QR Codes In Japanese Visas

One of the conclusions which developed from my last post about Japan is that the big difference between Japan and other countries is not the level of technology but the pervasiveness of the technology in everyday use. A case in point is mobile barcodes: The technological capacity is relatively easy and pretty much everyone has it, the difficult part is the business model behind it and driving uptake of the codes. In Japan QR codes are everywhere, but I didn’t realise how completely they’d been taken up by the country until I looked at the visa I received in Japan — shown right. This is not a marketing gimmick…