ToruCa

» see nttdocomo.co.jp/service/toruca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

NTT docomo announced ToruCa on 14 September 2005 and declined to call it an electronic coupon. The official description was flatter and more interesting than that: a way of taking the printed things shops hand out and putting them inside a phone. The first handsets that could do it, the F902i and the D902i, went on sale on 11 November.

A ToruCa was a file capped at 192 bytes. That bought a line of text and a small icon. Underneath it sat a second layer called ToruCa (detail), which could run to 100 kilobytes and was written in i-mode HTML, pictures included, so a coffee shop was able to ship something close to a web page into your pocket. Taking the card off a reader cost nothing. Opening the detail was billed as packet traffic, which is where docomo's money was.

You acquired one by holding the handset against a reader-writer on a counter, and what happened at that moment ran the other way round from how it looked. The reader pushed the card over mobile FeliCa into a folder the phone kept for the purpose. docomo's actual pitch was the absence of an app: before ToruCa a shop could already send you a coupon, but only after you had installed that shop's own i-appli, and now any reader worked with any 902i without being asked.

The fence around this was hardware. It needed a FeliCa chip inside a handset docomo had specified, a sentence that quietly excludes most of the planet, and the exclusion ran through docomo's own customers too. The company began selling the iPhone in September 2013, and from then until the end its service page carried a separate line for those buyers saying ToruCa could not be used.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what you could make ~

The specification was public. A content guide and a free authoring program called ToruCa Creator sat behind a click-through agreement on docomo's developer site, and outside companies were offering browser-based editors on top of it before 2005 was out, so writing a card was open to anyone prepared to read a contract. Sending one was the costlier half. A dedicated transmitter ran around 40,000 yen in December 2005, although a shop that already had a FeliCa reader on the counter for Edy payments could mostly just use that.

~ the roster ~

McDonald's Japan announced a nationwide rollout in February 2007 and began it that October, which is the largest deployment anybody wrote down. docomo never published reader counts or usage figures at all, and the standing Japanese summary of the service puts it dryly: adoption trailed well behind the number of handsets that supported it.

In October 2014 the service learned two new ways to reach you, Bluetooth beacons and IC tags, so a card could arrive without a counter or a touch. The pilot covered forty-one Crocs branches and ten ANAP stores. By 2020 the list of places ToruCa worked, on docomo's own page, under a heading promising these were only examples, had four logos on it.

~ half past one ~

The notice went up on 13 April 2020 and named the end as Thursday 10 September at 1:30 in the afternoon. The schedule table printed beneath it had a single row. The press release the same day gave the reason in about fifteen words of corporate Japanese concerning the present business environment and the concentration of management resources, and offered nothing to move to.

Part of it had already gone quietly. When docomo retired its old handset backup service in 2016, ToruCa data was among the things that were not carried across to the replacement, so a collection assembled over a decade could end in a handset upgrade years before the service itself was switched off.

~ what the address does now ~

Both of the addresses the service lived at redirect to the closure notice, which is five sentences long and thanks you for your patronage. A format built to replace the piece of paper you throw away resolves, six years later, to the one piece of paper about it docomo decided to keep.

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