Suica, Pasmo and the IC card, explained from the hotel desk

Ten years at the desk, and this was the first thing I set up for every guest: an IC card. It is a tap-to-pay card that runs the whole city, every JR train, every metro line, every bus, plus convenience stores, coffee machines, station lockers, most vending machines.

The fastest way is your phone. On iPhone, open Wallet, tap the plus, choose Transit Card, pick Suica, load a few thousand yen with Apple Pay. Done, two minutes, before you have even left the airport. Android phones bought outside Japan mostly support Suica too through Google Wallet. Phone Suica beats the plastic card because you can top it up anywhere instead of hunting for a machine.

If you want the physical card, look for a Welcome Suica machine at Narita or Haneda, red logo, English menus. It works for 28 days and there is no deposit to think about. Pasmo has a visitor version too and works exactly the same everywhere.

Using it is the whole trick of Tokyo: tap the reader at the gate when you enter, tap again when you leave, the fare sorts itself out. No fare tables, no route math, no ticket machines. When the gate flashes red mid-trip, your balance is low, top up at the yellow machines inside any station, they all have an English button.

One thing I always warned guests about: keep a little cash anyway. A few small ramen shops and old izakaya are still cash-only, and the ticket-machine restaurants sometimes take coins and IC but not foreign credit cards.