If you’re living and working here, you should be able to get a commuter pass IC card still.
You could also try to get a Suica or passmo on your phone.
Go to any train station a buy any regular ICOCA
How does it expire after a day? Aren’t they supposed to last like 29 days or something? I might talk to a station dude about it, like? Are you sure you don’t just need to put some money on it?
Hm, not heard of that Welcome Suica thing before. Just looking at its website now…
It’s got a nice picture on it, but quite frankly, this thing doesn’t really seem too good. It makes no sense not to be able to recharge it, and the artificial expiry date seems unnecessarily unnecessary; what is even the point of it expiring, beyond skimming off any unused and unrefundable remaining credit?
If this is really about the current difficulty of IC card supply, then as an armchair amateur expert, I would have instigated a far superior, and infinitely more sustainable programme by:
1. Allowing refunds made from remaining credit on returned cards. It may even have been possible to build some automated machines to do this, like how 7-11 quickly banged out new cash registers during the plague. 1. Re-use returned cards, instead of them becoming useless pieces of plastic with rare NFC chips inside.
The current setup is even worse than just letting strange foreigner man tourists use up the precious supply of regular IC cards. It’s not like they’re from different factories.
5 comments
Are you a tourist or resident?
If you’re living and working here, you should be able to get a commuter pass IC card still.
You could also try to get a Suica or passmo on your phone.
Go to any train station a buy any regular ICOCA
How does it expire after a day? Aren’t they supposed to last like 29 days or something? I might talk to a station dude about it, like? Are you sure you don’t just need to put some money on it?
Hm, not heard of that Welcome Suica thing before. Just looking at its website now…
It’s got a nice picture on it, but quite frankly, this thing doesn’t really seem too good. It makes no sense not to be able to recharge it, and the artificial expiry date seems unnecessarily unnecessary; what is even the point of it expiring, beyond skimming off any unused and unrefundable remaining credit?
If this is really about the current difficulty of IC card supply, then as an armchair amateur expert, I would have instigated a far superior, and infinitely more sustainable programme by:
1. Allowing refunds made from remaining credit on returned cards. It may even have been possible to build some automated machines to do this, like how 7-11 quickly banged out new cash registers during the plague.
1. Re-use returned cards, instead of them becoming useless pieces of plastic with rare NFC chips inside.
The current setup is even worse than just letting strange foreigner man tourists use up the precious supply of regular IC cards. It’s not like they’re from different factories.
iPhone? digital suica/pasmo
Android? Buy an icoca