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The story
A post arguing that “the government should build a zero-fee national payment app and wipe out credit cards and PayPay” went viral on 5ch’s Nanademo Jikkyo G (Live News general) board. The complaint stems from the fact that cashless payments come with fees paid to credit card companies and QR-code payment providers, a burden that falls on stores and consumers alike. In response to the view that “if the government ran it, there’d be no need for fees,” other posters pushed back with arguments like “someone still has to cover development and operating costs” and “without fees to collect, there’s no incentive for the government to bother,” and the thread spiraled into a detailed debate comparing the cost of electronic payments to the cost of minting physical cash.
What people said
They'll just slap on a fee anyway, using "social security costs" as an excuse to skim off the top.
They're already doing that — it's called the consumption tax
Probably because consumer advocacy groups have no real power here
Right now it's basically like private companies are stealing a 3% "electronic payment tax" from us.
Plenty of point — run it on public funds and rake in a bunch of cushy retirement posts for ex-bureaucrats (amakudari)
No way that works — there's no way to process a ¥100 payment for less than a yen
Then minting and circulating 1-yen coins is "impossible" too, huh
Currency is backed by national credit, so that's a different matter
The cost of minting a 1-yen coin = money that ends up circulating in the economy, whereas the cost of electronic payment fees = money the government siphons off just to keep the system running. Totally different things.
And where exactly would you use it? The terminals to accept it aren't free either
And how much do you think that would cost in development and marketing? You think the public would accept paying taxes for that?
Those companies are constantly generating massive wealth — no way the government pushes them out just for some small potatoes tax revenue
Nobody would use something like that
Fine, I'll concede — if you can't actually rebut what I pointed out, that's basically an admission
No, you already got rebutted, and you couldn't counter it. Do you not know how much it actually costs to produce currency?
Wow, haven't seen that emoticon in ages
Functionally it's the same as printing ¥10,000 bills, except stashing cash under the mattress to dodge taxes would no longer work. Good for tracking welfare payments (namapo) and NPO subsidies too.
That's exactly where it always ends up. How many times do I have to say the cost and upkeep outweigh the benefits
There's actually a trend of going back to cash-only to keep prices down
That's just how a free market works — if you don't like it, just don't go there
I get that, but it puts the biggest burden on the store, though..
Background and key points of this debate
The Japanese government has set raising the cashless payment ratio as a policy goal, but the actual payment infrastructure is run by private companies such as credit card issuers and QR-code payment providers. The transaction fees charged to merchants are often covered by non-disclosed contracts, and the burden is said to fall especially hard on small and mid-sized stores. That’s the backdrop for the idea that “the government should just build a zero-fee payment network,” but the thread split over who would actually cover the operating costs — development, maintenance, fraud prevention, and so on. Whether it’s even fair to compare the cost of minting and circulating physical cash to electronic payment fees also became a point of contention, and part of the discussion devolved into something closer to personal attacks. It’s worth noting, since it’s an easy point of confusion, that while the Bank of Japan has been running phased pilot tests of a “digital yen” since 2021, this remains purely at the research stage — it is not, as some posters implied, a concrete plan for a zero-fee payment app like the one discussed in the thread.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nanademo Jikkyo G) thread “Shouldn’t they build a national cashless system and wipe out credit cards and PayPay?“
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