One glaring weakness of Japanese Transit IC cards is the fare region wall. There’s a Japanese word for it, ‘matagaru’ which means ‘straddle’ passage…as in stay in the saddle instead of dismounting in the middle of a journey to pay fare in cash at the region boundary gate because the next transit IC fare region is different.
Suica for example only works for transit in the Suica/PASMO region, users cannot travel across 2 different regions. This means Suica users traveling into the JR Central TOICA area or vice versa have 2 choices: (1) paper tickets for the whole trip, (2) buy a paper exit ticket with Suica at the exit gate fare adjustment kiosk. This is the way it has worked for all cross region transit.
This is very inconvenient for Shinkansen commuters who live in the Numazu~Mishima JR Central region and commute into the Suica/PASMO Tokyo region. Suica and TOICA commuter passes are worthless, old fashioned mag strip commuter passes are the only option. A similar situation exists for cross region commuters in the TOICA~ICOCA regions. Fortunately, the JR Group companies (JR East, JR Central, JR West) are working to ease this problem and have new ‘matagaru’ cross region commuter pass service starting March 13. I posted about this development earlier, but it’s worth explaining again in more detail and covering the limitations.
Cross Region Transit
JR East, JR Central and JR West integrated their respective transit regions for special cross region commute passes. These are initially plastic only card but should eventually be available for mobile commuter passes as well.
There are some limitations: (1) plastic cards only: no Mobile Suica/Apple Pay Suica support, (2) 300 km limit, 3) regular non-commute pass transit not included: cross region commuter passes only support the designated station points, users cannot use them for non-commuter pass transit to other stations.
In a separate development there are new cross region exit gates installed at region boundary stations such as JR Atami and JR Maibara for regular Transit IC card (non-commuter pass) transit. At Atami station Suica region travelers exit via the green Suica gate lanes, TOICA region travelers exit via the blue TOICA gates. Entrance gates have not changed as only the exit gate matters for the fare region calculation (Suica fare or TOICA fare). There is a similar setup at Maibara station for TOICA and ICOCA users.
UPDATE
New gate entrance/exit layouts are in place at the new Transit IC card region exchange points. It doesn’t eliminate the Transit IC region boundary limitation but the new arrangement improves the transfer point experience for Shinkansen users, especially smart EX/EX-Press Reserve users.
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