Vending machines also won't take the ¥1, ¥5, or ¥10 coins...
Luckily the conbini shops have machines that do take them and allow you to dump a whole handful of change in at once and will give change back in the minimal configuration. So my recommendation in Japan is when you buy something at the conbini, dump all of your loose change into the machine, then pay the rest with a ¥1,000 notes and you will get the minimal number of coins back.
Oh, and you can throw the ¥5 coins into the local shrine for good luck. :-D
My personal Japan Trip Lifehack was to dump all the coins into the nearest transit card charge machine. The PASMO machines are the most flexible, there's a button for "charge in 10 yen increments", and the only thing those don't take are 1 and 5 yen coins. Suica and Hayakaken[0] machines were a bit pickier, you had to have at least 100 yen of change. Whatever the heck they used in Osaka was the pickiest - it was either 500 yen increments or it didn't take small coins, I don't remember which, but I remember having to hold all my change until I got back to Tokyo.
My personal Japan Trip Lifehack is to pay for all the small awkwardly numbered purchases (kombinis, supermarkets, fast food etc) with your Suica/Pasmo. This eliminates virtually all Y1/5 coins, since "proper" restaurants, transport, attractions etc universally round up their prices to the nearest 10 or even 100 yen.
I do regret Japan rolling back their previous requirement to have all prices tax-included, since now many budget places do the US thing of advertising nice round numbers but adding the tax on top.
They increased consumption tax but made it conditional in some way I don't understand, so that taking items out of a convenience store was taxed more than eating inside it. So there wasn't a single tax inclusive price anymore.
Never had too many issues with coins in Japan (I did leave before the new coins though), and I had a tendency to try to spend my coins so never really accumulated enough that they were becoming a pain.
I ran into this issue with two different vending machines this past weekend with a particular ¥500 coin. I thought it was because the coin was pretty tarnished in one spot - but I just checked and sure enough it is one of the new coins.
Apparently this has been an issue for a while now, and fairly common, but this is the first time that I can recall running into it.
In 1979 the US issued a new $1 coin. Seemingly overnight, a black-and-silver sticker reading "This machine will not accept the new dollar coin" appeared on every single Coke machine in the country.
I feel like at least the 500 yen coin update is well timed with the cashless boom, and more and more vending machines are accepting touch payments. Though I feel like this sort of change is not going to really bubble down much to vending machines out in the sticks.
Though as a whole the cost of handling cash is being pushed to users more and more. Coin deposits cost money now, train tickets cost a bit more...
It looks like they deliberately broke backward compatibility with existing infrastructure around 500-yen coins, perhaps so that they can better prevent the Korean 500-won hack.
Any machine that can handle the new 500-yen coin has probably been calibrated with lower tolerances to accept each version of the Japanese coin, but not the similarly-sized Korean coin with 1/10 the value. You can't just patch machines to accept a range of weights, because that would defeat one of the main purposes of introducing the new coin.
Meanwhile, you can still use the Korean 100-won coin to unlock any U.S. or Canadian shopping cart that takes a quarter. I don't know why South Korea ended up with coin sizes that are almost exactly the same as heavily-used coins in two of their closest economic partners, but they're probably stuck in the same situation as the Japanese: if they change their coins, they'll need to update a lot of existing machines.
> I don't know why South Korea ended up with coin sizes that are almost exactly the same as heavily-used coins in two of their closest economic partners
Easy to find coin mechanisms, and it increases the value of their currency, since the coins are useful outside the economy. ;)
The "new" coin photo in the article are the commemorative coins for the new emperor. While they are technically legal and valid coins, they are not for everyday use. The new coins which have been issued from R3 are different ones, and looks like the rest of the article is talking about them.
I'm not sure which coin the author's brother used. AFAICT, I have no problem using the new (ordinary) 500 yen coins.
Cash is still king in Japan. I only know of 1 restaurant that is cashless in my town, and you're much more likely to find somewhere that is cash only.
Even though cash is king, there are some real oddities. The new 500 yen coin that is hard to use is in machines is one. The other being the 2000 yen note. The normal denominations are 1000, 5000, 10,000. 2000 yen notes are very rare. For some reason, they seem to hand them out almost exclusively to tourists as they enter the country. Imagine if you gave Scottish five pound notes to everyone coming into the UK in Dover?
I'm not sure where you live, but cash is certainly no longer king in Tokyo. It's still alive and there are plenty of people that prefer it, but it's used for far less than half the transactions I see everyday. And I'll go months forgetting to refill the just-in-case cash in my wallet and never run into a situation where I would have needed it.
Yeah, I’ll second your comment. Just went back to visit friends for a few weeks and was up down down the country from Tokyo to Naha, almost never needed cash.
10 years ago was a different story, maybe. Nowadays Japan’s pretty digital when it comes to money.
Chase gave me a stack of ¥2000 notes when I pre-obtained some cash in the States before a trip. That caused some confusion when I got there and tried to buy a suica card. And I didn't even realize what was going on until a local coworker was surprised at me having them.
* They ended up with vaults full of them because domestic banks didn't want them. I understand this was the fate of a fair amount of US 50-cent and $1 coins: they migrated to 'dollarized' economies like Ecuador.
* They figure they're being helpful-- the $20 note is the most common in US cash commerce, and the $50 is very uncommon, so they figured giving people a note worth about $20 is convenient.
When I've ordered notes from the bank, they usually loaded up with the largest notes (lots of CAD100 or GBP50 notes) with just 100 or 200 units divided into smaller notes.
When I lived in Japan I would always make sure to have a few of the old 500 yen coins when I would head out into the countryside on bike trips. They invariably didn't take the new coin and getting stuck in the middle of nowhere with money and a machine that wouldn't take it sucked. And yes there really where vending machines at places that were super duper remote.
Assuming they haven't added any new security features, the manufacturer of the coin acceptor or recycler should be able to issue a firmware update that adds the new coin to the validator's database.
If you want to stick another corporation between all your payments then that is entirely up to you. I don't think it's particularly wise to hope for cash to die out.
An example of a side effects of cashless is that 3%-6% of profit from market stalls at a fair go to credit card companies and payment intermediaries. Bit weird that Visa and Square get a cut of me purchasing some local farmers honey directly from the farmer. But they have to use them else they'd miss out on sales.
This doesn't apply to Japan, anyone doing cashless there accepts 200000000 different types of payments and there's too much competition to sustain that level of fees.
EU regulates interchange fees. We can make an active choice to offer this stuff at cost (especially with stuff like PINs reducing fraud)
We can decide to just not allow the cut to be so high. It's possible to set a limit. Visa makes a bunch of money because they don't need 3% to cover infra + fraud.
Why is it a bit weird? You're compensating them for the service they're providing. Do you think the plastic card you carry around has magical payment properties?
The farmers market vendors accept payments because consumers expect it, and consumers expect it because it's a great service.
It's weird because it means they have their fingers in the pockets of even tiny local interactions like that. Vendors love having easy payments sure, but I've yet to meet a vendor happy about losing 3%+ of their margins because consumers expect it.
While I absolutely love the convenience of tap and pay systems, cash competes in many ways and we should not let the system slip away. The most obvious and egregious manifestation of this in my country is that they are not introducing new denominations. I used to be able to get coffe and breakfast with coins, now I need multiple notes.
They already introduced new designs of the old denominations that required cash machines to be updated for, so it’s doable.
I’m not sure that’s true. In Australia where we adopted tap payments very quickly and thoroughly I still find readers (especially public transport) that struggle with Apple Pay, while plastic works just fine.
Sure that ApplePay will work, unless Apple disagrees with your political views and deplatforms you, or any of the governments they answer to order them to do so.
Five eyes governments like having the power to shut the finances of dissidents (see Canada seizing trucker bank accounts, FBI-partnered NGOs getting Trump supporters deplatformed from financial services). Any digital currencies created by governments will still have this same mode of failure by design.
Luckily the conbini shops have machines that do take them and allow you to dump a whole handful of change in at once and will give change back in the minimal configuration. So my recommendation in Japan is when you buy something at the conbini, dump all of your loose change into the machine, then pay the rest with a ¥1,000 notes and you will get the minimal number of coins back.
Oh, and you can throw the ¥5 coins into the local shrine for good luck. :-D