Mobile Phone Use In Japan

A recent story in Moco News cited a survey that found Japanese usage of mobile phones still increasing. The survey found that 29 percent of the 20-40 age group spending more than three hours a day on their phone. For 40 percent of Japanese youth percent online shopping was the most popular service, while 38 percent said they most enjoyed downloading music.

I spent over three weeks in Japan last year and from my own experience I wonder how accurate this survey is.

I was looking forward to seeing all this mobile Internet activity firsthand but I was disappointed. They were using mobile phones almost exactly as Europeans do – to make phone calls and send messages. Although they send emails, using some great predictive software that, as the user types the start of a word [in Kanji], displays a list of common words and phrases for those characters. The user can then scroll through them, pick the word, which then drops into the sentence.

If people are downloading as much music as the statistics show, it was nowhere in evidence. In three weeks I saw six people listening to music on the move and four of those were using iPods. It seems that after years of neglect, the ubiquitous white slab has become cool.

The one time I saw rampant phone use was during the rush hour. Getting onto the Metro (as the Tokyo mayor has renamed the underground train system) at 9pm, the carriage was full of business people going home, using their phones to read. A whole row sat with their phones in front of them, absorbing emails, magazines, and newspapers.

Five other things caught my attention.

The pc Internet barely exists for a traveller. Even in the huge tourist city of Kyoto it was difficult to find a public pc; in the western reaches of Honshu and Kyushu it was impossible.

Handset design was poor. All local brands, they all looked the same: thick clamshells in coloured plastic, bigger than the average N-series Nokia.

The phone has replaced the camera. At every tourist spot they outnumbered actual cameras for taking photos.

Young girls covered their phones in stick-on jewels and dangly stuff. One dozing teenager I sat next to had solidly encrusted her phone with multi-coloured plastic jewels, topped with a Minnie Mouse bow. A lot of adult women had small pendant objects hanging off the phone.

You could make calls underground on the Metro. You could make calls on the bullet train. That was the real achievement; people making seamless phone calls on a train rocketing across the country at 180 mph. Think of the technology in action to achieve that.