Apple's proud announcement that its new iPhone could be used to buy goods in a single swipe left customers non-plussed in Japan, where mobile contactless payments have been normal fare for a decade. A type of Near Field Communication (NFC) chip, known in Japan as FeliCa, was introduced to the Japanese mobile market in June 2004 and has been been implanted in almost all phones sold in the country since. Ten years ago the charismatic Takeshi Natsuno, who was then multimedia services director of Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo, extolled the benefits of swapping cash for cell phones. FeliCa was conceived by Sony way back in 1989 and first used in the Hong Kong underground railway system in 1997 -- in a card known as Octopus -- inspiring cities around the world to use similar technology in their own contactless transport cards.



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