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

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.