SUICA

There are three main transit cards in Japan: PASMO, ICOCA, and SUICA. All three are fairly interchangeable but most importantly can be used to pay for transit in large cities and intercity rail like JR trains.

When you’re ready to travel you just tap your iPhone (or Apple Watch) at the turnstile and again as you exit at the end your ride. The transit system will debit your card for the amount of the ride. Couldn’t be easier!

Many retailers also accept these cards as payment for goods and services. They are exceedingly useful when you’re in Japan.

Without them you need to pay for transit with cash – no cards! In the metro stations there are ticket machines into which you need to feed cash, both coins and bills are accepted and while it looks like you can use a card to pay it is cash only. It’s not a big deal except it does slow you down every time you want to jump on a train or bus. Plus you need to hang on to your ticket for the duration of the ride and use it to exit the station when you’re done.

This post is about adding a SUICA card to your Apple Wallet and link it to a payment card so thar you can use your phone or watch to tap in and out. The same steps would apply for PASMO or ICOCA.

To begin, access your Apple Wallet on your phone. In the upper right corner of your Wallet you will see a plus sign (+), tap it and this is the screen you’ll see:

Choose Transit Card, and then you’ll see.

You’ll notice you can add a number of useful transit cards including those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

For Japan, choose SUiCA. You will then see this screen:

If you have an existing physical card (most of us don’t), you’d choose Transfer Existing Card. For today, tap Continue. You’ll then see this screen:

This is where you’ll designate how much to load onto your card. Our advice is to just load the minimum of ¥1000. If you’re linking to a card that doesn’t charge a foreign transaction fee (please let that be that case!), then there is no penalty to keep loading money as you need it. And it takes just a minute to load money onto your transit card.

Remember that at the end of your trip, whatever you’ve loaded onto your card is marooned with no way to get back other than using it. So you want to keep a minimum balance that will allow you to use it to tap in/out but not leave a lot of money unused. For point of reference, Tokyo and Osaka Metro rides are about ¥300 (give or take ¥50).

Once you choose to load a value, the next step is to link your payment card. It is SO MUCH EASIER to use a card you already have in your Apple Wallet. If you now have to add a payment card to your Wallet, there is an entire separate process you’ll need to go through at this point. So try to have a payment card loaded into your Apple Wallet before you travel. If you’re like me, who uses my Apple Watch to pay for everything then you’ll be good to go.

The next step is to choose which card you want to link to your SUICA card. Let me repeat: make sure you use a card that does not charge you a foreign transaction fee otherwise you’re going to get swamped in fees. Just a good practice really.

Once you start using it you’ll be able to monitor your balance and also see what trips you’ve taken.

Now a separate word about the evil practice called Dynamic Currency Conversion. You will see this when you use a U.S. card (debit or credit) to pay for things in a foreign country – mostly restaurants.

The shady, evil companies that handle those payments will “helpfully” offer to charge you in US Dollars rather than the local currency. Seems benign in the moment, but if you are already using a card that doesn’t charge a foreign transaction fee then there is no reason not to pay in the foreign currency. In fact you will benefit from the currency conversion rate that your bank gets.

If you choose to let the payment company do the conversion (dynamic currency conversion) you should know that they are skimming a hidden conversion fee of anywhere between 3% and 10% (and maybe more) to convert the transaction for you.

Here’s a real world example of a restaurant bill where we paid ¥12,500 for dinner. The bank conversion on that was a little more than ¥150:$1, or about $83. The point of sale machine asked if we wanted to be charged ¥12,500 OR $91.50. Had we chosen $91.50, we would have essentially paid a service fee of $8.50 to the company handling the transaction. Yes it would have been in USD, but so, so what. My credit card will also charge me in USD and give me a much better conversion rate!

DO NOT FALL FOR THIS TRICK. Always, always, always choose the local currency and always, always, always use a card that does not charge a foreign transaction fee.