Posted on: Sunday, February 22, 2004
Japanese hooked on their cell phones
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post
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| Rika Ogawa of Tokyo is among the 70 million Japanese who use their cell phones to gain access to the Internet.
Associated Press library photo |
"Now turn left; now turn right, walk straight ahead. ... Hooray, you're here!" the voice chirped from his receiver. A satellite in Earth orbit charted his progress on a full-color street grid displayed on the screen of his cell phone.
"The cell phone is way past being just a phone in Japan," said Wai, 32, a systems engineer who wakes up with his phone alarm at 6:30 a.m. and then uses the phone almost every waking hour to send and receive dozens of e-mails, link remotely to his home-office PC, download music and read newspapers, even novels, during his daily commutes. "For us," he said, "the cell phone is now a way of life."
The cell-phone market in the United States is set for a major shake-up after the announcement last week of a $41 billion buyout of AT&T Wireless by Atlanta-based Cingular Wireless, with the merged juggernaut poised to quicken the rollout of such advanced services as access to the mobile Internet and other third-generation, or 3G, technologies.
Behind the rush to boost cell-phone uses in the United States lies a less flattering truth: In recent years, America has lumbered forward like a John Deere tractor on the mobile information superhighway, while Japan has zoomed ahead like a Z-car.
Technologies considered experimental or novel in the United States have already gone mainstream here, giving rise to an unparalleled cell-phone culture. Today, Japan offers a fascinating glimpse into a possible future for Americans: life in a wireless world through the cell phone.
About 70 million Japanese — 55 percent of the population — have signed up for Internet access from their cellular phones, a threefold increase from 2000.
Cell phones, or keitai in Japanese, are closing in on computers as the device of choice for surfing the Internet. While the Japanese are using their cell phones in the same way many Americans use their laptop computers or personal digital assistants, they also are pulling out their phones to watch TV, navigate labyrinthine city streets with built-in GPS systems, download music, take and transmit home movies, scan bar-coded information, get e-coupons for discounts on food and entertainment, pay bills, play Final Fantasy, even program karaoke machines.
While at least some of these uses are expected to become commonplace in the United States, Japan's penchant for the cutting edge, the cute and the compact has given rise to a particular, occasionally peculiar, keitai culture.
Many young people today even describe their cell phones as extensions of themselves. On subways and trains throughout Japan, keitai addicts, oblivious to the world around them, their hyperactive thumbs furiously typing e-mails on cell phones, have become ubiquitous, even stereotypical sights. One Tokyo TV station recently broadcast a reality show featuring a teenage girl whose cell phone was taken away for one week. She was reduced to tears when she finally got it back.
"I get separation anxiety when I am away from my cell phone. It is part of my identity now," confessed Yoshihisa Amano, 26, who works for a software company in central Tokyo. "Cell phones have created extensions of personal space in Japan," said Yuichi Kogure, who teaches a class on keitai culture at Tokyo's Toita Women's College.
"In the keitai world, people forget where they are, and women (with cell phones), for instance, can be seen putting on makeup or brushing their hair in the subway, something considered highly rude in Japan in the past," Kogure said. "But now, people are walled inside their own little world with their keitai and aren't even aware of what they're doing in public."
