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>Yes, I am sure it works fine for locals and for tourists that are able to get an IC card, I was just relating my personal user experience. You were relating i
by shiroiuma 3y ago
>Yes, I am sure it works fine for locals and for tourists that are able to get an IC card, I was just relating my personal user experience.
You were relating it as if it's normal. It's not.
It's like going as a tourist to NYC in 2012, getting hit by Hurricane Sandy, and then complaining that NYC is plagued by hurricanes and flooding and a terrible city to visit as a result. (Sandy was an event that NYC hadn't experienced in, I don't even know, generations?)
Buying paper tickets for local trains/subways simply hasn't been normal in Japan for quite a long time. And according to other posters here, you could have bought an IC card at the airport anyway, but for some reason you didn't do that or ask about it. When I came here as a tourist, buying an IC card was the second thing I did after I got off the plane and got out of immigration/customs, right after visiting an ATM and getting some cash. It's one of the most basic things about visiting Japan, and should have been one of the first things mentioned on any website that you'd find when googling about traveling in Japan.
It's not even much different than the US: if you want to visit DC or NYC, you have to have a stored-value fare card (or phone app these days), and unlike Japan, those cards are only good on those cities' metro systems, whereas Japan's IC cards can generally be used everywhere in the country (with some weird exceptions, but Suica and Pasmo generally work almost everywhere). And unlike the city-specific cards in the US, you can return the IC cards when you leave Japan and get your whole deposit (plus remaining stored value) back.
>Another problem which I forgot to mention is that sometimes the colors in Google Maps didn't match those in the metro.
I've never noticed that. The colors for the Tokyo Metro lines are all correct in my daily experience; I'm not so sure about the other lines, but Tokyo Metro makes more use of color-coding for different lines AFAICT.