Tourists Can Now Buy Suica, PASMO Physical Cards Again Starting March 1st

Our long national nightmare is over: Suica and PASMO, deeming the chip shortage over, both say they’ll resume sale of the cards.

Want a souvenir of your Japan trip to take home with you? Good news: you’ll be able to buy a physical transportation card in Japan’s Kanto region again after a long dry spell.

The Suica and PASMO IC transportation cards are iconic symbols of eastern Japan’s extensive and convenient transportation network. Built using the home-grown FeliCa IC technology, the cards are good for area trains, buses, and taxis. You can also use them as a form of cashless payment at over two million locations across Japan.

However, due to a chip shortage, both JR East and PASMO Corporation have limited the sale of physical cards. In 2023, both announced they had suspended the sale of so-called “anonymous” cards — cards you can get from a vending machine without any identification of ownership printed on them.

Suica still sold its Welcome Suica card for tourists. And both companies’ cards can easily be used virtually on an iPhone, which built support for Felica into all its models years ago. (Unfortunately, only Android devices that have enabled support for the FeliCa standard — typically, phones sold in Japan and other Asian markets that…