[kelnos]

My wife has a US-bought iPhone, and we tried to load some money onto a digital Suica card. The hardware is there, but the system wouldn't accept any of the credit cards or her debit card that she had registered with Apple Pay.

An Indian friend of mine (who lives in the US) told me it's similar to when he visits family in India; none of the digital transit cards work for him because the system won't accept his US payment cards.

(I have an Android phone which has the right FeliCa hardware, but it's disabled in software so Google doesn't have to pay the licensing for it.)

[Dracophoenix]

Visa and (to an extent) Mastercard have been known to block transactions from their foreign-issued credit cards to digital Suica and PASMO cards. US issued Amex and Discover cards (at least prior to the latter's acquisition by Capital One) use JCB's merchant network in Japan, and thus receive the same treatment as any other JCB-branded card.