Hundreds of Uses : Fun, Profit in the Cards for Japanese
Pick a card, any card. Chances are, you’ll find it here.
Business cards, radio cards, calculator cards. Cards for phoning home and riding home, cards for toning up and waking up, cards for getting in and going out.
Cards to spend, cards to save. Plain cards and fancy ones. Cards with magnetic strips, cards with “smart” chips.
Japan has card fever.
Every business imaginable, it seems, has caught it. Bars, beauty parlors and banks; fitness clubs and nightclubs, high-tech and low-tech businesses. They’re all making, giving away or selling the cards.
Newest Obsession
And the Japanese are scooping up the cards in huge numbers, making an obsession of choosing and using them. Though they’re not credit cards or even the new debit cards, some of them have become status symbols, carrying the kind of cachet that, say, a Platinum American Express card might bring in the United States.
Some of them, because of the unique designs or photos imprinted on them, have become collector’s items, spurring a side market for traders and resellers and selling for hundreds of times face value.
In ever-trendy Japan, where fads race through the countryside like bullet trains, this card fever might soon fade away as another fad emerges. It might, that is, were it not that the cards appeal to some more subtle characteristics of Japanese culture, say Japanese who use them.
Small and Practical
“I love my cards,” said a public relations executive for Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, showing a wallet full of cards--and not just those sold by his company, which are the hottest cards on the market these days.
To begin with, the cards are small, neat and practical--guarantees of an immediate hit in Japan, where space is cramped, simplicity honored and efficiency prized.
Ever striving to make things more compact, Japan’s large consumer electronics companies are adding to the plethora of cards. The ubiquitous calculator is now as thin as a plastic credit card and neatly slips into a wallet or purse pocket. So do tiny radios that pick up signals from AM and FM stations and even audio broadcasts of television programs.
There are cards that simply tell the time, and more sophisticated ones that buzz out an alarm or even display the time in New Delhi, Moscow and Los Angeles.
Many of the most popular cards, such as those used for making calls and riding trains, cut down on money transactions. This appeals to the Japanese, who disdain handling money, especially coins.
Perhaps a more important ingredient of the cards’ success, however, is that they show “belonging” to a group, the sharing of an ideology or interest. It may seem odd to Americans, who profess to hate crowds even as they join them, but the Japanese actually choose to spend free time as part of a group. Despite the daily rigors of getting to and from work and shopping in throngs, Japanese take vacations and sightsee together in an amazing display of group harmony.
“Being part of a group makes us feel more comfortable,” said Kunio Kadowaki, who works as a guide in the old capital city of Kyoto and often arranges and leads large tour groups for Japanese sightseers.
But while reflecting this fondness for belonging, the cards also point to an emerging sense of individualism among the Japanese.
The grandfather of the card phenomenon in Japan is the business card. As surely as two business people in Japan will bow--or shake hands, if a Westerner is present--upon meeting, they will exchange business cards in a ritual known as meiji.
But the business card is being outshone by a new breed of cards, usually called PIs, or personal identity cards. With PIs, high-school and even junior-high students have their own form of meiji, with a touch of youthful flair.
The PIs that students have specially printed often use colorful paper and fancy scripts shunned by their more conservative elders. While they show that the student attends a particular school or belongs to a certain group, because they are individually selected and designed they also express the user’s personality.
For such cards, the students can pay four times the going rate of about $7 a hundred for the staid white business versions. The students have proven to be a lucrative new clientele for stationery shops that formerly considered cards a side business.
Personal Service Offered
Some of these shops, especially in Tokyo districts like Roppongi that cater to a youthful crowd, have gone fully over to the student market. A few are exclusively devoted to young women customers, offering a pleasant setting, a cup of tea and patient advice as the customers carefully select designs from specially created books showing various styles and types of paper.
A more sophisticated form of identity cards are those issued by clubs and businesses to their members and customers. Often these are “smart” cards, which use a tiny computer chip to store specific information about the cardholder. The card is almost a portable, personalized mini-database; when the card is used, it lets the issuing company or organization tap into the information about its customer.
Masahiro Miki, a public relations executive for Texas Instruments Japan, belongs to a health club that issues smart cards to its members. In this case, the card’s computer chip contains information about Miki, his membership status and the fitness program he follows.
Beauty parlor smart cards may tell the operator the customer’s preference in hair style or manicure; retailers use the card not to credit purchases but to identify the customers’ sizes and favorite fashions and colors.
Members-only bars have found a discreet way of using smart cards to maintain good customer relations. Not only do the cards identify the patron’s favorite drink, but, one card carrier admitted with only slight embarrassment, “This card reminds them, in case they forget, which of the hostesses is my favorite.”
Club and retail cards may imitate the look of credit cards, but usually are not. Japan is a nation of savers, not debtors, and credit spending is still very much a foreign concept.
Many of Japan’s giant department stores based in Tokyo have stores throughout the country. But retailing is still mostly a regional business in Japan, and a credit card issued in Tokyo might not be accepted at a sister store in Hiroshima. Plus, the thousands of independent shops and restaurants that make up the great underbelly of the Japanese service economy are proving difficult territory for the giant Western-based credit agencies.
“We’d much rather pay cash here, and besides, my favorite restaurants wouldn’t take these cards,” said an executive of one of Japan’s leading high-technology companies, who carries his MasterCard and Visa for use during frequent business trips to the United States.
But if the choice is between coins and a card, the card wins, hands down.
A taxicab passenger would much rather take an extra minute to sign a coupon in payment for the ride than fish in his pockets for the appropriate coins. And that suits the cab drivers--many of whom carry extra pairs of the sparkling white cotton gloves they wear in part to avoid touching coins.
This disdain for handling coins has helped gain acceptance for the kinds of cards issued by Nippon Telegraph & Telephone and Japan Railways. Their cards are prepaid chits, no bigger or thicker than a business card, which can be purchased in various denominations for use in public pay telephones or for train rides.
These cards work rather like subway tickets. To make a call at a public pay telephone, the card user inserts the magnetized card, and as time is used up, another 10 yen is subtracted from the value of the card. At the end of the conversation, the card is returned to the caller, with holes punched to show how many 10-yen units have been used.
The cards are mostly appreciated for the convenience. A 10-yen coin (about 7 cents U.S.) buys very little time. Unless the pay phone user keeps feeding in 10-yen coins, the phone will automatically shut off as the time expires.
“You have to keep pumping those coins in, and if you run out, you’re cut off. It’s very frustrating. That’s why the cards are so great,” said Sheridan Tatsuno, an analyst with Dataquest in San Jose who speaks Japanese and feels more comfortable using the public phones on his travels there than do most foreign visitors. “I used to get cut off all the time. I hated that.”
Once used, the card can be thrown away. That is, if it’s used in the first place.
As collector’s items, the telephone cards are more valuable if they have no holes punched in them. And in the card craze, telephone cards are leading the pack.
Telephone cards are nothing new in the world, but with the help of the collector’s market, and a marketing push from NTT, their popularity in Japan has soared during the past year.
More than 200 million of the cards have been sold between December, 1982, when NTT first began making them available, and last December. But fully half of those sales, according to an NTT spokesman, came in the second half of 1986.
Sport Special Designs
Unlike the plain telephone cards used in some European countries, NTT’s cards sport special designs--often photographs of celebrities or national historical sites.
The regional NTT offices issue cards featuring some local highlight--such as a noted shrine or the cool shimmering pools of the northern regions. Cards are also issued for special occasions. Some commemorated the May, 1986, Tokyo economic summit. For Mother’s Day this year, a delicate spray of carnations decorated a card. One issued for the 400th anniversary of the Osaka Castle bore an 80,000-yen price (nearly $600) at a department store selling a wide array of unused phone and railway cards.
Additionally, NTT allows outside companies to design their own cards, which they can have produced in mass quantities for discount prices. The companies then use them for special promotional or marketing events, or simply as advertising gimmicks.
When Texas Instruments Japan won the Deming prize for industrial quality in 1985, it had a special telephone card made up to show its prestigious Deming gold medal and gave the cards free to its customers. Japan’s largest advertising and market research firm, Tokyo-based Dentsu, gives away the cards as tokens of thanks to people who participate in market research surveys. Many companies have begun allowing their top executives to use the telephone cards as auxiliary business cards.
Use of the cards as mini-billboards has fueled the thriving collector’s market. Companies have found that by featuring the portrait of a celebrity, their ads become hot commodities. In addition to temples, gardens, company logos and mottoes, the faces of baseball players, singers and actresses now smile on hundreds of cards.
On a recent Friday night shopping trip to an Osaka department store, Kazumi Uetani, a young, well-educated engineer at a big electronics company, hunched over a counter, scanning the array of colorful cards under the glass and quickly spotting one he wanted.
It showed an actress, Asami Kobayashi, demurely posed and smiling on a card issued by Seiko as an advertisement. For that card, Uetani paid 2,200 yen, about $16--and more than four times face value. “But she’s my favorite,” he said shyly.
Uetani is an admitted latecomer to the telephone card craze. His collection, accumulated in a three-month period, boasts only about 50 of the cards--from more than 50,000 varieties available.
Though he added three more on this visit to the Printemps store, he has yet to shell out really big yen for a card.
Quick Appreciation
Yuki Saito, a wisp of a singer adored by teens in Japan, is the face on one of the most expensive telephone cards. One of her poses for Toho Music, her recording company, was released on a 500-yen card that recently sold for 300,000 yen--or about $2,100.
Department stores have been quick to capitalize on the card boom, offering a place to shop for the cards and selling specially designed albums that collectors buy to store their cards in pristine condition.
A couple of enterprising companies have begun selling machines that will print personal designs on blanks obtained from NTT. At a special section of the giant Matsuya department store in Tokyo’s Ginza district, you can stop by the booth and have your own face or artwork printed onto telephone cards to pass out to your friends.
Despite all the collecting, many cards still find their way into the slots of NTT’s public telephones. NTT has been hard-pressed, in fact, to keep up with the surge in popularity of the cards and is stepping up its efforts to replace coin-only pay phones with newer models that accept the prepaid chits.
“I personally never carry 10-yen coins any more,” said one Tokyo businessman, fanning out a handful of the brightly colored telephone cards. “I just wish I didn’t have to carry these 100-yen coins for the vending machines.”
