Eight railway companies in Japan’s eastern Kanto region have announced that they will stop using tickets with magnetic strips and replace them with tickets using QR codes.
Many people now use prepaid IC cards or smartphone apps which can be scanned at the ticket gates. However, paper tickets with magnetic strips are still sold at railway stations and these need to be inserted into the ticket gates before popping out on the other side of the gate.
An image from JR East showing the old magnetic and new QR code ticket systems
The machinery inside these ticket gates is rather complicated and so tickets often get stuck on their way through.
With the new QR code ticket system people will simply scan their tickets at the ticket gate instead. The size of the tickets will not be changed.
The aim of the change is to reduce the cost of maintaining ticket gates and make it easier to recycle used tickets. Because they include metal, tickets with magnetic strips require special processing when they are recycled, but the new tickets can simply be treated as normal paper waste.
The eight companies that will introduce the new tickets are JR East, Keisei Electric Railway, Keikyu Corporation, Shin-Keisei Electric Railway, Seibu Railway, Tokyo Monorail, Tobu Railway, and Hokuso Railway.
The railway companies will begin their transition to the new tickets in the spring of 2027.
Article by Michael Lambe. Image courtesy of JR East. All rights reserved.
