Passnet

~ the obituary ~

Passnet was a magnetic card with a balance on it, and the way you used it was to push it into a slot on the front of a Tokyo ticket gate. The machine read the stripe, worked out what you owed, took it off the balance, printed a line on the back recording the date and the station, and fed the card out at the far end for you to collect as you walked through. Nothing was tapped. The card physically went through the gate, and a commuter in a hurry picked it up on the other side without breaking stride.

What made it worth carrying was that twenty-two railway companies had agreed to honor each other's plastic. Seventeen of them switched Passnet on together on 14 October 2000, which is Japan's Railway Day, and the roster grew to twenty-two, among them Odakyu, Keio, Keisei, Keikyu, Tokyo Metro, the Toei subway, Tobu, Seibu, the Tsukuba Express, a monorail out in Tama, a mountain railway at Hakone, and the little loop that runs around Tokyo Disney Resort. One journey could cross as many as four of them on one card.

The numbers were not small. In the 2002 financial year the Passnet operators issued 82.06 million cards between them and loaded 191.4 billion yen onto them, over 1,649.9 kilometers of track and 1,098 stations. The joint release that carries those figures puts two rivals beside them: JR East's magnetic Io-card managed 17.9 million cards and 54 billion yen in the same year, and Suica, already running and already contactless, had 6.68 million holders. Of the three, Passnet was the big one, and Passnet was made of magnetic tape.

A card that works on twenty-two railways in one metropolitan area is a card you either carried every weekday or never once held, and I was never in the first group. What follows is built out of the council's own releases and the operators' closure notices. Those are unusually good documents, because a stored-value card is a financial instrument, and people running one are obliged to write down exactly what becomes of your money.

~ the case file ~

~ the name they were not allowed to use ~

The name came out of a public competition. In October 1999 the operators ran an open call for a nickname for the common card, and the posters advertising it carried a line that read: our passport is about to be born. In July 2000 they announced the winning name and the start date in the same breath, and the posters changed one word. On 14 October, our Passnet is born.

Then the council made a rule about its own brand. Passnet was the name of the system, not the name of a card, and members were told not to print it on the plastic as a product name. So they didn't. Tokyo Metro's was the SF Metro Card, Toei's was the T-Card, Tobu's was the SF Tobu Card and Seibu's was the SF Leo Card, where SF stood for Stored Fare. Keikyu's was the Rutoran Card, a name inherited from an earlier and incompatible card whose back printed in a single row.

The rule did not hold. Plenty of operators never invented a name at all, and on those lines the signage and the passengers called the thing Passnet, or Passnet Card, and that is the name that stuck. Some of the companies who had gone to the trouble of a brand quietly dropped it from the card face later on. Others kept it and shrank their own logo below the size of the Passnet mark sitting next to it. By 2003 the council was selling a boxed collector set of twenty operators' Passnet cards on a serial-numbered mount, at 20,000 yen, off a stand at the Railway Festival in Hibiya Park.

~ what the gate would accept ~

The machines were more forgiving than the instructions. A correct orientation was specified and it made no difference: any way round went through. You could feed two cards in at once, one of them upside down relative to the other, and the gate would take both and return them stacked the same way up, only a little slower than usual.

What it would not do was mix generations. A Passnet running short at a ticket machine could be topped up with cash or with another Passnet, but put the short card in and then offer a PASMO or a Suica and the machine refused the IC card outright. You could not buy a PASMO with a Passnet either. It was also no good as a platform ticket, so the one thing a prepaid fare card could not buy was the right to stand on a platform and not travel.

Out on Tobu's local lines in Gunma and Tochigi there were stations with no automatic gates at all. Where there was a member of staff, they processed the card by hand. At twenty-four unstaffed stations you took a paper certificate proving where you had boarded and carried it to a station with somebody in it to have the card dealt with there. If you knew in advance that you would be getting off at one of those, you bought an ordinary paper ticket from a machine before you set out.

~ four endings ~

PASMO went on sale on 18 March 2007, and Passnet then died four separate times, each with its own verb in the operators' notices. Sales stopped with the last train on 10 January 2008, and the automatic gates stopped reading it with the last train on 14 March 2008. The ticket machines and the fare-adjustment machines carried on for another seven years and stopped with the last train on 31 March 2015. The refund windows closed on 31 January 2018.

Two of those dates have exceptions printed beside them. Cards were sold until the last train of 10 January, which meant that where stock remained they went on selling after midnight, so there are Passnet cards out there stamped with an issue date of 11 January 2008, because a ticket machine rolls its date at zero hundred and the last train does not. And the Disney Resort Line went on taking Passnet at its gates for a further year, until 13 March 2009, because PASMO reached Maihama late.

The refund arrangement is the part worth noticing. Passnet was never refundable while it was a working fare card. Fee-free refunds opened on 15 March 2008, the day after the gates stopped reading it, and stayed open for nine years and ten months. Some operators fitted machines that would move a whole Passnet balance onto a PASMO. None of them would move it onto a Suica.

~ the company named after it ~

The company that replaced Passnet was incorporated on 9 February 2004 by nine of the major railway operators, and the name they registered was Passnet Bus IC Card Co., Ltd. It became PASMO Co., Ltd. on 21 December 2005, about fifteen months before PASMO went on sale. The final notice, issued by the council on 15 December 2014, actually gave a reason, which notices of this kind frequently do not. The migration to PASMO, it said, was proceeding smoothly.

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