About the telephone cards on this site
While spring-cleaning this year, I found my small collection of telephone cards that I have been keeping since I came to Japan in the early 1990’s. Back then the Internet as we know it now didn’t even exist; there was no Skype, no Yahoo messenger, not even the lowly email to communicate with my family in the Philippines. If I wanted to call home, I would buy a telephone card which cost ¥1,000 and gave me a whooping 5 minutes of conversation (most of which began with “We only have 5 minutes so talk fast!” and ended with “Oops, we’ll be cut off in 15 seconds…!”)
So what can you do with used telephone cards? Make an online gallery, I guess. ^_^;;
Note that these telephone cards are part of my private collection and are posted here only for informational purposes.If you have questions regarding this website, please send us a message at admin [at] jphonecards.net. Thank you.
Anatomy of a Japanese telephone card
An ordinary telephone card from Japan, like most telephone cards, is a rounded rectangle (No.1) measuring 86mm by 54mm in width and height. On its right ride, there are 1 or 2 nicks (No. 2) most likely to indicate by touch which side goes into the telephone first (the other side), especially to visually-impaired persons. On the upper-left corner, to visually indicate the direction of insertion is the “IN” mark (No. 3) and on the top are numbers below which holes are punched by the machine indicating the approximate units left remaining in the card (No. 4).Most telephone cards have 105 units (¥1,000) but 50-unit cards are not uncommon. 320- and 540-unit telephone cards (¥3,000 and ¥5,000 respectively I presume) apparently exist, although I don’t recall having personally seen one.
On the upper-right corner of our sample card (No. 5), the words “TELEPHONE CARD 105″ (indicating the number of the units the telephone card has) and on the lower-right the NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation) mark (No. 6) are printed. These two marks are probably the only ones whose position on the card is variable; on other telephone cards, they are printed on any two of the three available corners not occupied by the “IN” mark or sometimes omitted altogether.Finally, on the whole card itself is the design, which makes these cards collectible. A lot of these telephone cards feature Japanese scenery, although many more have anime characters, trains, sports figures and famous people on their designs.