The incentives of PayPay against the convenience of cash: On the conveniencing of cashless payments in Japan

Abstract

This article offers a two-decade overview of digital payments in Japan, with a focus on the role of convenience stores in the rollout of new payment systems. The aim is both to follow the recent development of code-based payment apps such as SoftBank's PayPay, while also interrogating the appeal to convenience by both the apps themselves and by academic literature on digital payments. The assumption of convenience as a default explanation for the adoption of digital payments in much literature must be resisted in view of Japanese government policy and large-scale incentive campaigns by payment providers encouraging users and retailers to adopt app-based payment systems. In Japan in particular, these incentives were meant to combat the default convenience of cash or other tap-to-pay prepaid cashless options introduced in the early 2000s. The role of convenience stores in the 2018–2019 “cashless payment wars” period under investigation here is to allow the perceived convenience of the retail forms to inflect the experience of the apps themselves. The article further uses this case as an opportunity to reflect on the temporality of convenience itself, as a retrospective explanatory framework for social shifts, and as a process of becoming-default of a new payment system. I term this process conveniencing. The conveniencing of otherwise inconveninent payment apps is the process under analysis here.

Convenience has become the go-to explanation for the adoption of cashless transaction apps, across Asia and beyond. While digital transactions were initially framed in terms of financial inclusion (especially around the M-Pesa project in Kenya), convenience has since become the rhetorically dominant means of explaining why people use cashless transaction apps (Chang et al., 2022). It is undeniable that payment apps tend to market their services on the basis of convenience. In turn, much academic research on the topic—particular work based on survey data—tends to reaffirm this by taking convenience as an a priori assumption. In my weekly Google Scholar alerts for “convenience,” I would estimate roughly a quarter of the entries on convenience are in the context of explaining digital payments. ¹ There seems to be a circular logic here: apps advertise themselves as convenient; users’ experience is rated on this basis; research then concludes that the apps’ appeal is convenience. Yet this “convenient” explanation begs the methodological question: Can an uncritical concept of convenience explain anything when it starts off as the sales pitch and selling point? Even more fundamentally, it provokes a more analytical question: convenience for whom, how, and when?

In some respects, the virtuous circle of convenience appears analogous to the framing of “liveness” in television in an earlier era, where television's claim to liveness was underpinned by its own extensive audience surveys that gauged receptions of liveness. As Jane Feuer wrote in a classic critique: “The problem of testing for responses to the ideology of liveness is further complicated by the fact that Good Morning, America itself is based on surveys seeking to give the people what they want” (Feuer, 1983: 21). ² Similarly, we are prompted to consider the value of convenience as an explanatory framework when service ads, app interfaces, and app store descriptions all frame digital services under an overarching banner of convenience. That is not to say that the appeal of digital payment systems cannot be investigated as a matter of convenience (or ease, simplicity, or any other of its synonyms that equally require attention).

Rather, the larger point is that payment apps’ claims of convenience, as well as the broader consumer use of the term, both require a more thorough explanation in themselves. In this article, I will situate the convenience of payment apps in Japan within a longer trajectory of transactional convenience. Also, I will argue that the application of convenience to any given experience tends to invoke a retrospective temporality, occurring where a mode of action has achieved the status of a systematic default. I term this process conveniencing. This seems particularly cogent in the case of money, the convenience of which relies principally upon its naturalization. In tracing the two-decade history of digital payments in Japan I offer in this article, I emphasize the crucial role that convenience stores in particular have played in making digital transactions possible.

While there are many reasons for the rise of digital platforms, one of them is their continual assertion of convenience. Emily West and Jenny Huberman describe Amazon's branding and ideology of convenience; Amanda Lotz notes convenience as a go-to explanation for using streaming platforms like Netflix (Huberman, 2021; Lotz, 2017; West, 2022). Whether they do in fact provide it or not is to some extent beside the point; their claim is to convenience and these claims tend to be affirmed by scholarship and user questionnaires. I’ll describe the process and temporality of making-convenient as conveniencing: the often retrospective use of convenience as an explanatory framework for why a certain platform, app or service is adopted—whether or not it actually felt convenient at first. Indeed, many of the apps described in this article were, at first, inconvenient. Difficult to use, cumbersome, and prone to failure. How they were made convenient, or rather how they were made to be adopted is based more on the force of incentives than on promises of convenience. Retroactively, though, this process of adoption is often described via the convenience it provides. This is conveniencing.

Payment apps, I should add, go to the very heart of platforms. Platforms are defined, among other things, as facilitating transactions between two or more parties (so-called multisided markets). Extending my earlier research that tracks the rise of transactional platforms in Japan (Steinberg, 2019), I move to consider payment apps as foremost digital platform; the newest version of the ur-platform of the credit card. Payment apps facilitate monetary transactions between third parties, like the credit cards that multisided platform theory was based on (Kokuryō, 1994; Rochet and Tirole, 2003). There is no truer platform, in this sense, than the payment app; and this insight is at the core of the group research project—Digital Transaction Platforms in Asia—that this research is part of. It also extends the insight of Adrian Athique on Indian platform capitalism onwards: that platform capitalism should be investigated via its transactional forms rather than by a typology of firms (Athique, 2019b; Srnicek, 2017).

In what follows I turn to look at the landscape of Japanese payment apps and digital transactions. In doing so I build on my and others’ previous research on the creation of online transactional platforms in Japan, from the early mobile Internet era onwards (1999∼), to account for offline transactions, an increasing number of which are mediated by do-everything super apps like LINE (Steinberg, 2020) or aspiring super apps like PayPay. Given that the use of these payment apps is often located, I focus attention on the ubiquitous and crucial interface of these payment apps: convenience stores. This article hence shifts my locus of study from online mobile phone platforms to the online to offline juncture, a space where payment apps flourish.

The research presented in this article draws upon archival readings on convenience stores in Japan; press accounts, journalistic coverage and books about the so-called “cashless payment wars” of 2018–19; Japanese government reports on its “Cashless Vision” plan of 2018 and subsequent follow-on reports; and lived experience of cashless transactions sites in Tokyo. It also draws from wider research into convenience stores and discourses of convenience in cultural theory and politics today. If we start from the premise that convenience is not necessarily the sole motivating factor in the rise of transaction platforms and especially payment apps, we will be better placed to interrogate their interaction with actual modes and infrastructures of convenience. In doing so, it becomes clear that retail establishments that facilitate cashless transactions are central to their uptake.

To illustrate the interactions between place and convenience over time, I examine both Japanese cashless transactions over the past 25 years (from roughly the year 2000 to the present) and the place of convenience stores in creating transactional milieus in Japan. This dual approach seeks to build on the analysis of the “appification of money” (Goggin, 2021: 136) and the shift towards app-mediated “social money” (Swartz, 2020), adding to these accounts the importance of retail and place in mapping these transformations. It also converges with Athique's argument that the exchange of money lies at the heart of platforms (Athique, 2019b), and likewise with Athique and Goggin's provocation that we need “to reconsider the Internet as primarily a transactional architecture (Athique and Goggin, Forthcoming). Lana Swartz suggests that “the story of payment innovation is one of addition, not progression”; and that “technologies of payment are a palimpsest” (Swartz, 2020: 23). Scholars of fintech in African cities similarly see complexities and contradictions alongside novelties and continuing forms of colonial extraction (Cirolia et al., 2024). In a manner that reflects these complexities, the Japanese payment landscape is a messy palimpsest of historical accretions of payment methods. This is usefully captured in this image of a Lawson convenience store in 2022 (Figure 1). From cash to contactless IC cards for electronic money (either smartphone-integrated or card-based), to credit cards, to loyalty cards, to barcode- or QR-code-based payment apps—the number of payment methods accepted is dizzying. As such, the backers of app-based payment platforms and the government agency promoting them clearly understand that they have to compete with the convenience of cash and other payment options.

Figure 1.

Detail of payments accepted on the door of the Lawson convenience store in Machida, Tokyo, Japan (photo by author taken in December 2022).

As platforms and super apps increasingly pivot towards transactions as their core provision, researchers must understand the government policies, retail institutions, and longer histories that underpin this pivot. Thus, in the first section of this article, I will illustrate how the government of Japan incentivizes the adoption of cashless transactions and why this is crucial for their proliferation. The second section focuses upon the app-based, Alipay-inspired models of payment found in dominant apps like SoftBank's PayPay or LINE Pay, which fought for market dominance during the cashless payment wars of 2018–19, before consolidating under the corporate control of a single-parent company. The third section builds on the institutional focus on government planning by considering convenience stores as the physical retail sites where new payment systems are first rolled out. The final section examines the temporality of convenience, as it is evoked in payment apps and their promotional campaigns. The aim of what follows, then, is to put pressure on the convenience concept—the universality of which Rahul Oka contests (Oka, 2021: 190)—via a longer history of cash and cashlessness in Japan, and an unpacking of the motives for adopting app-based payment methods.

Cash society to cashless society

In 2024, cash remains dominant in Japan, despite vocal advocacy for cashless payment systems over the past decade. In 2010, only 13.2% of transactions were cashless with the rest conducted in cash. By 2023, the ratio of cashless transactions had gone up to 39.3%, a significant increase no doubt, but which still leaves cash with a 60.7% share (METI, 2024). This sharp increase was aided by the COVID-19 global pandemic, which, in Japan like elsewhere, prompted consumers to shift more quickly to online services and cashless payments. But the pandemic is only part of the story (Fujiki, 2023). The Japanese government has been pushing for a cashless transition for some time, in line with its Cashless Vision formulated in 2018. Japan's Cashless Payment Promotion Office announced that: “Based on the Cashless Vision formulated in April 2018, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry [METI; formerly MITI] is working to promote cashless payment with the aim of increasing its ratio to around 40% by 2025 and to 80% … in the future” (First Meeting of the Study Group on the Future Direction of Cashless Payment to Be Held, 2022). METI's 2018 “Cashless Vision” document notes that only 20% of transactions in Japan were cashless at the time of writing, versus 90% in South Korea. To redress this perceived shortfall, the Cashless Vision report advocates for “increasing the safety and convenience of cashless payments,” implicitly suggesting that cashless payments themselves are not convenient de facto; their convenience must be produced (METI, 2018: 4).

Japan's cash-heavy economy contrasts markedly with its East Asian neighbor, China, where mobile, app-based payment platforms from Alipay to WeChat have become essential infrastructures of everyday life (Plantin and Seta, 2019; Tse and Pun, 2024). The continued dependence on cash contrasts with Japan's image as a technological forerunner, reflected in the concern voiced explicitly by METI, that “Japan could be left out as an underdeveloped country in terms of cashless payments if it fails to catch up with this international trend” (Playing Catch-up, Japan Forges Ahead with Cashless Payments, 2018). The cashless push by METI was followed by magazines devoted to promoting cashlessness (Kyashuressu magazine [2020–2023]), and countless news and magazine articles covering the trend. This reminds us of METI's crucial role as a “pilot agency” (Johnson, 1982) within Japan's “activist state” in Japan's postwar economy (Anchordoguy, 2005: 11); a role that persists into Japan's state-guided model of platform capitalism (Steinberg et al., 2025). The concerns voiced here explain the Japanese government's offer of generous incentives to users, retailers, and service operators via the Point Reward Project for Consumers Using Cashless Payments program (PRP). The scheme operated from October 1 2019 to June 30, 2020 (Fujiki, 2023). Japan's incentive approach can be contrasted to more compulsory approaches taken elsewhere, notably the shock demonetization in India in November 2016 that fueled the rise of app-based payment platforms like Paytm (Athique, 2019a, 2019b). One of the motivating factors for Japan's Cashless Vision was the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The document and others like it from 2014 signal the need to prepare for the influx of foreign visitors to Japan accompanying the Olympics by extending cashless payments, which would “improve the convenience and efficiency of payments” (Prime Minister's Office, 2014: 77).

Whereas the 2014 document focused more on credit card use, the “Cashless Vision” of 2018 focuses mostly on the app-based QR code payment method, signaling the importance of China and regional Asia in modeling the vision of a cashless society. Indeed, interoperability with Chinese payment platforms WeChat Pay and Alipay, as well as Korea's KakaoPay (Kim, 2024), would become selling points to vendors for adopting QR code-based apps in 2018–19. (For two excellent accounts of QR codes, see de Seta, 2023; Nguyen, 2022). While QR codes were first developed in Japan, it was in the Chinese context that they became widespread as methods of payment, and they were subsequently reintroduced to Japan via Alibaba's influence on global payments. This was mediated, in part, by telecom giant and venture capital firm SoftBank's wider influence in the Asian region and close ties to Alibaba. Ultimately, then, alongside a general concern about appearing “underdeveloped,” Japan's policy goal was to make payments easier for tourists coming from countries where QR-based payment methods are now the norm. Between the government incentives to go cashless and COVID-19's impetus to go cashless in the name of hygiene, the cashless payments almost doubled between 2017 and 2023 (Figure 2). Increased use of QR-based payment apps in particular signals a frequency of usage not captured in Figure 2. Fujiki (2023) develops a graph that clearly signals the increase of code payments (i.e., transaction apps) as a form of payment from 2019 to 2021. While in total transaction amounts, credit cards still far outweigh payment apps in total amounts paid (Figure 2), both electronic money and code payments began to rival credit cards in frequency used in the pandemic period. A mitigating factor here is that credit cards are used for higher-cost purchases, weighting Figure 2 towards credit cards and failing to fully capture the spike in the frequency of use of code-based payment apps.

Figure 2.

“Changes in the cashless payment amount and cashless payment ratios in Japan (2023),” graph by METI (METI, 2024).

While the METI document opens with the premise of “increasing the convenience for consumers,” it frames convenience as something that must be created and even incentivized (METI, 2018: 3). Evidently, one of the problems is the existing convenience of cash. Among the four “background factors that make the spread of cashless payments challenging,” including the secure environment and the ease of using cash, the report also points to “ATMs [being] very convenient and the ‘ease of getting cash’” in Japan (METI, 2018: 23). Since Japan did not go India's route of shock therapy, incentives and not government fiat were the preferred means of conveniencing cashlessness, inculcating the consumer convenience of using cashless payments and thereby bringing Japan towards what the report grandiosely terms a “Cashless Civilization” (kyashurresu bunmei). As the report puts it, “What is needed in addition to the provision of services that are highly convenient, are the solicitation of consumers’ interest in cashless payments, and motivations (i.e., incentives) for consumers to try out cashless payments” (METI, 2018: 54). As we shall see, for SoftBank and other players incentives were key to the launch strategy of their QR and barcode-based services, offering concrete types of mechanisms and motivations—sometimes a little too dramatically. The government also took its own advice, offering further incentives, via the PRP program under which “consumers, registered retail shops, and payment service providers received a subsidy” (Fujiki, 2023: 2). Intended to offset an impending increase in Japan's consumption tax, the cashless subsidy also played a role in the incentive campaigns offered by the many entrants into the payment apps sector.

Payments systems in Japan: from electronic money to the cashless payment wars

Turning to the payment systems themselves, I return to the list of accepted payments found at the Lawson convenience store (Figure 1). ³ This is an “anywhere in Japan” kind of picture that usefully captures both the complexity of the Japanese payments ecosystem in Japan and the place of convenience stores within this ecosystem. What we see on Lawson's sign is a sedimentation or palimpsest of different types of payment types and technologies, including:

[Cash – implicit via the large ATM sign under the list of payments]

Credit Cards

Electronic Money (電子マネー）and others

IC Cards (Nanaco, Pasmo, Suica)

Apple Pay, G Pay (Google Pay)

Loyalty cards

Ponta Points card via Apple Pay (Lawson loyalty card)

dPoint (NTT) via Apple Pay

Barcode Transactions

PayPay

LINE Pay

Alipay+ Partner (+ KakaoPay as partner)

Notably, cash is not explicitly included, since it remains the unsaid premise of all convenience stores. No store I have come across advertises that you can “use cash”. Thus, the continuing dominance of cash is assumed in its absence among the payment methods listed. Cash is rendered implicitly via the large ATM sign, which both announces that there's an ATM in this store and advertises Lawson Bank. Lawson has operated ATMs since 1989, and rebranded them “Lawson ATM” as of 2001; Lawson Bank was established in 2018. Lawson is not alone in foregrounding ATMs as a core part of their convenience offering. 7-Eleven's outdoor signs also announce “ATM, Alcohol, Tobacco” under the main branded 7-Eleven sign. Cash, and its availability via ATMs, is the default of convenience. Credit cards come next (technically, the first explicit payment method mentioned), including tap-based credit cards. Credit cards were typically used for higher-value transactions in Japan, rather than the small transaction amounts typically spent in a convenience store, though this is changing as tap-to-pay credit cards become the norm.

In the next tier, we find “Electronic Money and others”. This is perhaps the most significant form of cashless payment after credit cards, viable as forms of payment from around 2004 onward. Though IC Cards and their mobile equivalents do not represent a large amount of payment volume in the METI graph (Figure 2), they do count for about 5–8% of all cashless transactions yearly, in numerical terms, between 2017 and 2023. By then barcode or QR-code payment apps had become the third likeliest payment method after cash and credit cards in Fujiki's calculations (2023: 129). This seems particularly significant as many of the so-called “contactless IC cards” (whether plastic cards or integrated into one's mobile phone) are prepaid, and therefore presume smaller transaction values, per transaction. The genius of this electronic money format is precisely its simplicity and ease of use via existing systems when it comes to the smaller but more frequent transaction values of convenience stores. Unlike other payment formats, one doesn’t need to unlock one's phone to pay with mobile IC cards.

IC cards speak in a literal sense to what Athique and Goggin describe of the velocity of transactions (Athique and Goggin, Forthcoming). This motility arises in large part due to the origins of these cards as transit network cards before later expanding to general-use payment cards. Indeed, they are often termed “transit cards” (交通系カード). IC cards like Suica, Pasmo, ICOCA, and others are based on a standard developed by Sony during the 1990s. IC cards were first rolled out by the railways in 2001 as a touchless transit card that could be loaded with either money for individual fares or digital monthly transit passes—replacing the paper tickets or plastic transit passes used previously (Iwata, 2017: 22). The cards were debuted in 2001 for the Japan Railway East (JR East) transit system, before being integrated into subway transit systems and other transit systems around the country. These appear first as plastic cards the size of a credit card and later, as of 2004, are also integrated into proto-smartphones such as Docomo's i-mode phones, known as “feature phones,” as part of their mobile wallet function.

Sony worked in collaboration with former national telecommunication giant and Japan's largest mobile phone provider, NTT Docomo, to develop the “Mobile Felica” standard which it patented and then licensed to other mobile carriers like SoftBank, Rakuten, and KDDI. Collectively, it was termed osaifu keitai or mobile wallet, allowing transit passes and pre-paid charges to be loaded onto one's phone. The mobile wallet was launched in 2004. The first iPhone to be equipped with Felica would finally come out in 2016—remarkably a dozen years later. 2004 also saw the first use of Felica IC cards and Mobile Felica in FamilyMart stores and train kiosks across Tokyo. Convenience store chain FamilyMart touted this as a shift ‘from “in the station” to “in the city”’ (Family Mart de Suica ga goriyo itadakeru yo ni narimasu, 2004). Seeing these cards as a potential growth area, 7-Eleven released its own electronic money card, “nanaco,” in 2006. While initially circumscribed in their operational zones, store-based and regional payment cards eventually became interoperable. The ability to tap any of these cards across Japan, in railway and subway, in convenience stores and supermarkets, has thus become a vaguely compulsory form of convenience embedded in the notion of ticketless travel.

The next major development in cashless payments came in the late 2010s with app-based payment systems. This period witnessed the so-called “cashless payment wars” of 2018–19. This is when barcode or QR code-based payment apps like the SoftBank subsidiary PayPay, Naver's LINE Pay (later, with LINE, a jointly owned SoftBank-Naver company; now shuttered in Japan), the Docomo mobile payment system d-barai (d払い), the fintech start-up Origami (since merged with Mercari, an eBay-like marketplace), were launched. One of the major reasons for the simultaneous launch of so many apps in 2018 was the Cashless Vision policy and payment incentives for consumers, retailers, and payment operators. In line with the aim of bringing cashless payment use to 40% by 2025, the Japanese government offered generous incentives to all parties via the Point Reward Project for Consumers Using Cashless Payments program (PRP). The QR and barcode-based payment apps were a particular beneficiary of the program (Fujiki, 2023: 10). Convenience stores were once again central to the introduction of new payment systems, with cashless payments in convenience stores rising from 22% to 53% between 2015 and 2021 (Fujiki, 2023: 130). Convenience store chains even launched their own payment apps around this time, including FamilyMart's FamilyPay, and 7-Eleven's short-lived 7Pay (shuttered within 2 months of its launch, following a hacking incident). In 2016, e-commerce giant Rakuten's launched Rakuten Pay, an early entrant that still competes vigorously for market share in a now crowded market. Telecommunications carriers (Docomo and SoftBank), tech companies (LINE, Rakuten), convenience store operators, as well as banks including Japan's postal bank (Yūchō Pay) all offer app-based payment services (Yang, 2020: 59). Anecdotally, as of 2025, most of these services aside from PayPay, Rakuten Pay and au Pay (all three telecom affiliated) are unknown and unused today, or shuttered, with PayPay having come to dominate the app-based payments space.

“Payment wars” naturally need contestants. PayPay's main competitor in 2018–19 was LINE Pay, a component of the LINE super app, which has approximately 80 million monthly active users in Japan. Starting as a chat app in 2011, and expanding thereafter into calling, music, maps, ride hailing, employment, and much more, the LINE super app is central to Japan's tech ecosystem and a key infrastructure in day-to-day life (Steinberg, 2020). ⁴ While LINE has a longer history of digital transactions via its in-app payments and currency for buying stickers or other in-app goods, where the pay service has its start, LINE Pay only launched as a standalone app in April 2019, at which point it competed with PayPay. In March 2021, LINE (publicly listed but majority-owned by Korean search giant Naver) was consolidated into a joint operation with Yahoo! Japan (owned by SoftBank), after which point the operations of PayPay and LINE Pay were integrated. This integration allowed PayPay to draw on LINE's existing user base and enabled LINE Pay to be used at stores that accept PayPay. As of July 2022, the QR codes were unified across LINE Pay and PayPay. In April 2025, the LINE Pay service was ended in Japan.

In 2022, LINE Pay had around 40 million users and could be used at 4 million stores; and PayPay had 55 million users and could be used at 3.7 million stores (Agatha and Ozawa, 2023: 30). For many payment services the endgame of the “cashless payment wars” was not simply to consolidate the payments market, but to use cashless incentives to direct users towards other products in their ecosystem. Thus, PayPay encouraged users to use Japan Net Bank (now PayPay Bank), and Rakuten Pay users were directed to use Rakuten Bank (Shirotori, 2019: 34). PayPay also incentivizes users to use SoftBank-associated companies including its mobile and high-speed internet services, Yahoo! Japan, and later LINE, while Rakuten offers incitements for users within its e-commerce unit. In short, these payment services are part of what Ishita Tiwary in the Indian context, terms “larger platform ecosphere[s], where one service cross-subsidizes and create values for other sites of audience commodification” (Tiwary, 2020: 95)—recalling, too, how Reliance Jio works in that context (Athique and Kumar, 2022; Mukherjee, 2019).

The PayPay app, launched in October 2018, is particularly significant in that its owner SoftBank is a pan-Asian investor in payment platforms. SoftBank is simultaneously a tech company, a telecommunications firm, and a venture capital fund (via its Vision Fund) (Qiu and Chan, 2025). SoftBank's Masayoshi Son was an early investor in Alibaba in the late 1990s, and also an investor in India's Paytm payment system. In many ways, PayPay can be seen as a marriage of both Alipay and Paytm, using the model of Alipay and the software and code of Paytm (as well as its engineers) (Wang and Doan, 2019). SoftBank relied on Paytm for the development of PayPay (Dash, 2020). Merchants accepting PayPay are also able to accept payments from other apps within the extensive Alipay+ network, including Alipay, Kakao Pay, and G-Cash (Kim, 2024; Soriano and Mamac, Forthcoming; Wang, Forthcoming), along with GrabPay and other cashless payment systems embedded in Asian super apps. This interoperability offers flexibility for Asian tourists arriving in Japan. As in other Asian countries, PayPay's QR code model offers a flexible and low-cost system for vendors who don't need to buy specialized POS equipment. Customers can either offer their QR code to be scanned for payment, or they can scan a QR code at the cash register if the merchant has a tablet; or merchants can simply print a QR code for the store, which a customer would scan and then manually type in the amount due to the merchant.

This adaptability provides payment choices for users and low participation costs for merchants, with no terminal purchase or lease required. Accordingly, both PayPay and LINE Pay advertised themselves (in Japanese and English) via concepts like ease and convenience (Figure 3). Nonetheless, their intense promotional campaigns involving large discounts or lottery-like free purchases speak to other factors at work. Japanese Postal Bank's Yūchō Pay app's Google Play page puts it more honestly: “convenient and a bargain” (benri de otokuna). ⁵ Incentives are what drive the adoption of these new code-based services. In a country where cash is king—and at least until recently most convenient—and simple tap-to-pay IC cards and mobile equivalents have existed since the early 2000s, it takes more than ease or simplicity to displace these (and, as I’ll follow up on below, ease was far from many early users’ first experiences of code-based apps). It requires incentive, a bargain—effectively bribes to users and retail stores. Thus the payments space is a competitive landscape in which the aim is monopoly via consumer incentive campaigns. By 2023 PayPay announced that it had reached 67% share of all code transactions in Japan for the 2022 financial year (“in both the annual payment amount and number of payments”), signaling itself as the victor of the cashless payment wars (PayPay Corporation, 2023). PayPay also announced that it “will continue on the path to evolve from a ‘payment app’ into a ‘super app’ that will make users’ lives richer and more convenient” (PayPay Corporation, 2023). This agenda is likely inspired by the new batch of Southeast Asian super apps that stem from payment or delivery services rather than communications apps of the LINE, WeChat, and KakaoTalk variety—a domain in which SoftBank has significant investments (Chai and Amaral, 2022; Steinberg et al., 2022: 1409).

Figure 3.

Screenshot of PayPay English landing page (https://paypay.ne.jp) taken on March 2, 2025.

The consolidation with LINE was certainly important in securing PayPay's dominance of Japan's code payments market. Other factors include its zero-fee policy for merchants and low barriers to adoption. But arguably it was its incentives that really won the day. PayPay's giveaways were the most extravagant of all its peers, in keeping with the excesses for which SoftBank is known in Japan. Tech journalist Iwata Akio's book about these heady times, Cashless Hegemony Wars, details PayPay's infamous campaign, known as the “‘Let's give away 10 billion yen’ campaign” (「100億円あげちゃう」キャンペイン). Under the campaign, PayPay offered a 20% rebate on every purchase made with the app, until the rebates added up to 10 billion yen (or approximately $67 million USD)—with an upper limit of 50,000 yen per person, per month (Iwata, 2019: 19). In addition to this, there was also a lottery system where around once in every 40 transactions PayPay would reimburse the entire transaction amount, up to 100,000 yen ($670 USD). For SoftBank mobile customers, the odds increased to 1 in every 10 transactions. Iwata notes that the campaign tore a page from Alipay's playbook in offering these kinds of large discounts or paybacks (2019: 34). Colloquially known as the “PayPay Festival” (distinct from the now thrice yearly, smaller-scale “Hyper PayPay Festival”), the campaign was to start on December 4, 2018, and was to last until the end of March 2019. Only, the campaign burned its allotted 100 billion yen in 10 days—and so the campaign ended abruptly on December 13. The sudden end was a shock to everyone and yet succeeded in bringing unprecedented attention to cashless code-based payments. The campaign resulted in 19 million downloads to iOS and Android devices in the 10-day span of time, some 43 times more downloads than during the three weeks before the campaign was announced (Iwata, 2019: 29).

Among other things these heady 10 days crashed the service, generated Twitter buzz and newspaper headlines, and saw long lines at convenience stores and big box electronics stores like Bic Camera outlets, where people queued to buy Apple tablets and computers, eyeglasses, refrigerators and other pricey products (Iwata, 2019: 24). It seems PayPay itself was unprepared for this influx of users, with several service interruptions and even the downing of the entire SoftBank cell network (Iwata, 2019: 27). While the brevity of the campaign, and its extravagance, drew public criticism, the buzz it caused resulted in the large market share that PayPay has in the code payments space today. Thus, the success of PayPay was due not to its simplicity or convenience. Indeed, as a payment method, it was more complicated to use than cash, tap-based credit cards, or IC cards.

Incentives and bargains rather than convenience per se solidified the place of code payments. Articles in major newspapers like Asahi Shinbun note that, during the payment war period, “Many people use [payments apps] less for their convenience than for the price reductions” that the apps offer (Murai and Kuribayashi, 2019: 6). Early users of PayPay like Iwata note how difficult it was to locate stores that would accept the payment form—outside of convenience stores and Bic Cameras, which were key to the early roll-out of these payment systems. The difficulty of finding places to use the new payment apps is a central part of their story. The next set of difficulties arose in the multiple windows and sequences users had to pass through to complete the transaction at hand. The increase in transaction times, particularly in convenience stores designed to process payments quickly, was regarded as “troublesome” to both store and user. “In the end it may be faster to pay by cash,” one article notes, rendering the point of the apps moot (Shirotori, 2019: 35).

Solicitation and incentives based on rewards and loyalty point systems won the day for PayPay, and continue to motivate users to adopt this payment system—especially the young who use it in greater numbers. For merchants, both government and pay service operators provided incentives and rebates on hardware purchases as well as merchant handling fees (which PayPay and LINE Pay kept at zero for the first few years, and very low subsequently). For consumers, the various festivals and loyalty point programs persuaded users of the value of payment apps (Okina, 2022: 117). The centrality of these strategies to the PayPay story signals how incentives like loyalty points and the platform ecosphere model continue to feature in the growth and everyday usage of code-based payments. Once again, this calls into question the default explanatory framework for the use of these payment apps as their supposed convenience. It requires us to think more carefully about how convenience is manufactured. What also emerges in the evolution of cashless payments in Japan is the vital role of convenience stores as a ubiquitous infrastructure for introducing novel technologies, as a nexus for the palimpsest of transaction systems, and, frequently, as actors in the payments sector in their own right.

Franchising cash and cashlessness

This prompts me to give a brief overview of the retail infrastructure of cashlessness, by focusing on the convenience stores that have made cashless transactions possible in Japan. With their promise of consumer convenience (i.e., access, speed, choice); their computerized point-of-purchase registers; and franchised networks extending across Japan, convenience store franchises have long played a central role in the diffusion of novel payment systems, from IC cards to the cashless transaction apps this article focuses on. This is also a matter of scale. There are 56,000 convenience stores across Japan, with about 50 million visits per day, and tens of thousands of stores operated by each of the major chains: 7-Eleven, Lawson, and FamilyMart.

That payment systems are tied to retail outlets has been usefully argued by Adrian Athique (2019b). Athique posits the emporium as a structural analogy for the kind of enclosures and the transaction-based environments created by contemporary digital platforms, noting that both “the emporium and the platform [are] vast mechanisms for handling money” (Athique, 2019b: 70). Other work also suggests we consider platforms together with the physical retail spaces that are equally part of the digital shift (Turow, 2017). As in the Japanese case, Cheryll Soriano's account of G-cash in the Philippines demonstrates how 7-Eleven convenience stores are crucial nodes for converting digital money to physical currency (Soriano, 2024). Retail sites are often overlooked everyday or “quotidian” (Ito et al., 2005) spaces where new technologies are trialed, tested, and deployed. The Japanese convenience store's commitment to trialing ever new kinds of convenience—including choices of payment—makes this a vantage point from which to observe new transactional forms. As I argue at length elsewhere (Steinberg, 2025), the Japanese convenience store is more than a structural analogy, what the emporium was to Athique; it is an early model and a physical site for the interface of physical retail, digital services, and digital transactions in the formation of the platform economy.

In returning to Japan in December 2022 after a 3-year absence due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I documented both which stores accepted cashless transactions, and what signs they used to indicate this. What I found is that the banners and signs noting the variety of cashless options accepted at a given location were mostly found in convenience stores, coffee shops, drug stores, and occasionally self-checkouts at larger retail chains. Uniting all these locations is the fact that they are chain stores or franchises. These are local outlets opened either by a larger chain or by a franchisee acting according to the guidelines of a franchise head office, which also provides hardware and software systems for how they should be run. In these systems, a franchisee puts up a certain amount of capital to open the store and pays a percentage of income to the head office. In return, the franchise head office supports the logistics of delivery, stocking options, inventory management software, and perhaps most significantly here, the check-out register where payments are made. The franchised convenience store is a retail form bound up with technological innovation and the mundane provision of convenience. As such, convenience outlets provided the ideal sites for increasing the convenience of cashless payments that the Cashless Vision document called for.

This was not merely serendipitous. Japanese convenience stores have always been a site for innovations in transactional forms, from the rollout of payment for electricity and other bills in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to automatic teller machines (ATMs) in the 1990s and early 2000s, to the IC-card-based payments in the early 2000s, to the QR code or barcode-based cashless transactions in the late 2010s. Unlike specialist retailers, the convenience store has not been—and I would venture to say never will be—replaced by e-commerce. Rather, the convenience store becomes a model for e-commerce in the late 1990s and early 2000s, directly competing with Amazon and Rakuten on the one hand, while serving as a version of last-mile delivery for these platforms on the other. Convenience stores were also the explicit model for the i-mode mobile internet system, an early model of the platform economy that launched in 1999 in Japan. In turn, i-mode would become the software model for iPhone and Android smartphones. As the lead of the i-mode project, Matsunaga Mari notes: “I wanted regular women to be able to use i-mode like any other cell phone, like a convenience store for information” (Nishii, 2000). In many respects, the Asian super apps of today are explicit virtualizations of this concept. Thus, i-mode would directly inspire, as Matsunaga and others had hoped, the digital equivalent of the convenience store (Enoki, 2015: 93; Steinberg, 2025). Nonetheless, even amidst smartphone-mediated 10-min delivery services, the physical convenience store persists in Japan and other parts of Asia.

Convenience stores in their globally popular form were born in the US, reinvented in Japan, and then re-exported to large parts of Asia and the world where the “Japanese-style” convenience store remains dominant today. The first Japanese stores were established in the late 1960s, with the first 7-Eleven Japan opened in 1974. Today, the convenience store is ubiquitous, open all hours of the day or night, offering everything from fresh foods to insurance to delivery services. Since the 1990s they have been regularly described as life infrastructure (Whitelaw, 2018: 79). Technological and logistical advances have been central to the convenience store industry in Japan and abroad. 7-Eleven Japan unrolled its first integrated information system in 1978; its second one in 1982 (including this time a POS system with its lauded “item-by-item management”), and newer systems every few years. The company put itself at the forefront of technological innovation and has been celebrated for its innovations. The drive for fresh food provisions like bento, onigiri, and sandwiches, alongside its small store footprint, meant that continual delivery and restocking of inventory were at the heart of the Japanese convenience store chains and motivated their mastery of logistics.

As with digital platforms, information gathering and management were key to the self-definition of convenience stores, with two 7-Eleven analysts describing the company as “an ‘information industry’” due to “the information system employed throughout the entire chain” (Ishikawa and Nejo, 2002: 7). In the 1980s this was mostly invisible to the consumer, other than being able to count on their onigiri being there if they wanted it. Over the 1990s, these information systems increasingly became consumer-facing, such that the convenience store became an all-purpose service point, where one could pay one's electricity bills, buy auto insurance, and purchase brand items via catalog orders (Steinberg, 2025). Analyses of the convenience store industry's IT strategies characterize the 1985–2000 period as an “era of the pursuit of service variety and convenience” (Mukai, 2018: 102). ATMs were first introduced to Japanese convenience stores in 1989. Enabled by the subsequent liberalization of the financial sector convenience stores became banks (Marutschke, 2011: 45), much as digital platforms are now doing. 7-Eleven has become a banking behemoth in Japan, boasting more ATMs than any other bank in the country; a vast cash machine of convenience. Hence when METI fretted about “ATMs [being] very convenient and the ‘ease of getting cash’” (METI, 2018: 23)—it is to the facilitating role of the 24/7 convenience store in making cash easy to access that they refer. And so it makes sense that it is convenience stores that would also become the frontlines of the drive toward cashlessness.

Convenience is relational and situational, something Abe Akio recognized in his calls for a Japan-style convenience store in the 1970s (Abe, 1972: 63), as contrasted with the original American convenience store model. Japanese convenience store chains since have taken the provision of convenience to be mission critical, shifting from a goods-centered model of convenience provision in the 1970s and 1980s, to a services-centered model of the 1980–90, to a mix of both since the 2000s. As of the late 1980s convenience store head offices have understood payment options and transactional forms as key elements of their value proposition: providing convenience. We can understand Figure 1 to represent convenience chains’ ongoing commitment to offering consumer choice in payment options. Payment choice is itself a convenience. This in turn explains convenience stores’ willingness to adopt the IC-card and then code-based payments as quickly as they did.

As retail outlets are firmly associated with the offering of convenience, store chains’ support for app-based payment services further helps create the feeling of convenience by association that the apps want to attribute to themselves. The stores produce the conveniencing of these apps. Thus, the offering of PayPay and other code-based payment options at convenience stores enabled code-based payments to promote themselves as convenient—by being associated with the very hubs of convenience in Japan: 7-Eleven, Lawson, and FamilyMart.

Living in convenience

Let's return in detail to our keyword: convenience. Along with putting pressure on the convenience concept and offering a longer overview of payment systems in Japan, I argue that we cannot think of payment forms apart from the places that facilitate their use. Convenience must happen somewhere. A cashless society is never just about digital payment apps; it is functionally dependent on the retail spaces that enable cashlessness. What, then, about users? Is the adoption of cashless transaction apps—for them at least—motivated by an inherent desire for convenience? As we have seen above, the answer is: perhaps in some cases, but it is incentives that move the market. Rebates, incentives, promotions, loyalty points, and integration into platform ecospheres motivate the adoption of cashless transactions, where they are not coerced by the withdrawal of cash or mobility. As described by users and tech critics in the period of the so-called cashless transaction wars of 2018–19 in Japan, the use of payment apps involved cycling through multiple windows to get your QR code before you can finally pay, and encountering glitches and crashes after that. If seamlessness, ease, reduction of labor, and elimination of inconveniences were the promise of these apps, initial accounts from the period suggest they fell short of their promise. The sense of novelty was perhaps in play, but the offer of savings during a time marked by wage stagnation and slow price inflation was likely more significant, or at least must be so if we attribute consumers with rational motives. Nonetheless, it is still worth delving deeper into the term convenience. (For parallel if sometimes conceptually diverging accounts, see the special issue on convenience edited by Rahul Oka (Oka, 2021)). In particular, we should be mindful of the future scenario implicated by the becoming-default of convenience.

This is how we can understand QR-code payment in China; a becoming-infrastructural of something that was once optional, now retroactively explained via the concept of convenience. It is in this sense that I identify a peculiar retrospective temporality to convenience. It is a term that often works to explain why something default has become such. There is almost always a force of enclosure that underpins these transitions. In India's Paytm, it was the flash demonetization. In Japan's case, it was incentives—including PayPay's over-the-top “Festival.” This conveniencing suggests that a distinction can be made between convenience as feeling and convenience as a condition. That is, alongside subjective feelings of ease, convenience names a second moment; a condition.

Elsewhere, Joshua Neves and I have argued that convenience moves from the first moment of the conscious perception of something as convenient (designating a feeling of ease) to something like the affective background of everyday life (convenience as a condition; as the infrastructure of life itself) (Neves and Steinberg, 2024: 22). That is, we distinguish between convenience as the subjective sense of ease; and convenience as condition. The first might accord with the quotidian sense of increased ease, comfort or seamlessness which underpins some activity (the general definition of convenience as ease (Oka, 2021: 192)); the second we could understand via Brian Massumi's description of fear as “the objectivity of the subjective under late capitalism” (Massumi, 1993: 12). In this second moment, convenience is no longer a choice or motivation but rather a condition within which we live the objectivity of the subjective. A feeling that has become the background surround or infrastructure of life itself. Convenience shifts from something we feel to something we live inside (Neves and Steinberg, 2024: 27). ⁶ Once inside it, convenience becomes background feeling; setting a default. To this two-stage process, I note another path to convenience-as-default that I have foregrounded here: conveniencing, which names the process whereby something not originally felt to be easy or comfortable is made to appear to feel convenient, but only retrospectively. This is the condition of convenience without the first moment, that is the initial feeling of something as convenient. Payment apps become convenient, but only in retrospect; once they have become default conditions due to enticements or inducements. This is the inverse movement to the one Neves and I trace: from convenience as default to convenience as feeling; from the second moment back to the first.

To return to Jane Feuer's point above, this second movement is akin to the recursive dynamic of a viewer experiencing the “liveness” programmed into the television show based on prior audience testing. In this case, it is the become-default of a promise of rewards framed as convenient. This “living inside” of convenience has become a core aspect of platformization. Once inside, there's no more outside to convenience. It is something we inhabit, and not by choice, reason, or volition. This is why ideological critiques of convenience have little effect in the face of everyday “digital resignation” (Draper and Turow, 2019). We understand that our data is being gathered, but living outside of the mandatory “convenience” of the smartphone is not possible. This compulsory condition of convenience directs many people—from office workers to delivery workers to caregivers who live the on-demand temporality of contemporary work and care. If convenience merely designates seamlessness, ease of use (Tierney, 1993), timing (Shove, 2003), and time-saving, then PayPay was not convenient—despite promises to be so. Yet there could be a time—perhaps it is arriving already—when PayPay nonetheless becomes the default payment method, and thereby a social condition, and thus convenient. The becoming-mandatory of technological forms previously seen as frivolous may encourage PayPay's head company SoftBank. Think again of the smartphone: an initially frivolous thing has become a convenient requisite for work, leisure, access to basic services, and public spaces. Those incentives and rewards are clearly sufficient to bring users onboard and keep them there. This is the power of conveniencing.

Based on the accounts of journalists, tech critics, and others, we can state with relative certainty that PayPay and LINE Pay were not convenient payment options when they were introduced. Yet, if, in the for now somewhat unlikely scenario, PayPay becomes the dominant transaction medium in Japan, displacing credit cards and IC cards and cash, perhaps those same journalists, critics, and users will retrospectively describe the platform as being convenient (and always having been convenient). Convenience would then operate as a shortcut explanation for PayPay's ascendancy, allowing PayPay to become what their ads and promotional materials always promised them to be. This would be the conveniencing of the default, the inescapable, the only option available. This is precisely the convenience that so much of the research on cashless payments relies on (I would say: defaults to).

This should offer a cautionary reminder for those writing about digital platforms and payment apps of the need to question the too-easy account of these apps via the analytic shortcut (or causal circularity) of convenience. ⁷ Instead, we should insist on asking: what does convenience mean, for whom, and when in time? How is this convenience formed, and by association with which retail environments? We should also continue to consider which version of convenience is in play: the feeling or the condition, and in what order. From feeling to condition? Or from condition to feeling, as in conveniencing? Otherwise, the teleology of convenience—as a retroactive explanation for entirely different causal factors—will obliterate the content, feeling, and historical making of convenience itself.