What a Suica year. After all that pie in the sky 2024 Suica Renaissance marketing glitz, we should have known the ugly reality 2025 had in store for us when JR East released the utterly incompetent and useless JRE Wallet App in January. Link your Suica card for all kinds of coupon goodies. Except it didn’t do that or anything else. Any competent company management would have killed it, like Steve Jobs asking the post MobileMe meltdown staff what it was supported to do, then asking, “Then why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” I suspect very little of the Suica Renaissance fantasy will actually work the way the JR East marketing team wants us to believe. Here we go.
Suica Renaissance phase 1: teppay QR payment coming to Mobile Suica and Mobile PASMO apps
On 2025-11-25 JR East held a press conference to unveil the first phase of Suica Renaissance: QR code teppay, a mobile payment platform collaboration with PASMO and JCB that aims to make Mobile Suica and Mobile PASMO as easy to use for all kinds of payment transactions like PayPay. Junya Suzuki’s report on the announcement was the best of the bunch and did a good job of laying out the basics and limitations.
- The 300,000 JPY balance limit and no cash withdrawal policy allows JR East-PASMO-JCB to operate in the relatively loosely regulated ‘prepaid instrument’ category: “teppay is classified not as a “funds transfer operator” but as a “prepaid payment instrument” under Japanese financial regulations. With a funds transfer operator (e.g., PayPay, Rakuten Pay), balances are treated essentially as cash: users can withdraw to bank accounts or ATMs, and strict KYC and anti-money-laundering checks are required before sending money to others. With a prepaid payment instrument, the rules are much lighter. After discussions with regulators, JR East received confirmation that “person-to-person transfers without identity verification” are acceptable, provided the balance cap is kept at ¥300,000 and appropriate monitoring is in place.”
- Limited to Mobile Suica and Mobile PASMO apps: teppay is basically a separate backend service layer that can be used to add funds to Mobile Suica / PASMO cards, send and receive NFC/Bluetooth peer to peer teppay balance funds, and pay for store purchases where teppay is accepted. Teppay may look like a magic addition to the Mobile Suica 20,000 JPY balance limit, but it’s really a completely separate service layer.
- Mobile Suica and Mobile PASMO user base is about 35 million. If those users use teppay, it could easily become the second largest QR mobile payment platform after PayPay.
With the teppay launch still a year away, the press conference first ‘hands on’ experience was mostly smoke and mirrors. My take is that JCB will handle most of the teppay development and backend operation that will connect with the Mobile Suica / Mobile PASMO system hosted by JR East. As Suzuki san says, “Whether teppay can gain broad acceptance will depend on post-launch improvements and, above all, on JR East’s ability to convincingly answer the question: ‘Why should I actively choose teppay over what I already use?'” Also read Suzuki san’s related article that explains why younger users, the user group teppay is aiming for, are not into reward points. Reward points are for older folks. That’s why teppay point wasn’t covered at the press conference.
Suica Renaissance phase 2: reinventing the Suica wheel with walk through transit gates
The other big hype of Suica Renaissance is walk-through gates. Almost all of the walk-through gates used in JR West and JR East test installations are face recognition based technology where the user registers their face data with the transit company. At the Mass Transit Railway Technology Exhibition held at Makuhari Messe at the end of November, face recognition, BlueTooth and Millimeter wave gate demos were on display but only BlueTooth was really new and the only demo tech for smart-devices.
- Millimeter wave radio: showcased at previous expos, the key feature of this millimeter wave walk-through gate is that it uses existing Suica IC plastic cards as-is, when inserted in a millimeter wave radio case. Suzuki san reported: “When a Suica card is inserted into a dedicated card case and the user enters the gate, communication via millimeter waves occurs between the gate and the card case during passage….from the gate’s perspective, Suica processing happens mid-passage without contact. Communication between the card case and Suica uses FeliCa (NFC) at 13.56 MHz, different from millimeter waves. It’s akin to moving the traditional gate’s IC reader to the card case, bridged by millimeter wave communication. The system allows truly hands-free passage—no need to hold the card case; it works in a pocket. However, the card case has an antenna in a protruding part. Covering it with a hand or materials that absorb waves (metal, water) prevents communication, causing errors. Challenges include the card case requiring power, with a built-in battery. It has an on/off switch, needing to be on for walk-through use. Cost-wise, the card case is around 1,000 yen currently. Gates can be designed for installation on existing ones, similar to Niigata’s facial recognition overlays for cost/space efficiency. However, promoting card case adoption is a limitation and there is no smartphone integration at this point. Issues for future consideration.”
- Bluetooth Walk-Through Gate: “Another exhibit was a walk-through gate using Bluetooth and facial recognition, displayed at the Japan Signal booth. They demonstrated a multi-compatible gate supporting Bluetooth (BLE)…For BLE, smartphones act as “BLE beacons” emitting signals continuously, detected by the gate for passage permission. Like facial data, beacon info must be pre-registered on servers—a common requirement for walk-through gates, differing from JR East’s direct Suica millimeter wave approach. BLE uses 2.4 GHz, prone to interference from reflections, affecting accuracy. Japan Signal noted single-lane operation is fine, but multiple parallel gates are challenging, requiring selective deployment.”
Here is a typical JR East Tokyo region station transit gate layout in 2025: 6 lanes of which 3 are IC card only, 3 are combo IC + mag-strip paper ticket + QR Eki-Net. Mag strip tickets will be gradually phased out in favor of QR, but all of these gates are new, installed between 2024~2025 for the new Suica 2.0 central server ticket processing system. And with the huge new Suica 2.0 transit gate upgrade, JR East is quietly swapping out full fledged gates with simplified Suica validators where ever they can:
In short, walk-through gates are not going to be universal. Considering that transit gates have a 5~7 year life cycle, the next big upgrade would be sometime after 2030. From the JR Group standpoint, walk-through gates will be aimed at users who want the convenience of using them at high traffic major stations that have them. Stations like JR Asagaya (pictured above) will be lucky to have a single walk-through combo gate. Users will also have to register their facial bio-metrics with multiple transit operators they commute over (for example JR West, Osaka Metro, Nankai, etc.). Flashy tech demos don’t always translate to a great day to day rush hour experience. Time will tell but I don’t see the current walk-through setups becoming the default transit gate experience.
It’s depressing that transit gate developers are ignoring touchless UltraWide Band (UWB) technology that extends the reach of current smartphone NFC embedded secure element GlobalPlatform used in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, keeping your transit card secure, private and in your pocket. UWB offers 10 to 30 centimeters of accuracy where BLE 6.0’s techniques deliver accuracy of only about 1 meter. Beyond accuracy, UWB signals can theoretically span up to 200 meters and perform better in environments with obstacles or interference, whereas BLE operates in the crowded 2.4 GHz band. UWB’s superior accuracy and reliability make it ideal for secure distance checks as it simply extends the NFC eSE platform smartphones already use. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any further developments since NTT Docomo, Sony, NXP Semiconductors announced the technology in December 2019.
Suica Renaissance phase 3: Gotochi MaaS confusion
JR East MaaS developments to date have been all over the place, literally and figuratively. Multiple smartphone apps for different regions and services, each requiring new account and payment registration. Some of the clutter will finally be trimmed with JRE ID, the new single PassKey login service, but there’s a long way to go to create a simple cohesive service bundle that’s easy to use. Ideally JR East wants their MaaS to work something like this:
The reality is complicated by the recent rollout of Suica 2 in 1 Region Affiliate Transit Cards that extends Suica to affiliated (i.e. feeder) transit operators in the JR East region (Iwate, Akita, Yamagata, Gunma, Nagano prefectures). However the cards and the reader infrastructure use the new FeliCa SD2 chipset and new FeliCa OS to implement multiple features (multiple commuter passes and point systems, local area transit discounts, etc.) on Suica 2 in 1 plastic cards and reader infrastructure. None of the new features work on mobile yet but it finally looks like we have the answer to the Suica 2 in 1 for mobile question: Gotochi Suica.
The latest Suica Renaissance marketing PR release hints that Mobile Suica 2 in 1 is coming but with a new name: Gotochi Suica (Regional Suica). The first Gotochi Suica service areas will be Gunma and Miyagi prefectures starting in 2027. The concept is fairly simple: 1) register your My Number card in a new version of Mobile Suica app. When you arrive in a ‘Gotochi Suica’ region, your Mobile Suica card automatically updates and receives local service extras.
The full Gotochi Suica service menu will be available in 2028 and appears to include all the plastic Suica 2 in 1 features and more added via the new Suica 2.0 system backend. It’s anybody’s guess if Mobile Gotochi Suica actually upgrades the Mobile FeliCa OS to incorporate the FeliCa SD2 feature set or if they are simply added on the backend. Only FeliCa Dude would know but I suspect the latter as NTT Docomo doesn’t seem very keen on adding new Mobile FeliCa features these days (like UWB support, non JP Android support and so on). Who cares as long as it works…right?
Suica Renaissance phase 4: Dead Penguin
There was a lot of brouhaha when JR East announced that the Suica penguin mascot would ‘graduate’ (i.e. “you’re fired“) in 2026 in conjunction with the teppay launch. Lots of folks were confused as to why JR East would dump their most marketable and long lived corporate character. YouTuber Shimoya’s Real Media channel had a good explanation of the situation. The basic problem is shown on the Beck’s Coffee paper bag copyright. Three copyright holders: Chiharu Sakazaki, JR East, Dentsu.
This means that JR East has to get permission from the other two copyright holders for any new use, or campaign involving the shared Suica penguin character. It’s also important to know about Dentsu, an ‘ad agency’ monopoly that in reality is a media broker/yakuza outfit with fingers in every major promotion campaign, especially government funded ones, like the Tokyo Olympics, Spotify, and so on. Originally part of the South Manchuria Railway Imperial Japan empire, Dentsu should have been broken up by the GHQ but was deemed too important a tool in spreading American occupation propaganda. I know from painful experience that any business involving Dentsu is an expensive and demeaning shakedown.
As Shimoya san points out, the Suica penguin was originally a one-off poster campaign character that slowly evolved into the Suica mascot that it was never intended to be. The result is a Suica penguin character that is extremely costly and complicated media branding with many usage restrictions. In light of all the new things JR East wants to do with Suica, (teppay Suica, Gotochi Suica, etc.) and all the other JR East services that don’t have a mascot (Eki-Net, JRE POINT, JRE BANK, VIEW CARD, etc.) it’s far easier and cost effective to dump the penguin and create a new mascot that JR East completely owns and can use wherever and whenever they want. Do you think Steve Jobs would have kept the Apple logo if he had had to constantly ask the ex-Beatles for permission to use it in every new ad product campaign?
I like the Suica penguin but understand why it has to go. As one ex-Beatle once said, all things pass.
Thanks for reading, best wishes to you in 2026.
Related previous posts:
Suica 2.0 Platform Closeup
Suica 2 in 1
Suica 2 in 1 mobile dilemma: promoting targeted region services on a wide mobile platform
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