Since April 1999 NTT is issuing new telephonecards with a chip. The cards are a little bit thicker than the Tamura magnetic cards, but thinner than the european chip cards. The weight of one card is 2.8 g compared to 2 g for a Tamura card. The cards come in 105 units for 1000 yen and are valid for more than 5 years. In the case of the card I bought in April 1999 at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, the expiry date is September 2004. For expired cards replacement is possible within 5 years from the expiry date, but a handling fee is required. The front shows a picture, the backside has a 13 digit alphanumerical individual number and the expiry date. It seems that the image on the front side is not encoded in the individual card number, thus classification of the cards will be difficult. Below the individual card number is a small number in a circle. This may be the issue number. One telephone number can be stored on the card.
Before use, the lower right corner of the card must be snapped off.
Then the card is placed on a holder in the upper right corner of
the telephone. Thus wear and tear is limited.
Up to now I found the cards (sold in vending machines) and the phones
ONLY at Haneda Airport. NTT plans to exchange half of their 800,000 public
telephones within the next 5 years, thus they will be sold all over the
country.
The cards are thought to be unforgeable, because the individual card
number is stored in a central computer and the validity of the card is
checked when it is used to make a telephone call.
According to a card dealer this type of card will be issued for a transition
period only. In a few years this type of prepaid cards will be replaced
by debit cards where the cost for a call will be directly drawn from your
bank account, using the same technology as now with the new cards.
According to that dealer, the new type of cards generated little interest
amoung Japanese collectors, because they will be out of date soon (even
though they are still valid).
I think just the opposite. Because the cards are not well accepted
amoung Japanese, the issued cards will be few and the market amoung collectors
will be small. This offers a good opportunity to get a representative collection
of the new cards.
