After an 11-hour international flight, I wasn’t expecting catching a train in Japan to be the hardest part of the trip.
Anyone who’s ever been to London will know about the Oyster card. All over Japan, there are similar travelcards for each major city and region. Most of them have cute names with puns about travel, like Osaka’s ICOCA which sounds like ‘let’s go’. In 2013, ten of the main types became interchangeable, so you could get your manaca card in Nagoya and use it in Fukuoka instead of their nimoca card.
I have a Pasmo card from my previous visits to Tokyo. (‘mo’ means ‘as well’. Train mo, bus mo, Pasmo. Pass mo, get it? Ah, these things take too long to explain…)
I didn’t bother getting the Osaka ICOCA or PiTaPa, as it’s apparently fine to use Pasmo across all of Kansai.
Well, it would be if they weren’t region locked.
Region locked! A fate that I thought could only befall video games and DVDs. Japanese train tickets are not my PAL.
Here’s where it gets technical. Japan Rail, the main national train company in Japan, operates separate eastern and western divisions. They’re both JR, but not the same thing. Like twins who stopped speaking to each other a few years back.
Cards from Tokyo are locked for use solely on JR East trains. You’ll notice that the website I linked above doesn’t mention that very important fact. If we had just one rail operator, this would be like travelling direct from London to Manchester and finding your ticket became unexpectedly invalid at Crewe.
In my case, this was travelling directly from the airport to my destination and finding my card was never valid in the first place.
Not only was my Pasmo locked to JR East, I wasn’t at a JR station at the time. Japan’s still got private railways. There’s also Nankai, Kintetsu, Hankyu and Hanshin around here. In a Nankai ticket office, nobody can hear you screaming that the Pasmo website says it should work.
The validity can be transferred from east to west, but this has to be done manually. At first, the man at Nankai pointed me back out of the station to the nearest JR office. The look on my face must’ve been ‘LOL NO’ because he eventually fixed it himself.
I am now the proud owner of a Kansai-friendly Pasmo. I imagine it’s quite rare. I’ll try and take it onto an episode of Antiques Roadshow when I get home.
