Suica

Sales of Japan’s most convenient train ticket/shopping payment cards suspended indefinitely

Suica and Pasmo have become an ubiquitous part of life and travel in Japan, but you can’t get a new card for either.

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New unmanned hotel opens in Japan that requires check in and check out by Suica train card only

It’s just like boarding the train, except you’ll be sleeping here.

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What to do if your phone battery dies when using a mobile transit pass on a Japanese train

Avoid getting stuck inside the train station forever with these handy solutions.

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Love your Suica card? Now you can eat it up, with Suica penguin chocolates

Charge your stomach with some candy after you charge your Suica card.

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Anger online as tweeting tech guru Takeshi Natsuno slams Sendai for rejecting IC card

You may have heard the name Takeshi Natsuno before. A Keio University professor, former Senior Vice President at NTT Docomo, Sega Sammy big-wig, and creator of i-mode, he is by all accounts an intelligent, not to mention extremely tech-savvy, dude. So you can imagine the surprise the good residents of the city of Sendai felt when he took to his Twitter account earlier this week to publicly disparage their home town as being “too lame for words”.

Just what prompted this sudden outpouring of ire? Well, it seems Mr Natsuno felt rather short-changed when he attempted to use his prepaid Suica IC Card to ride the Sendai subway. Suica is a Tokyo-based IC card system. Sendai is not in Tokyo. You can probably see where this is going.

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Suica Penguin now a cake — See his face transform as you eat!

You may recall we reported a while ago on JR East’s Suica penguin mascot character being turned into a totally yummy-licious looking cream-filled bread. Now, Suica Penguin, as the mascot is known, has become a beautiful cake that’s attracted a fair bit of attention on the Japanese Internet recently. Of course, we couldn’t ignore such buzz involving a confection that’s bound to look adorable as well as taste delectably sweet, so we sent one of our reporters off on a mission to try the penguin cake everyone seemed to be talking about and provide our readers with a first-hand account. So, was the cake as cute and tasty as we expected?

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The adorable Suica penguin bread —  Too cute to eat but too good not to

If you’ve ever used public transport in Japan, you may have seen the Suica card, the smart card you can use to pay the fare on Japanese transport systems, named after the onomatopoeic phrase “sui-sui“, meaning to swim or glide smoothly. You may even have noticed that they come adorned with an adorable mascot penguin character, known simply as the “Suica Penguin“. But did you know that the Suica Penguin has now been transformed into a form of delicious confection?

Apparently, the Suica Penguin is irresistibly cute in edible form as well, and the penguin bread is selling like crazy! Naturally, we had to get our hands on a couple and see for ourselves what made it so special.

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