How Japan Public Transport Changed in 6 Years | ✉️ #68

Illustrated banner for MKDEV Dispatch #68 featuring a man holding a cat with a paper plane graphic, titled "How Japan Public Transport Changed in 6 Years" against a background of paper planes.

Last updated: 26/04/25 | Published: 26/04/25

Hey! 👋

I’ve been to Japan twice so far - in 2019 and recently, April 2025. What changed, at least from the tourist perspective, in those 6 years?

They have this beautiful IC card system over there - you get a plastic card once, and then top it up with money and use it almost everywhere to get on public transport. Tap when entering, tap when exiting. You can even use this at some stores, including convenience stores. This system is in place since a long time.

But there is something new now: you can issue a virtual IC card directly from your smartphone, top it up via Apple Pay or Google Pay and just tap at the control gates with your smartphone. This makes the whole process essentially cashless, but it also solves the problem of issuing plastic cards with the chip at scale. The problem is real: in Tokyo, as a tourist, you can’t get a plastic SUICA (local IC flavor) card anymore, exactly due to the chip shortage.

I still got an IC card just as a souvenir (the designs are extremely cute), but otherwise I just used my smartphone across whole country. That’s a useful, though iterative, improvement to an existing system, that makes everything a little bit more convenient, efficient, cost-efficient and what not. I love such changes.

On the other hand, I always like to compare such systems with the system in Germany.

First of all, you’ll never see a ticket gate in Germany. Regardless if its Berlin or Munich subway, or some local train in Baden-Württemberg, there is no tourniquet to go through. You just get on a train and you go. You should have a valid ticket, of course.

Second, you can buy any ticket in a mobile app. In fact, there are probably dozens of apps by now, but most of the tickets are also available inside Deutsche Bahn app. You can get some small local train ticket, or high-speed cross country ticket, or ticket for French and Austrian railways, or public transit ticket in any city or town. Or you can stick to your local municipality mobile app as well, of course.

Naturally, you can still buy a paper ticket, and some of them you need to validate on the platform using a ticket stamping machine. but that’s only if you really prefer to go old-school. Lots of people do.

And finally, since some time there is a nation-wide subscription called DeutschlandTicket. You pay (as of today) 58 eur per month, and you can use any public transport and local trains as much as you want. You can’t hop on a long-distance or high-speed train with this ticket, but any kind of in-city transportation as well as regional trips to Alps and what not are covered.

If you combine these 3 things, you get a system where you just stop thinking about such thing as tickets, ticket control, queues at the entrance or at the exit of stations and so on. You go inside a bus, sit and get to your destination. You go to subway, enter the train and go. No matter how fast tapping your smartphone on a ticket gate is, it’s not going to be faster than no ticket gate at all. In this case, you get a better system not by upgrading a component, but by completely getting rid of it.

It’s not without it’s downsides, of course. The German system is based on 2 things:

There are random checks of tickets. Every now and then some people will enter the train and ask you to show a ticket;
To ride without a ticket is considered a criminal offense, ending up in a fine or, in rare cases, even up to 1 year in prison. Ouch;

So the system works, at least partially, because of a big incentive to have a ticket. Whether this kind of incentive is good or not is being debated every now and then.

You can improve the system by upgrading it’s components, or you can improve the system by getting rid of components and, optionally, replacing them with some strict rules and policies. What I also saw in Japan is that some places got face recognition devices instead of a regular ticket tourniquet. Presumably, it simplifies the process further, while also allowing some metrics collection - something that German system lacks.

What I also tried in Japan this time was a self-heating bento box. I am not aware of anything similar in Germany, and I don’t have any lessons learned from this. All I can say is that it’s an amazing innovation and we need more of this, and less of AI chaos.

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