoke any Japanese. Together we skillfully massacred both languages with an ad-hoc pidgin and lots of gesturing. Due to an issue with my wireless hotspot I only had an old school phrasebook at my disposal, which was about as helpful as the infamous Monty Python sketch implies. The airport seemed much more convenient as a tourist since everyone there at the very least spoke basic English. At the time it was certainly possible to get a Suica card at a major train station, though admittedly not easy.

We got IC cards (ICOCA) in Osaka for 500 Yen each, and used them for 2 weeks travelling across Japan this March. Worked like a charm, only thing that's annoying for us tourists is how it is a stored value card and needs to be topped up. I think we still had like 500 Yen on our cards when we departed, even though we bought a lot of stuff with it on the last few days.

While we got ours at the Osaka airport (KIX), I am sure I saw the "purchase a new SUICA/ICOCA" options at a few terminals while topping up. I suppose you mixed up the "Welcome to SUICA" tourist card (available at fewer locations) with the normal one? I was under the impression there was a lot of confusing information floating around online.

But I agree, public transport in London is - as a tourist - more straight forward. Just a matter of spotting the terminals at some stations IIRC. OTOH in Japan we found no station with an elevator smelling like someone used a hippie bus as an emergency toilet ;-)

> "Welcome to SUICA" tourist card (available at fewer locations) with the normal one?

Quite likely.

It's basically one card for everything, independent of company, in Japan. Only certain trips require tickets from specific companies.

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