Basically, you can think of the phone as a user interface to your credit card. So you can check your balances and usage history easily, have multiple cards on the same phone (and manage them on the phone), and do all kinds of weird stuff like pick up coupons from NFC readers around town, and log in to karaoke machines with your favourite songs.

As you say, right now, the advantages of mobile phone NFC versus a plain old NFC-enabled credit card are presently sorta marginal. In Japan the majority of people use static cards instead of the mobile phone version. But as the services start to expand and the marketing geniuses figure out how to eek some benefit out of this system, I think you'll see the adoption rate increasing.

Some things that are essential when designing such a system are: ability to use the payment system even when the device is out of battery, recovery and transfer of the user IDs to another device, and remote disabling. Somehow, I doubt the US based folks have gotten their heads around these very important aspects yet.

I was about to reply and say, "what rock have you been living under?!" The payment terminals are simply everywhere in Tokyo; you can't miss em.

But the parent has a point: in rural and more old-fashioned areas of Japan, it's true that NFC payment systems are a bit more rare and cash is generally preferred. The exceptions are the national chain stores and convenient stores, which accept NFC payments, but for a rural resident, there might not be enough "critical" mass of stores to justify signing up.

So here we have another article that says Japan is somehow unique, homogeneous and therefore "easy" to set up NFC payments. But that's a rather flawed and tired excuse. The NFC payment systems in Japan are just as fragmented as anywhere else, with lots of mutually incompatible systems (Seven-Eleven being a prime example, accepting only their homegrown "nanaco" card). The difference is that the hardware aspects are all based on the FeLiCa standard, thus, much as different protocols can run over Ethernet, you don't need to invest in various mutually incompatible hardware sets.

People outside of Japan should follow this model too. First decide on a widely compatible communication standard (FeLiCa is a decent one and already used internationally) and then let the various billing companies fight it out.