When Suica service is “partially available in some other stations,” how do I find out where exactly?

Question

On this map describing the railway lines in Eastern Japan where Suica and other compatible IC cards can be used, it is noted that a star indicates that

In addition to the above, Suica's service is partially available in some other stations. For further details, please access the JR EAST website.

For example, the Ban'etsu West line, running westwards from Koriyama station (at the bottom right corner of the PDF), is marked with a star. I assume that this means that Suica can only be used at some stations on this line, but where exactly on the JR East website do I find out exactly what those stations are?

Answer 1

The easiest way to find out whether Suica et al. can be used at a JR East station is to type the station's name in Japanese (with the suffix 駅) into a search engine, and look at the corresponding 駅の情報 (station information) page on the JR East website, which should be among the first results. See for example here for Aizu-Wakamatsu station.

The station information page contains a Suica section with four "boxes", which indicate (from left to right) whether a Suica can be

• used at the ticket gates;
• charged with cash;
• charged with JR East's "View Card" credit card; and
• used for shopping at the station's kiosks or vending machines.

If the box is green, yes, if it is grey, no. If the page does not contain a Suica section, it means no to all.

For non-Japanese speakers, a simple way to obtain a station's Japanese name is on the line's Wikipedia page (for example here for the Ban'etsu West line), which lists the line's stations in Japanese and Latin characters.