Tokyo Just Works. It is inspiring to see a well-functioning civil society. Most emblematic of this is the trains that always arrive on time, are always clean, and rarely get delayed. There is still so much more potential to be had around the world.
Visiting for the first time recently from North America felt kind of like the fabled Gorbachev-sees-an-American-supermarket moment for me. Not only do the trains go everywhere, frequently, and reliably, but the condition of everything was astounding.
The cleanliness was a big part of it, but also just how non-abused everything was. I was there for a week and didn't once see a tag carved into the seats or walls of a train car or smell urine on a platform. I don't think I even saw a single piece of litter on a train. The respect with which people treat public property was genuinely eye-opening.
I wish there were some kind of transferable lesson that we could apply here where dingy and defaced public infrastructure is just accepted as "the way things are in a big city," when it's demonstrably not inevitable.
I currently live in Singapore and when I went back to the UK after almost a year, one of the things that was most jarring was all the graffiti everywhere.
You become blind to it when you live there but when you suddenly realise places _dont_ have to be tagged when they shutter for the night. (If they even shutter at all)
I do think the cleanliness of Tokyo is (at least) two factor: People are more clean in public (less graffiti, less littering, less spitting, less gum, less urine) and the maintenance spend for public infrastructure (roads, trains, etc.) is higher. That combination is the magic. Restaurants feel similar as well. Many are freakishly clean by any US/CAN/EU/AUS/NZ standards. Again, I would say the key is a combination of neat(er) customers and fastidious cleaning by the restaurant staff. Of course, there are still dirty places, but they are rare.
When you go hiking in the countryside, it is common to see people carrying a small plastic bag to pickup any garbage along the trails. Again, compared to other hiking destinations, the trails here are freakishly clean all the time.
not a lot of public trashcans in these places. you carry a bag for your trash because that's the only way you're getting rid of it, and littering fines can be non-trivial.
For example digital services for essential government services were brought only recently (mynumber). Its decent but ways behind anything in europe. Digital services in general suck in japan, especially banking where the forms and backends cant handle foreign names, so you often have to send snail mail in the end. Faxes are still common place. Lots of stuff is still handled in paper even if they are submitted digitally so many things are painfully slow, especially anything visa/immogration related. With digital cash there are annoying walled garden economies and i could go on.
General stores, restaurant, and public transport work really well however.
I will not touch on societal issues or politics, as everyone has their own view on these matters.
I guess it does for locals but talking as a tourist who has been there for 3 days, using the train is confusing as hell. First, you have to pay your tickets in cash every time (the "IC cards" are not sold anywhere due to a chip shortage) and the machines do not accept foreign credit cards. Second, when you purchase your ticket, your destination station may or may not be in the list of available destination stations, so you sometimes have to pick an intermediary station instead. Then when you leave, you have to go to a ticket counter and pay whatever you owe (again, in cash only). Lastly, the similarity in station names, such as Nippori Station and Nishi-Nippori Station, added to the confusion. I apologize for the venting.
The IC card system and how it became what it is today is a _fascinating_ topic, tied deeply with the superb automated gates at Japanese train stations in. I wonder if people would be interested in reading a longform-ish piece on these..
This was my exact experience. Download Suica app, figure out that the 3rd option is "register without id/account", put 1000 yen in and go. Top off anytime with Apple Pay. Never had to fiddle with cash at the train station. Honestly one of the most convenient things about Japan.
Thanks but on Android I was getting "This item isn't available in your country". I tried to bypass Play Store and download the APK directly but was getting a bunch of errors. I am leaving tomorrow but I definitely will try to get an IC card/app next time I visit because manually purchasing tickets with cash all the time isn't great.
It has been a few years since I last looked, but most Android phones outside of the Japan market didn't have NFC hardware that was specced to meet the tighter Mifare timing tolerances required for the Japanese version of the spec (iirc the phone had, like 1/10th the time to respond back vs US readers). On the other hand, every modern iPhone sold globally was specced to be able to support the Japanese variant of Mifare (and thus could have Suica in Apple Wallet).
Has to be verified unrooted phones, which are mostly local Android phones + ALL iPhone 8/SE2 or later. e.g. SC-02K and SCV38 will work but SM-G960N won't. By the way, commuter passes works as regular cards outside of specified routes or valid-thru dates, so long it has seen use within last 10 years.
It won't work on Android with a foreign phone because your phone doesn't have the Felica chip. All Japanese Android phones have this chip, and all Apple phones worldwide have it, so the iPhone users don't have this problem.
Apple adds FeliCa and NFC radios to all iPhones worldwide. Only Android phones sold in Japan have FeliCa radios, worldwide models only have a NFC radio.
Suica working with the standard wallet app alone and being able to reload from a US MasterCard makes it hard to beat for convenience. Don’t even have to stop at a ticket machine or ATM to top up, just be sure to pull funds from a card that doesn’t charge foreign transaction fees.
https://atadistance.net/2023/08/01/how-long-will-the-suica-c...
Interesting, I was not aware of this. Good to know as I have some relatives coming over this week. And yes, like most digital cash in japan it's usually heavily walled garden. You can only charge your Suica or buy ticket with JR East's View credit card :) To their credit though, IC cards work very well but seems like you were unfortunate with the chip shortage.
My understanding is that there is now a special IC card for visitors only, "Pasmo Passport", but it's only available for sale in a few locations: https://www.pasmo.co.jp/visitors/en/buy/
No, it's actually out of sale. Makes no sense but it is. Welcome Suica(the red ones) and PASMO Passport cards sold at airports are supposedly still available.
You can use your phone (iPhone for sure, dunno about others) to add a Suica card (and others) through the Wallet app. Then you just tap your phone and go.
There are Fare adjustment machines in the stations for the cases you mentioned. You don't have to handle cash or talk to attendants.
Station names can definitely be confusing though, even for natives.
Other sibling comments have mentioned using your phone or the Pasmo passport but I just got back from Tokyo last week and there's a machine selling the Welcome Suica, a time limited card where you lose whatever was left on the card, at Haneda and Narita. I picked one up when my flight landed and was able to top it up and use it all throughout my 3 week trip.
Nishi Nippori is just West Nippori. It’s hardly different from how other countries name train stations (e.g. Berlin Westkreuz vs Ostkreuz, and in London Hounslow East, Hounslow Central and Hounslow West)
>I guess it does for locals but talking as a tourist who has been there for 3 days, using the train is confusing as hell
When I was a tourist here several years ago, I had no trouble at all. I just used Google Maps. It tells you exactly where to go, which platform to stand on, when the train will arrive, which car to sit in for most efficient transfer, etc.
>First, you have to pay your tickets in cash every time (the "IC cards" are not sold anywhere due to a chip shortage)
No one uses cash, except some tourists. The chip shortage thing is a very, very recent problem. All the locals don't have this problem; they have IC cards they've had for years, or they use their phone. According to some other comments here, they do sell special IC cards for tourists at the airports now.
>and the machines do not accept foreign credit cards.
There's a good reason for this. 1) fees, and 2) credit cards are incredibly slow. Japan developed the Felica chips used in IC cards specifically because they needed to be extremely fast to handle the incredible foot traffic going through the fare gates. Using credit cards (even if the processors lifted all the fees) would slow everything down and cause a massive backup.
>you have to go to a ticket counter and pay whatever you owe (again, in cash only)
Well yeah, that's what you get for using old-fashioned paper tickets.
>Lastly, the similarity in station names, such as Nippori Station and Nishi-Nippori Station,
You think it's confusing to have "X Station", and "West X Station"? The US has the exact same thing: in the DC metro system, there's Falls Church East and Falls Church West stations, for instance, or Farragut West vs. Farragut North in downtown DC.
Yes, I am sure it works fine for locals and for tourists that are able to get an IC card, I was just relating my personal user experience. And I have to mention I was in Shenzhen just before, where the UX is really top notch (just need an app on your phone which is linked to a credit card), so my expectations were perhaps a bit high. I haven't used the DC metro so can't really comment on whether it is equally confusing or not. Another problem which I forgot to mention is that sometimes the colors in Google Maps didn't match those in the metro.
>Yes, I am sure it works fine for locals and for tourists that are able to get an IC card, I was just relating my personal user experience.
You were relating it as if it's normal. It's not.
It's like going as a tourist to NYC in 2012, getting hit by Hurricane Sandy, and then complaining that NYC is plagued by hurricanes and flooding and a terrible city to visit as a result. (Sandy was an event that NYC hadn't experienced in, I don't even know, generations?)
Buying paper tickets for local trains/subways simply hasn't been normal in Japan for quite a long time. And according to other posters here, you could have bought an IC card at the airport anyway, but for some reason you didn't do that or ask about it. When I came here as a tourist, buying an IC card was the second thing I did after I got off the plane and got out of immigration/customs, right after visiting an ATM and getting some cash. It's one of the most basic things about visiting Japan, and should have been one of the first things mentioned on any website that you'd find when googling about traveling in Japan.
It's not even much different than the US: if you want to visit DC or NYC, you have to have a stored-value fare card (or phone app these days), and unlike Japan, those cards are only good on those cities' metro systems, whereas Japan's IC cards can generally be used everywhere in the country (with some weird exceptions, but Suica and Pasmo generally work almost everywhere). And unlike the city-specific cards in the US, you can return the IC cards when you leave Japan and get your whole deposit (plus remaining stored value) back.
>Another problem which I forgot to mention is that sometimes the colors in Google Maps didn't match those in the metro.
I've never noticed that. The colors for the Tokyo Metro lines are all correct in my daily experience; I'm not so sure about the other lines, but Tokyo Metro makes more use of color-coding for different lines AFAICT.
On iOS, you can create a virtual IC card from Apple Wallet and top it up with a credit card from your Wallet. This doesn't work on foreign Android devices because only Apple includes the necessary hardware worldwide.
As a tourist who just spent a week there, you either want to use your phone (though this is a bit harder with Android than iPhone AFAIK. All iPhones just work, only some Android devices do.) or get a passmo passport which works for the trains, but not anything else the IC cards work for.
I ignored the names and worked purely off the station numbers, knowing that my hotel was on the chiyoda line, and google maps.
Specifically for most Android devices, only Japan specific variants of each model carry the hardware necessary to work with Japanese IC cards. To my understanding the only exception are Pixels but those require some tinkering to get the hardware to actually work if they’re purchased outside of Japan.
iPhone and Apple Watch work OOTB since iPhone 8/X and Series 4.
