The question comes up before every order, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one.
Nearly every phone sold in the last several years can read a tap card. On the Apple side, the iPhone 7 was the first that could read an NFC tag at all, and from the iPhone XS onward it happens in the background: screen on, unlocked, hold the card near it, and a notification slides down. No app, no setting to find, nothing to explain. That covers essentially everyone you will meet in a business context.
Android is less tidy. The large majority of handsets have NFC and have had it for years, but two things vary. Some ship with the radio switched off by default, and on cheaper handsets it is occasionally not fitted at all. You cannot tell by looking.
The failure is almost never the phone
This is the part nobody tells you before you buy, and it is the part that actually matters.
When a tap does not work, the cause is usually one of three things, and none of them is the card.
The first is where you tapped. The antenna is not in the middle of the phone. On an iPhone it sits at the very top edge, near the cameras, and the natural human instinct is to touch the card to the middle of the back. Nothing happens, both people look at the card, and the moment gets strange. Aim high.
The second is the case. A thin silicone case is invisible to NFC. A thick rugged case, a metal plate for a magnetic car mount, a pop socket with a metal core, or a wallet case with four cards stacked in it will all weaken or block the read. Metal between the card and the antenna is the reliable way to stop this working.
The third is the phone being asleep. The screen needs to be on and the phone unlocked. A phone lying face down on the table is not going to read anything.
What to do when it does not work
Have a fallback and decide what it is now, while you are reading this, rather than in the two seconds when someone is holding out their phone and it is not doing anything.
The fallback is not a lecture about NFC settings. Nobody wants to be walked through their quick settings panel by a stranger who is trying to sell them something. The fallback is a QR code or your profile address said out loud, used immediately and without commentary, so the conversation continues.
That is the whole trick. The tap is the good version. The fallback is what keeps the bad version from being memorable.
Why this matters more in Japan
An exchange of business cards here is a small ceremony, and the cost of a fumbled one is not technical, it is social. If you are going to introduce a new object into that moment, you need to be certain about the mechanics, because the recovery has to look like part of the plan rather than an accident.
Practise it once on your own phone. Find the spot on the back where it reads first time. Then you will know exactly where to hold it, and the person in front of you will see something that works.