Riding the trains

Post by Ella

Japan Railways (JR) is a mega corporation that runs the majority of train lines in Japan. There are branches: JR East, JR West, JR Hokkaido to name a few.  Each has its own website and there is no unifying theme for the look and feel of the interface. There are also many smaller private railway companies that have their own specialty routes.  City metros are yet another form of train travel and are run by each city.

At railway and subway stations there are banks of ticket machines. Many have English available. You can buy individual tickets every time you ride. 

Or you can purchase an IC (Intelligent Card), top it up with whatever amount of Yen you want and use the card instead of continually buying tickets. There are multiple brands of ICs but they are all interchangeable.

For riding subways and local trains, we use our SUICA cards in our Apple wallet. SUICA = Super Urban Intelligent Card. Point the phone at the “IC” reader to enter the platform area and the reader recognizes you have a transit card. Don’t even have to open the wallet or even unlock the phone. A SUICA notice pops up letting you know you are in transit. 

At the end of the ride, point your phone at the card reader on the way out and SUICA ends your trip and deducts the correct fare from the balance. If you don’t tap out, you can’t ever use that card again until you go to the ticket counter and ask someone nicely to fix it.

Longer distance trains like Limited Express and Shinkhansen are a little fussier. In addition to a base fare that the IC will cover, you need to also buy an express fare and you can choose to have a seat reservation or not.

I’ve purchased Shinkansen tickets thru SmartEx, an app by JR West for our upcoming move to Kagoshima. 

Here is an interesting thing I learned about Apple Wallet. Go to your wallet and tap the + in the upper right. Scroll down a little and you’ll see the option to add a transit card. Click on that and you can scroll down through various countries. If you go to Japan,, there are three available. If you continue, you enter some info and then you can add Yen using Apple Pay or one of your credit cards.