At least when I lived there, Japan was a heavily cash centric culture. Due in part to the difficulty of getting a credit card and how little benefit there was to having one for day to day consumer interactions (edit to mention that I’m very much simplifying here; I know it’s more nuanced than this). 60% is lower than I would have expected but it has been almost a decade since I lived there. I closed the article once they threw that huge pop up in my face, but I did see that they only mentioned that Japan was an outlier. If you knew anything about Japanese economics and culture, this wouldn’t have been surprising to see. I’m guessing the rest of the article didn’t provide any depth to their visualization.