The UK media has a thing about Japan. Japan must always be portrayed as ‘pathetic’. Pathetic losers, pathetically isolated, pathetically out of step, arrogant, etc. Does this make UK readers feel better about themselves? I don’t know, but I have learned to take any UK media coverage of Japan with a large dose of skepticism, laugh at it, or do what the Japanese do: ignore it all together. After all, who cares what UK journalists think about Japan when they cannot be bothered to spend the time and effort to find out what’s really going on, and actually report it.
Case in point, today’s Financial Times piece: The painful path of curing Japan of its cash addiction (paywalled). It has all the nasty lazy hallmarks of UK style Japan reportage: the ‘Galapagos trap’ (Japanese isolated from the rest of the world), the ‘FeliCa failure’ (FeliCa has stunted the spread of cashless systems that have taken hold elsewhere in the world, i.e. EMV is king of the world and Japan is isolated), and now the ‘QR code failure’ (Japan was slower than China applying OR codes for mobile payments, isolated and out of step again).
This last failure, of course, leads into the recent 7-Eleven QR Code 7pay launch and security meltdown, and the narrative that FT really wants to sell here: the grand parable of modern Japan, a nation of has-beens:
the (7pay) incident has become part of a grand parable of modern Japan: a country in a permanent tension between its high-tech image and the realities of aging consumers and squandered opportunities.
WTF? I thought we were talking about contactless payment trends in Japan here, not the UK take of the world order. Why is the management failure of one company the only narrative that matters despite the many successes and changes happening right now? FT’s pathetic Japan narrative, is pathetic.
FT offers little hard evidence for the failure of FeliCa and QR, and of course completely ignores the success of things like Apple Pay Japan, the expansion of global NFC smartphones, the continuing growth of Suica use, and neglects to explain the reason behind the Japanese QR Code push: obtaining personal information for Big Data.
As any Japanese IT journalist will tell you, analyzing real Japanese contactless payments market trends is very difficult because the beast is highly regional. What you find in Tokyo is completely different from Fukuoka, or rural areas. You have to look at many different pieces to understand the trends and where they are going.
The best thing FT can offer is a 6,000 person web survey from MyVoice which does not include any crucial context, which in Japan is everything. What regions are we talking about here, what’s the age spread, the amount of use, average purchase amounts, etc. There are tons of little web surveys but they don’t convey the big picture. Sure, lots of people might use PayPay to buy this weeks discount gum or get the startup campaign goodies, but that has nothing to do real day to day contactless payments use.
The rest of the piece is padded out with phoned in quotes from the usual suspects: ‘financial analyst experts’ from Credit Suisse and Mizuho Financial Group, the latter of which have skin in the game with their own QR Code payment system.
All in all it’s the low easy road that big established media takes too often these days. The Financial Times had a great opportunity to explain the exciting changes happening in the Japan payments market right now, and open a lot of eyes and minds. Unfortunately they blew it. That’s a loss for everybody, especially FT.
Update: fellow blogger in Japan Michael Camilleri has posted his take of the infamous Financial Times piece, a highly recommended read.
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