Japan has a reputation as a technological wonderland, home to the most advanced and just plain-old cool gadgets in the world. Of all the various options available to slake the technolust of nerds like myself, the Japanese cell phone - or "keitai," as it is called here - is perhaps the best.
Nearly everyone in Japan owns a cell phone, including children. In my search for one, I came across a simple, child-sized model with the ubiquitous Hello Kitty logo plastered all over it. While I never considered buying that particular model, a manlier version with images of robots did catch my eye.
But despite the inherent awesomeness of giant robots, other phones managed to catch my attention, thanks to more conventional features, such as rotating screens that allow the user to watch television or a 5.1 megapixel camera. Unfortunately, my lack of yen dictated that I choose the student plan and the associated basic model of keitai offered by au, one of three major Japanese cell phone providers, along with DoCoMo and SoftBank. Japanese corporations seem to like unconventional capitalization techniques.
Even the low-end cell phone I ended up purchasing is better than any phone I have owned in the United States. It has a wide variety of extremely useful and fascinating tools and applications that I have no idea how to use because I am an idiot and chose the model that can only display in Japanese. Almost everyone else in my study abroad program wisely chose to have an English-displaying phone. But, for some reason, I thought that accidentally deleting my entire address book or initiating my phone's self-destruct sequence would force me to learn Japanese faster, or something like that. I've only had it a few days, though, so who knows? Maybe that will actually happen.
One thing I have figured out how to do with my phone is something that is, to my knowledge, unique to Japan. Unlike in the United States, text messages are not sent straight to the recipient's number. Everyone has a separate e-mail address for texting. This means that text messages can be sent from any other e-mail address, so if you wanted to send complicated directions to a friend, for example, you could type it out at a computer and send it by e-mail to their phone instead of pecking the whole thing out on the keypad of your phone.
While this option is nice, it is simultaneously annoying, because anytime phone numbers are exchanged, e-mail addresses must also be exchanged if the parties in question intend to send text messages to each other.
To nullify this drawback, Japanese cell phones have infrared ports, which allow the phone number and the e-mail address, along with any other information like the name and picture of the sender, to be sent to the other person at the same time. The cell phones are just held up near each other, the right buttons pushed and everything is sent to the other phone. It is a very simple and effective method, and everyone uses it.
Despite my frustration with actually using it, I am pleased with my sleek piece of technology from the glorious isles of Nippon. Sad to say, it will be useless when I return to the United States, so I will have to revert back to the typical U.S. phone. Maybe I'll be able to afford an iPhone. Those are just as sexy as any Japanese keitai.
