From Meiwaku to Tokushita! Lessons for Digital Money Design from Japan Scott D
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From meiwaku to tokushita! Lessons for digital money design from Japan Scott D. Mainwaring and Wendy March Bill Maurer People and Practices Research Group, Intel Research Anthropology Department, UC Irvine 20270 NW Amberglen Ct., MS AG1-110 3275 Social Sciences Plaza B, MC 5100 Beaverton, OR 97006 USA Irvine, CA 92697 {scott.mainwaring,wendy.march}@intel.com [email protected] ABSTRACT established footholds in places like college campuses, Based on ethnographically-inspired research in Japan, we Starbucks, and gift card issuing retail chains. report on people’s experiences using digital money payment systems that use Sony’s FeliCa near-field Near-field communication (NFC) and security technologies communication smartcard technology. As an example of enable incorporation of both kinds of cards into mobile ubiquitous computing in the here and now, the adoption of devices, allowing one to pay with a wave or touch of ones’ digital money is found to be messy and contingent, shot e-wallet. These begin to open a new space for HCI research through with cultural and social factors that do not hinder and design around the experience, use, and aesthetics of this adoption but rather constitute its specific character. digital money. Adoption is strongly tied to Japanese conceptions of the Japan is often held up as a digital money success story, a aesthetic and moral virtue of smooth flow and avoidance of place where the cashless future is arriving first. Next to commotion, as well as the excitement at winning something Hong Kong, Japan has seen the widest adoption of stored- for nothing. Implications for design of mobile payment value digital payment for everyday transactions. Many systems stress the need to produce open-ended platforms factors, including regulatory, technical, and infrastructural, that can serve as the vehicle for multiple meanings and may underlie this success. For this paper, we present experiences without foreclosing such possibilities in the findings from a short ethnographically-inspired study to name of efficiency. focus attention on the interaction- and culture-based factors promoting, and inhibiting, digital money’s relative success Author Keywords in Japan, and their broader implications for HCI design. Digital money, e-cash, e-wallets, mobile payment, ethnography, Japan, ubiquitous computing. Rather than attempt to evacuate the social and cultural habits and attachments that “irrationally” hinder the ACM Classification Keywords universal adoption and applicability of advanced payment K4.4. Computers and society: Electronic commerce. technologies, our research suggests that, on the contrary, social and cultural factors not only matter, but may make or INTRODUCTION break an m-payment or e-cash system. Furthermore, it is Cash is increasingly seen as a species threatened, if not often people’s ability to activate, modify, dream with, or endangered, by the purported efficiency and convenience of even love the technology that makes it successful. digital technologies [3, 8]. Credential cards (credit, charge, or debit are used to authorize the transfer of money from PRIOR WORK account to merchant and have proven widely popular, Sociologists and anthropologists of money have drawn displacing cash payments particularly for larger purchases. attention to the social inflection and earmarking of cash [7, And seeking to displace cash from even small purchases, 11]: hardly an anonymizing or homogenizing medium, stored-value cards which transfer “e-cash” from the card money in this view works best when it works toward itself directly (or ostensibly directly) to the merchant have people’s varied ends, which may have more to do with relationships, politics, or faith than low transaction costs, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for efficiency, or rationality. personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies Research in ubiquitous computing has begun to take bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, seriously the social nature of future payment systems. For or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior example, Kindberg et al. [4] found participants in theatrical specific permission and/or a fee. simulations of different digital payment mechanisms as CHI 2008, April 5–10, 2008, Florence, Italy. Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-011-1/08/04…$5.00. much or more attuned to social implications and norms (“do other patrons know I’ve paid?”) than to rational assessments of technical security and trust. 1 Various market-research studies have looked at factors Brand Use Accepted in influencing m-commerce adoption, including its relative success in Japan than elsewhere [9]: better mobile UI Transit Tokyo rail, subway, bus lines; Suica, design, more favorable regulations, more desirable and & nearby shops and vending PASMO competitive services. Some view Japan as a special case E-cash machines; some taxis. driven by cultural idiosyncrasies, a nation of early adopter otaku (“geeks”) from which little can be generalized. National convenience store E-cash chains; some department stores, Our approach is not one of comparative market research or Edy only restaurants, karaoke clubs; business analysis, but one inspired by the ethnographer’s vending machines, taxis. goal of taking a culture in its own terms, challenging iD Credit preconceptions, and seeking first-hand understanding of (Similar to Edy.) what it looks and feels like from within. It is aligned with DCMX charges that of Bell and Dourish [1] and Mainwaring et al. [5, 6] who assert that pervasive technology is already a (socially Table 1. Selected FeliCa-based payment systems in Japan. constructed) fact of life in many contexts already, and that Most of our interviewees carried cash, at least one form of tech-centered visions like “ubiquitous computing” or the transit card (Suica or PASMO), and at least one credit card. “cashless society” can be usefully de-familiarized through Added to this were store cards for collecting points, and immersion in these incomplete, messy, i.e., real places. airline cards for collecting miles; these were how “stand alone” e-cash like Edy found their way into the wallet, STUDYING FELICA E-MONEY embedded within point cards (in Edy’s case, ANA [All In Summer 2007 we conducted research in greater Tokyo Nippon Airlines] cards). and the island prefecture of Okinawa on the use of FeliCa- based e-money. We used a combination of arranged and During our interviews we asked participants to empty their impromptu interviews, observation, and, when possible, wallets and talk about when and how they used the different participation (e.g., we “charged” smartcards with 3000 JPY payment systems. As they described what they would buy [25 USD] to give as participant gifts). In addition to e- with cash versus a credit card or how they differentiated money end-users, we spoke with retailers who had adopted between e-cash and cash, two strong and surprising themes e-money POS equipment, people marketing the e-money emerged: meiwaku and tokushita. system, and people researching e-money. AVOIDING MEIWAKU FeliCa is a passive NFC chip developed by Sony for use in Avoiding commotion in Japan is a far more broad and deep smartcards and modified by FeliCa Networks, a joint concern than just an institutional imperative for efficiency. venture of Sony and NTT DoCoMo, for incorporation into At the personal, cultural level, avoiding meiwaku handsets. Sony has shipped over 160 mil. since its debut in (annoyance, disorder, causing a commotion) is understood 1996, and FeliCa Networks an additional 40 mil. since its as both a practical and aesthetic/moral imperative, one of inception in 2004. Whether in a stand-alone smartcard or the first things children are taught.[2] One does not integrated into an osaifu keitai (“wallet mobile phone”), jaywalk; one does not talk on the phone on the train; one each FeliCa device can support up to eight different certainly does not pay with a credit card, certainly not for a applications, such as stores of e-value or identity small transaction, if it can be avoided. “I feel as though I’m credentials, and realize eight parallel secure transactions causing trouble for store clerks when I pay by credit card,” within 100 ms. of coming within range (a few cm.) of a one participant confessed; another added “Making people FeliCa reader. A number of separate e-money systems are wait is un-cool. People behind you in queue and clerk built upon FeliCa, the most prominent brands in our data might think, ‘time wasting jerk!’.” In fact, one ought to are listed in Table 1. avoid credit cards in the first place, as they expose one to a risk of indebtedness, an explosion of shameful meiwaku. FeliCa-based cash has its origins in the mundane, but th daunting, institutional practicalities of moving millions of (This is one factor behind that statistic that less than 1/10 of consumer spending in Japan is by credit card, compared commuters efficiently through fare-collection gates in th megacity transit systems. Suica, a play on the to nearly 1/4 in the U.S. [10]) onomatopoeia sui-sui (“flowing quick and smooth”), was In many ways, from the consumer perspective, the pre-paid developed by JR East, a major railway serving the Tokyo touch-and-go cash card should be a pro-social, face-saving area, as a more efficient evolution of its magnetic-striped elixir. Not only need nothing be signed, there is no paper tickets. All of our participants in greater Tokyo had fumbling for change, no interrupting the flow. No incurring used a Suica card, or the roughly equivalent PASMO card; of debt. Payment is automatically and precisely settled these are taken-for-granted aspects of commuters’ daily down to the last yen, the possible messiness of human error lives.