Launching Over Japan

Let me give you a little bit of a background here. Back when I as in University, there was a meeting held, where we decided what direction to take our lexicon in. After many hours of hot debate, a consensus was reached on two new suffixes that could be added to almost any verb, thereby transforming them into a noun. “-xor” would be added to anything to make it good, see “l33t haxor”, or “delicious meatxor” for examples. “-mo” would be added to the end of any word, to signify displeasure, and a certain air of mental retardation, see “lame-mo” or “tard-mo”.

Well, it seems that Japan has once again chosen something from the west to latch on to. Enter the Pasmo! Pasmo, from what I can gather with my limited Japanese, is two things. First, it is a wonderful RFID based rail pass system, that can easily be recharged at any train station. However, unlike its brilliantly marketed cousin Suica, Pasmo not only works at JR stations, but also on the Tokyo Metro, Busses, and most notably to me, the Noda Tobu line and Tsukuba Express! It also appears that Pasmo, and Suica can be friends, but more on this later.

Now while Suica has been brilliantly marketed and branded by a cute, simply drawn black and white penguin, we now come to the second thing that is “Pasmo”. What sort of mascot do you choose to market such a great card? Why a big gay pink robot with wheels on its norally useful hands and feet, from what I can tell. Bloody hell Japan, way to go picking up on my naming system, but I think you got it backwards. What you wanted was PassXor, the sleek red and white intra-network commuting gundam-like robo-mascot of death! What you got was Pasmo, the slightly retarded result of some washed out Archie Comic’s illustrators bad acid flashback.

Read on for the real review…

So now that we’ve gone through the basics of Pasmo, let’s dig a little deeper into the big pink robot.

Getting a Pasmo card (or becoming a Pasmo, as I like to call it) couldn’t be easier. It’s as simple as tracking down a station that accepts Pasmo cards, and walking up to the automated ticket machines. Once there, switch the machine to English mode, or if your adventurous leave it in Japanese (go ahead, you’ll get no help from me), and hit the Pasmo button. You can then choose between a regular card with no identification, or you can personalize your card for use as a monthly train pass, giving up your name and celphone number to give you back the card if it’s ever lost. And get it back you might want, as the next step is to decide how much you want to put on it. Your initial deposit will be down by ¥500 to cover a deposit on the card (you get it back if you ever want out of the Pasmo lifestyle), but the machines will accept denominations up to ¥10000, or $100. The card is then spit out of the machine, with or without a receipt, and you are on your way.

To use it in the trains, just wave it on top of the IC Card sensor when you enter and leave. Your balance is helpfully displayed any time you do this, letting you know when it’s time to top up. Alternatively, you can also use the card at select stores instead of cash, thus makeing my wallet lighter, in oh so many ways.