Japan has an e-money system generally convenient for all. In Tokyo, you can get an IC Card and load it with Suica or Pasmo. In other cities, the names vary and are a local endearment. However, they all have the same standard built into these cards, which is why you can use these IC cards interchangeably city to city in Japan. But thanks to the well-known chip shortage, these physical cards have been struggling with continued numbers for production, and they have been encouraging people to get the mobile application or digital wallet-based cards instead.
Fairly reasonable. There’s a catch though, you either need to have an iPhone OR an Android manufactured in Japan. The latter was confusing to me. I knew about some geo-based quirks like the forced shutter sound in Japan-made phones (Thanks upskirters), but why couldn’t I use my Google wallet or use the Pasmo app on my American-bought Pixel? An error message in the Pasmo app showed an error that said “FeliCa” was not detected.
What is FeliCa?
From Wiki:
“FeliCa is a contactless RFID smart card system from Sony in Japan, primarily used in electronic money cards. The name stands for Felicity Card. First utilized in the Octopus card system in Hong Kong,[1] the technology is used in a variety of cards also in countries such as Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Macau, the Philippines, and the United States.”
It is also known as the NFC “Type F” standard. According to the internet, it’s even higher level implementation speed and security-wise. However, FeliCa is a closed standard, so the specs aren’t fully known, and no one outside of specific professionals can confirm its integrity. It has apparently achieved ISO/IEC 15408 EAL6+ security level. So, we know at the very least AES, RSA/ECC, and SHA-2 & 3 are involved.
So, even though I had NFC on my Pixel, I did not have FeliCa. I had 2 options:
- Buy a new phone just to obtain an e-Suica.
- Just buy a physical backup Suica.
I did neither. I ended up realizing that Fitbit had their own wallet implementation, and Japanese-made FitBits allowed you to provision Suica on the device since it came with FeliCa. So now I have a backup Suica on my smartwatch. I figure maybe this is possible with other Japanese-manufactured Android smartwatches. But I have not tested this theory. Fitbit also recently migrated away from their own wallet app in favor of Google Wallet pairing. So if I delete this card, I am not 100% sure if I can re-provision it. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I also heard that people have been patching rooted phones to include this, but…I didn’t want to root my Pixel. ¯\(ツ)/¯