WashPost = "In Japan, a Wireless Vision of Future for U.S.: Mobile
Internet Is Mainstream as Cell Phones Take Place of Computer "
interesting.... however, if you multiply everything in this article by
2, you will get South Korea.



In Japan, a Wireless Vision of Future for U.S.: Mobile Internet Is
Mainstream as Cell Phones Take Place of Computer

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 19, 2004; Page A01

  TOKYO -- In search of a chic cafe hidden in the neon alleys of a
teeming Tokyo business district, Hiroki Wai activated the global
positioning system on his cell phone and punched in the cafe's phone
number. Instantly, a detailed map appeared and a perky female computer
voice was navigating Wai toward a hot date with a $9 latte.

  "Now turn left; now turn right, walk straight ahead. . . . Hurray,
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 this 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. When he makes or receives a call,
Amano creates an identity for himself by projecting an animated
character onto the other party's phone screen. Amano controls his alter
ego's emotions -- showing sadness, rage or glee -- by pressing
different phone keys, and can change characters to suit his mood or
caller.

  "My keitai is also a video phone, so my callers can actually see me,
and I can see them, if we choose," Amano said. He showed a reporter
I-chan, a sexy Japanese anime girl in a tight pink sweater and
cow-patterned miniskirt who he is now planning to display to friends as
his alter ego. "I might not always be looking my best when they call,
so I like the characters instead," he said.

  On train platforms and highway billboards, cell phone ads dominate the
cityscape. The ads underscore the idea that hot new laptops no longer
impress the affluent young Japanese; only the latest-model cell phones
are turning heads or winning status among peers.

  "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. "You take your world with you when you have your
keitai in your hand. 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. 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."

In Kyoto, the cell phone culture has generated a new type of university
class. Students in more than 52 courses ranging from math to welfare
studies at the city's Bukkyo University almost never speak aloud.
Rather, they e-mail questions and comments from their cell phones to
their professors while in class, and professors answer orally.

  "Students can be very shy, and the anonymousness of the system helped
them to overcome their shyness," said Kiyoharu Hara, assistant
professor of sociology and a mastermind of the university's unusual
class communication. "Keitai mail matched the Japanese culture of
silently conveying meaning."

  Cell phones also have dramatically improved efficiency in marketing.
Restaurants advertise immediate discounts on Web sites when they have a
slow night, offering price cuts of as much as 15 percent to fill seats
with keitai bargain hunters.

  But some people complain that so much messaging and surfing with cell
phones has resulted in people communicating more, but talking less.

  Mutsumi Mukaigawa, 26, an apartment concierge nursing a coffee at
Starbucks with one hand, holding her cell phone, decorated with a
silver-plated dangling bauble, in the other, has been sending more
keitai mails and making fewer calls to her parents, who live four hours
north of Tokyo. "My mother just last weekend said my father was sad
because I call less and less," she said. "But keitai mail is just so
much easier."

  Japanese have grown so skilled at writing e-mails on cell phones that
many now find it simpler than using computer keyboards. Some have
argued that the mobile Internet has taken off in Japan -- as well as
nearby South Korea -- because Asian thumbs are smaller and more nimble,
and thus more suited to typing on tiny cell phone keys. But the
Japanese who launched the service here say size doesn't matter.

  Takeshi Natsuno, considered the father of I-mode -- the landmark
service of communications giant NTT DoCoMo that granted Japanese easy
access to the Internet via cell phones in 1999 -- argues that U.S.
cellular phone companies have simply mishandled the concept by
employing different signal "standards," or cellular languages, which
make it difficult for cell phones to communicate with the Internet.

  At the same time, NTT DoCoMo, still the market leader here, encouraged
Internet content providers to produce Web sites viewable on cell phone
screens by offering them more than 90 percent of the revenue generated
from user fees. DoCoMo reaped the benefits as these sites boomed, more
subscribers signed up and content providers paid charges for their
expanded use of DoCoMo's wireless network.

  "Everyone wants to say, 'Oh, the Japanese are strange. They love tiny
and miniature things and that's why cell phone services have taken off
here,' " Natsuno said. "But the truth is that we are normal, and it's
the other guys who are something odd. It's not about being Japanese.
It's about knowing what people want and how to sell it the right way."


Binneh s Minteh
New York University

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