My 23rd Century Cell Phone

Upon arriving in Awa city, getting a Japanese phone was one of my highest priorities. Wandering into a Japanese keitai shop is kind of like a cross between attending an electronics industry convention and walking into the Sharper Image for cell phones. A typical Japanese cell phone, for example, may come with an LCD screen that swivels 90 degrees, GPS tracking, a bar-code reader, digital TV, credit card functions, video conferencing and a camera and is unlocked by face recognition. On top of that, several phones have begun to appear with waterproofing (for those of my friends that drop their phones in pools or toilets) and even solar-powered rechargeable batteries. You can get up to a 10 megapixel camera on your phone, they all record video, and indeed it’s pretty impossible to get a phone without a camera- I heard of another JET who was trying to save money by getting as few gadgets as possible, and chances are they got one with most of these features for free.
So, as you can imagine, when I chose the “free” option for cell phones at the store, I wasn’t expecting to be able to watch TV on my phone through a miniature antenna, or take high quality pictures/movies, surf the web easily, or about 100 other things that my little flip phone can do. For Japanese people that don’t use e-mail for business, it is also common here to have a single e-mail address- that of their cell phone (we don’t do instant messaging here haha)- I recently heard of a 31-year-old Japanese woman (the girlfriend of a fellow JET) who has just gotten her first e-mail address outside of her cell phone.
This is because e-mail and easy web surfing have been readily available on the Japanese market since before we knew these things existed in America. A short rundown by the NY Times states that for the mass consumer market, the Japanese developed: e-mail capabilities in 1999, camera phones in 2000, third-generation networks in 2001, full music downloads in 2002, electronic payments in 2004 and digital TV in 2005. Part of the reason that we haven’t seen more of these cell-phones in the States is two-fold- one, what the NYT calls the “Galapagos Effect”- as Japanese cell phones became more and more advanced, other countries had little incentive to develop their networks at the same pace as advances in Japanese cell phone technology because their own domestic cell phone industries would suffer. So, the Japanese have continued to develop their phones, and the average user here has, what would be considered abroad, a super-advanced phone. Second is the fact that recently we have become enamored with software-based phones as opposed to the gadget-packed (hardware-based) phones from here in Japan. Our typical phone of choice will most likely be an iphone, which as little value on the surface, but as we all know is jam-packed with useful light-saber, beer drinking, and music recognition software.
Interestingly enough, the iPhone has begun to make an appearance here, but so far it’s stood about as much of a chance on the Japanese market as our phones do elsewhere. I guess it’s just a matter of taste…