Long-time Japan resident here. I haven’t travelled outside Japan for quite a while so I don’t have a good sense of how payments work in daily life elsewhere. Here, the big convenience store chains now accept a couple of dozen different types of contactless, swipe, or QR code payments [1, 2, 3 (in Japanese)]. However, cash is also widely used, and many smaller businesses still accept only cash [4, 5 (ditto)].
[1] https://www.sej.co.jp/services/cash.html
[2] https://www.family.co.jp/services/payment.html
[3] https://www.lawson.co.jp/service/payment/settlement/index.ht...
[4] https://www.caa.go.jp/policies/policy/consumer_policy/meetin...
[5] https://dentsu-ho.com/articles/8187