Meishi exchange has rules, and most digital business card products were designed by people who have never performed it.
You present with both hands, your card turned to face the other person, held at the edges so you are not covering your own name. You receive with both hands. You read it. You do not put it away. It stays on the table, arranged by seniority, for the length of the meeting.
If you take somebody's card and slide it straight into your back pocket, everyone notices. Nobody says anything.
What the ritual is actually doing
The mistake is reading this as an inefficient way to transfer contact details. Under that reading, a digital card is obviously better, and the conclusion is wrong because the premise is.
Almost none of what is happening is data transfer.
The exchange establishes who is in the room and in what order. It gives everyone a moment to place a name against a face before the meeting starts. The card on the table is a seating chart you can read without appearing to look. And handing something to a person with two hands, then reading it before speaking, is a small act of attention that sets the register for everything after.
You could transmit the same fields by NFC in half a second and lose all of it.
That is why I get uncomfortable when this category talks about replacing meishi. The thing being replaced is not the part that is inefficient.
Where the actual friction is
The friction is not in the room. It is after.
You return from a meeting with four cards. Somebody now has to get them into a system. In a large Japanese company that is often a scanning service or card management software, which is why those products are so well established here. In a smaller company, it is somebody typing.
Then, later, the second problem. Your details change and every card you handed out becomes quietly wrong, sitting in binders and card holders belonging to people who have no way of finding out.
Both of those are real, both cost money, and neither of them is the ritual. This is the gap where a digital card belongs.
The split that works
Paper for the room. Digital for the phone.
Carry paper cards and present them properly, every time, with both hands. This is not a compromise or a transition period, it is the correct behaviour and it should not change.
Then, later in the conversation, when contact details come up on their own, offer the tap. Usually this is when somebody says they will send something over, or asks how best to reach you. That is the natural seam and it does not interrupt anything.
The tap gives them a contact entry that is spelled correctly, a link that stays current when your details change, and whatever else belongs there, a calendar link, the company profile, the product page in Japanese.
Nobody has been asked to skip a step. You have added one, at the moment where the other person was about to do work.
Three things that decide whether it lands
Present the paper card first, always. The digital version is never the opening move. Leading with a tap in a first meeting reads as skipping the greeting, and you will not get told that you did it.
The profile must be in Japanese. Not translated at the last minute. If a Japanese executive taps a card and gets an English page with your name in a Latin script and no kanji, you have created work rather than removed it. Company name, title and address should appear the way they would appear on the paper card.
It has to work without an app. This is the one that kills most products here. If the other person has to install something, you have handed them a task in front of colleagues, which is worse than the typing you were trying to save them.
What I would tell a foreign company selling into Japan
Do the ritual properly and do not be clever about it. Buy real cards, get the Japanese side typeset by somebody who reads Japanese, and practise the exchange before the first meeting rather than during it.
Then put a hosted profile behind them, in Japanese, and let it carry the parts that paper cannot: staying current, being savable in one action, and holding the links a card has no room for.
That is the whole strategy. Respect the part that carries meaning, fix the part that is only logistics, and never confuse which is which.