Twentythree

Changeover includes old-school solution for stations yet to upgrade to new technology.

Back at the start of the summer, East Japan Railway Company/JR East announced that it will be discontinuing the use of magnetic-strip tickets on its rail network, which is the largest and most-ridden in east Japan. Six other rail operators have now announced that they’ll be abolishing magnetic-strip tickets as well.

The companies joining JR East in this shift are:
● Keisei Electric Railway (operates in Tokyo and Chiba Prefecture)
● Keikyu (Tokyo, Kanagawa Prefecture)
● Tokyo Monorail (Tokyo)
● Tobu (Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, Gunma, and Tochigi Prefectures)
● Hokuso (Tokyo, Chiba)
● Sendai Airport Transit (Miyagi Prefecture)

The collected companies also account for all rail access to Haneda and Narita Airports.

Under the current system, passengers using paper tickets on these lines get a ticket with information such as the starting station and fare amount printed on the front, and a magnetic strip on the back. As you approach a station’s automated ticket gates, you slide the ticket into a slot on the right side, then it pops up from the terminal on the opposite end, so that you can grab it without breaking stride. At your destination you insert your ticket again into the gate as you exit the station, and it’s retained within the machinery.

▼ Ticket gates at a JR East station, with their insertion slots circled

Starting in the spring of 2027, though, the seven rail companies will be switching over to a new system of tickets with QR codes printed on them. Since these can be scanned optically to confirm that the fare has been paid, there’s no need for the data to be contained on magnetic strips, so the QR system will be replacing the magnetic format.

▼ The QR tickets will also be larger, 8.5 centimeters (3.3 inches) along their longest side compared to the magnetic tickets’ 5.75 centimeters, as shown in this relative size comparison graphic.

The companies say this switch is being made for sustainability reasons. JR East alone estimates that its current ticket design annually generates around 160 metric tons of trash, with the magnetic backings requiring a special chemical treatment in order to be safely disposed of. There’s also a long-term economic upside for rail operators in switching over to QR-code tickets. Not only does this allow them to essentially unify admission systems between their physical and digital/smartphone ticketing services, getting rid of magnetic tickets also allows them to eliminate a lot of complexity in ticket gate design and associated maintenance costs.

▼ It takes a lot of moving parts to pass a ticket through the machine and internally read the magnetic strip, as this gate with its outer casing removed shows.

Somewhat ironically, though, the switch to QR codes doesn’t mean that travelers will never again insert their ticket into a gate. After you scan your code at your destination station, there will still be a slot in the machine where you can stick your ticket, so that you don’t have to carry it around with you once your ride is done.

▼ Diagram showing the magnetic (top) and QR code (bottom) procedure when entering (入場) and exiting (出場) the station

In another bit of irony, not all stations operated by the seven companies currently have ticket gates that are equipped with QR code readers, and that will most likely still be the situation when the changeover to QR tickets takes place in the spring. For travelers with QR tickets needing to enter/exit stations without any compatible gates are asked instead to show their ticket to a station employee at the gate, a decidedly old-school way of utilizing the new technology.

For travelers already paying for their fare through tappable prepaid cards like JR’s Suica, the switch to QR-code paper tickets won’t have a direct effect on them, but the changeover still marks the end of an era, so rail fans might want to grab an extra base-fare magnetic ticket to keep as a memento before they disappear. As for those who’ll miss the distinct staccato rhythm of tickets snapping into and out of the machine, maybe someday there’ll be a way to recreate it, like with the recent rebirth of patapata signage at this Tokyo station.

Source: JR East via Abema News via Livedoor News, Nitele News
Top image ©SoraNews24
Insert images: SoraNews24, JR East, Sotetsu
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Just when Japan thought the jibetarian were gone for good…

With Halloween celebrations coming up, Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward is running a public awareness campaign with multilingual reminders that public drinking and littering are prohibited. Shibuya isn’t the only part of Tokyo that’s been experiencing cultural friction between foreign tourists and the Japanese resident population, though, and there’s another issue that’s attracting attention in the Ginza neighborhood.

Ginza is one of Tokyo’s fanciest neighborhoods, with its primary boulevard lined with flagship stores of brand-name designers plus more high-end boutiques found down the district’s side streets. As demonstrated in the video below, though, it’s not just high-end fashion that people are seeing in Ginza these days, but an increasing number of foreign tourists sitting on the sidewalk.

This sort of thing is generally considered slovenly, inconsiderate behavior in Japan, especially in places like Ginza that want to present a classy atmosphere. When asked why they were sitting on the sidewalk, curb, or planters, one of the people in the video, a man from Malaysia, said his feet were hurting from having been walking around for an hour. Another traveler, a woman from Kosovo, says that she’d assumed that sitting on the curb was OK because the street was currently closed to vehicle traffic (something Ginza does periodically on weekends and holidays), though she then reconsiders and admits that it would be better for her to follow the local customs and not sit there.

As in many parts of Tokyo, there aren’t many streetside benches in Ginza, and while the neighborhood does have a large number of cafes and coffeehouses, sometimes all the seats are taken, and even if there is space, their prices aren’t particularly cheap. That said, it’s extremely unusual to see Japanese people sitting on the street in Ginza, so the locals have demonstrated that is it possible to visit the neighborhood without plopping yourself down on the pavement.

It’s worth noting that there was a social phenomenon of people sitting or squatting on sidewalks in Japan during the late 1990s, who were called jibetarian (a pun on jibeta/”ground” and bejitarian, the Japanese pronunciation of “vegetarian”). However, the practice was primarily associated with rebellious teens, not the sort of demographic that hangs out in Ginza, and by the early 2000s even Japanese culture sort of collectively decided that sitting on the ground didn’t really make anyone look cool or tough anyway. Jibetarian have largely disappeared in the years since, so seeing foreign tourists sitting on the sidewalks of Ginza, sometimes eating meals while doing so, hasn’t been something Japanese locals are very happy about, as shown in comments for the above video such as:

“It’ll only be a few years until Ginza starts looking like [the shady parts of] Shinjuku.”
“Sitting on the ground like that gets your pants dirty, and then that grime gets transferred to seats on trains and in restaurants when they sit in them later.”
“Ginza has gotten really touristy.”
“There are cafes and other facilities where they could sit down, but I guess they don’t want to spend the money.”
“They could install benches, but then people would just lie down on them to nap and leave trash tucked into the frame.”
“A while back there was talk about those photos of foreign tourists sitting on the ground at Disneyland while they ate their lunches.”
“Instead of asking themselves ‘Is it OK to sit here?’ they’re just asking ‘Is it possible to sit here?’, and if the answer is yes, they do it.”

There were also more than a few comments on the video lamenting the lack of benches in Tokyo, so it’s not like the locals are completely unsympathetic. Again, though, Ginza draws lots of Japanese domestic visitors too, and they pretty much all manage to keep from needing to sit on the ground.

Under current ordinances, sitting on the sidewalk in Ginza isn’t illegal, provided the person doing the sitting isn’t blocking the entrance to a building or otherwise unsafely impeding the flow of traffic. That said, Japan’s baseline attitude about how to behave in public is built less on questions of technical legality and more on being respectful to others, especially the members of the local community, so if you want to be a gracious traveler, it’s probably best to listen to your feet and go looking for an acceptable place to sit before you reach the limit of your stamina.

Source: Teleasa News via Yahoo! Japan News via Hachima Kiko, YouTube/ANNnewsCH
Top image: Pakutaso
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Says he wants to go home, but the police are holding onto him for now.

At around 7 o’clock in the evening last Saturday, a 36-year-old American man walked into the police station in the town of Izumi in Kagoshima Prefecture. He was hoping to get some help, and he may still end up getting it, but first he got arrested.

The man said that he had been traveling around Japan, but ran out of money and had no place to stay. The police asked him to show his passport, and when they examined its contents they saw that he had entered Japan on a short-term travel visa, which allows tourists from the U.S. to stay in the country for up to 90 days. They also saw that his date of entry into Japan, via Saga Airport, had been October 15.

But wait, you might be thinking, last Saturday was October 10, so how was the man already in Kagoshima then if he arrived in Japan on October 15? Because he arrived in Japan on October 15, 2025, almost exactly one year before he walked into the Izumi police station. That also meant that his visa had expired nearly nine months ago, on January 13, and since he hadn’t applied for any sort of renewal, he was in Japan illegally.

The man told the police that he was aware he had overstayed his visa, and that as he had run out of money, he now wanted to go home to America. It’s not clear what he expected to happen next, but what did happen is that he was immediately placed under arrest for the visa violation.

The situation presents a good opportunity to take stock of the current social climate in Japan regarding immigration/visa law. If someone has overstayed their tourist visa and wants to leave Japan anyway, it might seem like they’ll have no real consequences to face when turning themselves in to the police. If the authorities deport them, that gets them home all the same, right?

▼ A deportation flight is still a departure flight.

However, Japan is in the process of tightening up a number of visa regulations, and recent high-profile crimes involving both foreign tourists and residents are leading to increased calls from the public to see foreign nationals stand trial and be punished for breaking the law, as opposed to the swift, quiet deportations that were common for many years. While it’s unlikely that prosecutors would seek a lengthy prison term for a visa violation (it would run counter to the idea of “You’re not supposed to be here anymore,” after all), waiting in custody for a court date can be very unpleasant in Japan, especially if the man is found to have been in violation of any other regulations during the year he’s spent in the country.

Legitimate hotels in Japan are required to examine and retain a copy of foreign guests’ passports, so it’s unclear how the man bypassed this or what other form of lodgings he’d been using, and the police are still investigating his activities since arriving in Japan.

Obviously, the smart thing to do is to not overstay your visa in the first place. Should you end up in that situation, though, the wisest place to go looking for assistance is at your home country’s embassy or consulate, since even if you need help, you’ve still committed a crime, which is something the police tend to frown on.

Source: TBS News Dig, Minami Nippon Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert image: Pakutaso
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Finished with a Totoro netsuke that combines anime charm with centuries of Japanese tradition. 

Whenever you think of Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro, the titular grey giant will likely come looming into your mind’s eye. However, this forest-dwelling character isn’t the only Totoro to appear in the movie, as it’s often joined by two others – a blue “Medium Totoro” and a white “Small Totoro“. While each one has its own unique charms, their personalities truly shine when they come together, and to prove that point is a trio of bags from the studio’s Donguri Kyowakoku specialty retail chain.

▼ Leading the charge in this fluffy bag collection is the Large Totoro Fluffy Tote Bag (5,280 yen [US$33.27]).

Though the Large Totoro appears here in a more fashion-friendly shade of taupe, which is actually a blend of dark brown and grey, the character is easily distinguished by its whiskers, which aren’t seen on any of the other Totoros.

The whiskers here are as soft as the bag, which is made from a warm and fluffy fabric, making it ideal for outings in the chillier seasons of autumn and winter.

▼ Stay warm with Totoro bag cuddles.

Everything you put in the bag will stay warm and cosy too, with an inner pocket for storing small items…

▼ …and a concealed magnet closure.

Another nice feature is the way you can spot Totoro’s belly markings every time you reach into your bag.

With a body that measures around 25 by 32 centimetres (9.8 × 12.6 inches), the bag is well-sized to carry a lot of items during your travels.

And the more you put inside Totoro the better, as its belly will take on a cute, rounded shape.

▼ Moving down a size, we have the Medium Totoro Fluffy Drawstring Pouch (3,135 yen).

This sweet rendering of the mid-sized Totoro is true to form in terms of features, as it has a nose but no whiskers.

Measuring 18 by 19 x 15 centimetres, the pouch is made from a warm and cosy boa fabric, and has a brown lining.

▼ The climbing rope cord handles are a striking design feature.

These handles also work to close up the drawstring pouch, so when it’s filled with items it creates a cute, rotund shape.

▼ You’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t run off into the forest with your belongings inside it.

▼ Small Totoro Outing Reel Mascot (2,200 yen)

Rounding out the cute bag collection, and the cute character trio, is the Small Totoro, who differs from the others by having no mouth, whiskers or nose.

▼ In this collection, it also differs by not being a bag or pouch, instead stepping in as a handy keychain.

The retractable reel makes this a practical item for attaching small items like keys…

▼ …and you can also attach it to the Large Totoro bag for extra cuteness.

▼ The family is complete!

If you’d like to add even more charm to your bag, you can attach another Totoro, this time in the form of a Netsuke strap. While the bags above have been restocked at the chain, the strap is a new addition to the lineup.

▼ The My Neighbour Totoro Kororin Netsuke Strap (Large Totoro & Small Totoro) – 1,540 yen

Netsuke have centuries of history behind them, as they started out as small, carved items to attach personal items like tobacco pouches and medicine boxes to kimono sashes during the Edo period (1603–1867).

The Totoro netsuke blends modern anime with Japanese tradition, and it comes in two new varieties.

▼ Light blue…

▼…and Pink.

While the blue version can be purchased now, Donguri Kyowakoku says the pink version will be available soon, from mid-to-late October.

All items can be purchased at Donguri Kyowakoku stores and in Japan (links below) while stocks last.

Source: Donguri Kyowakoku
Top image: Donguri Kyowakoku
Insert images: Donguri Kyowakoku (1, 2, 3, 4)
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A new visual guide for the ninja enthusiast in your life sheds light on the myth and fact behind Japan’s historical agents of infiltration.

Whether you grew up watching historical Japanese dramas or dreamed of attending Konoha Ninja Academy in Naruto, ninja have long captured the imagination of people from around the world. Japan has capitalized on this collective interest in recent years by offering everything from a Batman Ninja stage show to an actual ninja certification exam.

On October 15, Tokyo-based publisher of educational guides Natsume-sha is set to release Ninja: An Illustrated Guide to Japan’s Secret Agents. The compact A6-sized, 160-page book is being billed as an excellent gift for Japanese people to bring as a gift when traveling abroad due to its fully bilingual nature and helpful illustrations. What also sets this volume apart from other guides is that its creation was closely supervised by Yuji Yamada, a professor at Mie University who holds leadership roles in the Mie University International Ninja Research Center and International Ninja Research Association.

▼ We previously featured Yamada a few years ago at the onset of the Japan Ninja Council’s crowdfunding efforts for the Nindo online ninja academy.

The new book focuses on the contrast behind real historical ninja vs. the ones in the public consciousness. All text is presented in an easy-to-follow format with bilingual illustrations and accompanying illustrations.

It’s also broken into six main parts covering a wide range of topics such as the ninja’s role in intelligence gathering and infiltration, weapons, tools, ninjutsu techniques, and even historically accurate lifestyle depictions.

For instance, did you ever wonder what the deal was with those hand seals used by Naruto characters? It turns out that there’s actually a real-life connection to esoteric Buddhism.

Ninja: An Illustrated Guide to Japan’s Secret Agents releases in Japanese bookstores and on Amazon Japan on the 15th. We’ll certainly be snatching up a copy faster than the blink of an eye while we wait for any news regarding the unconfirmed reopening of Japan’s Ise Ninja Park in Mie.

Source, images: PR Times
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Instead of praying to the binbogami, you’re supposed to fight him off.

When visiting a shrine in Japan, the standard custom is to put a coin in the offering box, bow twice, clap your hand twice, say a quick, silent prayer, and then bow once more.

So we were very surprised when we discovered a shrine in Nagano Prefecture where instead of bowing and clapping, you’re supposed to strike and kick the statue of its god instead.

The shrine, located in the town of Chino, can’t be seen from the street. Instead, you’ll need to look for Hakko Park (“Fermentation Park”), a sort of local products and museum managed by miso maker Marui Ito Shoten.

Inside the facility you can see the giant wooden barrels used for the traditional miso-making process. They are impressive-looking, but the real sight to see is at the back of the building, where you’ll find signs directing you towards the passageway to Binbogami Shrine.

▼ Binbogami Shrine would usually be written in Japanese as 貧乏神神社, but since the language can also be read from right to left, the signs here render it as 社神神乏貧.

Even on a sunny afternoon, the shrine is shadowy, making it feel like you’ve wandered into a mysterious parallel world.

But where things get really strange is the shrine’s statue of a binbogami, or “god of poverty.”

An one-horned creature with a gaunt physique and eyes shaped like gold coins, binbogami have appeared in Japanese legends and folklore since the 13th century. They’re said to be particularly fond of the smell of miso, using their tattered fans to waft the aroma of the staple food towards themselves to better savor the scent.

Of course, no one wants a god of poverty hanging around, especially since they’re said to not only trigger financial losses, but general unhappiness and lack of success. One way of getting rid of binbogami is supposed to be to prepare a tray of baked miso, carry it through your home, and then toss it into a river, so that the spirit will follow it into the waterway and drift away from your dwelling.

But at Binbogami Shrine, they have a different, more visceral method. First you put a 100-yen coin in the collection pot…

…then you pick up a “poverty stick”…

…and then you give the god of poverty three sturdy whacks!

No more than three, though. After that, you have to set the stick down…because it’s time to kick the god three times too!

This process is described on the signs posted inside the shrine, which is a satellite branch of Nagano’s Suwa Shrine, which itself traces its history back to the 7th century. The signs also explain the final part of the ritual to drive away the god of poverty, which is to throw beans at the statue, giving it some overlap with the annual Setsubun bean-throwing festival in which launched legumes are said to repeal demons and misfortune. For extra effectiveness, calling out something like “Binbogami, begone!” or “Damn you!” during your toss is recommended.

Thankfully, Binbogami Shrine keeps a tray of beans ready…

…so we pelted the god of poverty with a small handful of them.

Pasted to the walls of the enclave that surrounds the binbogami are papers emblazoned with undesirables such as “my jerk boss,” “drunken middle-aged guys,” and “body fat,” as well as desired outcomes such as “Sickness, be gone!” and “Win the lottery.”

That mixture might seem a little contradictory, but the general sense is that by hitting, kicking, and throwing beans at the god of poverty, you’ll get him to leave you alone for a while so that bad things will stop happening to you, leaving more space for good fortune in your life instead.

The shrine has a way to help call more good luck into you life too, in the form of an otafuku mask, also called an okame mask.

Since these are generally a symbol of happiness and good fortune, there’s no more hitting or kicking to be done, and instead you’re supposed to gently rub or pat the mask.

We’ve gone to a lot of shrines in our travels across Japan, but Binbogami Shrine stands out as a completely unique experience. If you’re headed there, though, there’s an important warning to keep in mind: While striking and kicking the statue is encouraged, the shrine also cautions to not hit the binbogami too hard.

On a secular level, this helps keep the statue in good repair for the next visitors, but the shrine also says that too much ferocity directed at the statue will bounce back on you and actually increase your bad luck, so be careful not to overdo it.

Location information
Binbogami Shrine / 貧乏神神社
Located within Haako Park / 発酵パーク
Address: Nagano-ken, Chino-shi, Miyagawa 4529
長野県茅野市宮川4529
Open 9 a.m.-7 p.m.
Website

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