Is Cashless Going Right in Japan?: An Observation Report

Abstract

In this research, we investigated the recent trend of the diffusion of cashless payment in Japan by using the survey data of students in our institute during 2018 and 2021. Cashless payment has achieved remarkable development with the wide usage of smartphones and the prevalence of consequent smartphone-based system. Before the bar code, either two- and single-dimensional, was introduced in the cashless system, the major technology that was used is a smart card or integrated circuit card-based system. We investigated the behavior of technology adoptions to cashless payment, which we called “Smart Payment System” in 2018[5]. Since 2018, we conducted surveys and found that the effect of COVID-19 resulted in the increase adoption to the cashless payment system among students and the increase usage of credit cards. The survey showed that the use of cashless payment system increased after 2020 in comparison to 2018 and 2019. Since the COVID-19 pandemic in spring of 2020, the usage of online shopping increased, and the usage of real stores decreased. Although we did not use big data, such as the log data of mobile phone usages, the results indicated that our observation of the use of cashless payment system among young users is consistent with the common sense.