We’re starting to prepare for our trip to Japan on Saturday. I’ve been wondering if the old Suica cards that we have from our previous trip to Japan (in February 2018) would still work, and would still have the stored yen on them. Its been over 5 years since we used them. (I just Google searched now and apparently Suica cards stay valid for 10 years since their last use, at which point they expire and any stored credit is lost.)
(Before Googling) I thought I’d ask on reddit’s Japan Travel subreddit, but my post got auto-rejected by the moderator bot for being too common a question. But the moderator bot message did point me at the FAQ, where I found an article about Suica cards. It mentions that there is a “mobile Suica” which you can install in an iPhone’s Wallet app, and you can transfer physical Suica cards into your Apple Wallet as well.
So I tried it using my phone with one of the cards. I had to enter the last 4 digits of the card serial number, then let the phone scan it, and hey presto! I now have a digital Suica card in my Apple Wallet, and it shows me the balance is 1485 yen! I had my wife scan the other card we have, and now she also has a digital Suica on her phone, with a few hundred yen on it. So now we can toss the physical cards and tap our phones to board trains in Japan. And an extra cool thing is that we can top up the stored value completely on our phones, using Wallet to transfer money from a credit/debit card onto Suica. So we no longer have to navigate the Suica recharge machines in Japanese train stations.
This is all very cool, and I’m glad I looked into it.
And… I just had another look in Apple Wallet to see what other transit cards can be added… and it includes Clipper Cards, used in the San Francisco Bay Area! We have Clipper Cards too, because I’ve visited SF many times. I’ll have to transfer those to our phones as well.
In other news, today I had the last three ethics classes of the Documentary Films topic. Tomorrow I start on Natural Resources with the Tuesday kids.
My wife had the day off work, for the King’s Birthday public holiday. It’s weird, this is the first time in my lifetime that we’ve had the King’s Birthday instead of the Queen’s Birthday. It’s amazing how much difference that little change makes. The Queen’s Birthday was just a normal thing that happens every year. But the King’s Birthday feels surreal and strange.
We took Scully on a nice walk in the midday warmth. The mornings and evenings are getting cold, but the middle of the day is still quite pleasant. It’s been a very mild winter so far, and with El Niño happening now I suspect it’ll stay mild and not get really cold.
And this afternoon I made a few more Irregular Webcomic! strips using the photos I took a couple of weeks ago. I made enough to last this week, which ends with strip number 5000 on Friday. So yeah, I made my 5000th IWC strip. It’s a weird feeling knowing I’ve been making this comic for… over 20 years now. I kind of want to retire it at some point soon, within the next 6 months, or year, or so. But I feel a need to tie up all the storylines I’ve started now. So it’ll be a little while yet.
New content today:
You might appreciate the current season of “The Layover”, a video series in which the cast play giant versions of various games across nations and continents. In the current “Capture the Flag” contest, they’re playing in Tokyo and surrounding areas. And they can only take trains–no cars or buses.