Japanese Keitais

For those of you who don’t know (and there’s really no reason why you should know this), Japan’s cell phone tower system is completely different from the one in the States, or, to my knowledge at least, any other country in the world. So that means that cell phones from every other country don’t work in Japan, and, likewise, that Japanese cell phones can only be used in Japan. You may think that this is really inconvenient, and, well, frankly it is. I was one of the lucky ones who managed to find a rental Japanese phone in America before coming here. Most of the other international students had to wait a month after coming here to get a phone, since foreigners can’t buy one in Japan without an alien registration card. But the one advantage, if there is one, is that it forces every foreigner to get a Japanese phone, thus immersing them in the culture even more.

What, you may ask, could be so different about Japanese cell phones? Well, first of all, people don’t really use phones to call each other in Japan. Instead, they always text, and texting in Japan is totally different from texting in the States. Wait, did I say “totally different”? Because what I meant to say was “way, way cooler.” The coolest thing about texting on Japanese phones is all the icons you can send. There is a menu in the texting screen of probably over 100 different tiny icons that you can scroll through, and when you receive an icon in a text each one has a little animation that goes with it. The icons range from the ones you’d expect (smily face, sad face) to completely random ones that anyone would love receiving (an alien face, a whale, a space invader from the old-school arcade game) to completely random ones that you’d never want to send anybody (a steaming pile of shit that for some reason is smiling, a selection of ridiculous racial caricatures, such as a dark skinned guy in a turban, a white guy with a huge nose, and most surprisingly, an Asian guy with a pointy hat and a fu manchu mustache). If you avoid sending the latter icons, then texting in Japan is way more fun and flashy than texting in the States.

But the crazy aesthetics of cell phones don’t just apply to texting; they apply to the outsides of cell phones as well. For one thing, everyone puts keychains on their phones. Phones even have little tiny spaces on them for tying keychains. In fact, when I’ve told people that no one does that in America, I’ve gotten surprised reactions. But putting a keychain on your phone is probably the most subtle way you can customize it in Japan. If you want to go all out, you can go to certain places that are essentially beauty parlors for phones. They’ll put stuff like glitter, rhinestones, and elaborate stickers on your phone for you.

And then there’s something called infrared. Fucking infrared. Actually it has a different name in Japanese, but I keep forgetting it. Infrared is basically a wireless system that every phone has, and it lets you send your all your contact information directly to someone else’s phone, as long as their infrared is turned on. It’s actually very convenient, but before I figured it out it was a nightmare trying to use it, especially since it’s seriously the ONLY way people exchange phone numbers in Japan. The idea of manually putting someone else’s number into your phone while they tell it to you is unthinkable in Japan, at least among college students. Before I figured out how to use infrared, exchanging phone numbers with Japanese students was a crazy process, since no one would ever be willing to program my number into their phone manually. No matter how many times I would insist on it, or even write down my number, they would insist even more on using infrared, to the point where they would eventually just give up arguing and do it for me. Now I know how to use it, and everything’s fine, but before I did I always got the craziest reactions whenever I would try and tell people my phone number rather than using infrared.

Anyway, that’s the deal with Japanese cell phones. In other news, I’ve recently found out that I’ll be going to Hong Kong in July and Korea and Nepal in August. Of course, I’ll be devoting multiple special blog posts for each place I visit, most likely in the same way I did for Osaka. And speaking of Osaka, here are those pics I promised.