(by Craig Fisher, UK, and Gunter Pilz)
In addition, from May 1985 onwards, notches were placed on the lower right - hand side of each card to make them more difficult to counterfeit.
Today, 50 and 105 unit cards (with two and three stripes on the reverse, respectively) are the only denominations produced, although cards with higher denominations were produced in the past.
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| White card with one notch and three stripes (= 105 units) | White card with two notches and two strips (= 50 units) |
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There are many classification criteria for magnetic phonecards. Most of them are explained in this image |
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In this example the following two criteria do not appear: " date of issue " and " KDD ". On some cards the " date of issue " is printed on the back, on other cards the three letters "KDD" are printed similarly to " NTT " in the Japanese text. |
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| PHONECARD CATEGORIES |
One of the reasons for the huge number and variety of
Japanese phonecards is that, in addition to the
public issue phonecards (and their overprinted versions of definitve
cards)
designed by NTT, and their forerunners,
DenDenKoSha - cards, cards can also be produced privately in the form of
advertising ("Free design") cards,
"Model Design" cards and
computer-printed cards. Printing and manufacturing of these "private"
cards is the responsibility of Teleca, a subsiduary of NTT. The next category of private cards, "White" cards, are those sold by NTT to
outside companies for printing. Phonecard publishers increasingly prefer
these to "free design" cards because they are faster and cheaper to have
printed; unfortunately for collectors they are all given the same code
number, making them difficult to catalogue.
Public issue cards are easily distinguished from private issue cards because
the former have the NTT logo "
"
on the front of the card, whereas private issue cards have it on the back.