How Mobile Phones Conquered Japan

How Mobile Phones Conquered Japan
By Xeni Jardin

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68537,00.html

Blue-haired Harajuku high schoolers thumb-text distant pals on stickered keitai. Cell phones become cookie brokers, beaming snack requests to vending machines that zap back digital payment demands. Teen girls book illicit "compensation dates" with salarymen, sending snapshots to potential johns via camera-phones.

The popular myth of Japan as a surreal, warp-speed incubator for all things handheld and digital is nothing new.

But rarely do outsiders have an opportunity to venture beyond iconic anecdotes for a matter-of-fact understanding of how mobile technology shapes that country's culture -- and our own.

Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life is touted as the first English-language book to attempt just that, and it succeeds.

Co-edited by University of Southern California research scientist Mizuko Ito, Keio University lecturer Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda of Tokyo's Chuo University, the book debunks popular assumptions about why mobile culture evolved as it did in Japan.

Through a series of real-world case studies, it examines the relationship between mobile technology and Japanese society. In doing so, it sheds light on the way handheld connectivity tends to reshape cultures worldwide.

The book begins by tracing the evolution of mobile media from its roots in the wireless telephones found on '50s-era merchant ships, through '90s pager culture to contemporary smartphones. Then it explores how those devices became a source of pervasive connectedness to friends, family, lovers and co-workers -- a completely different kind of connectivity from the "other-world" internet space experienced through personal computers.

The Japanese word for cell phone -- keitai, meaning "something you carry with you" -- provides a hint about its role within Japanese culture. Over time, mobile devices in Japan have come to be perceived not so much as bundles of technical features, or tools for replicating PC functions from the road, but personal accessories that help users sustain constant social links with others.

In one essay, Ichiyo Habuchi describes that always-on state of wireless closeness as a "telecocoon" -- "a zone of intimacy in which people maintain relationships with others who they have already encountered."

And contributor Kenichi Fujimoto refers to the devices themselves as "territory machines" capable of transforming any space -- a subway train seat, a grocery store aisle, a street corner -- into "(one's) own room and personal paradise."

Apart from the technology's role in sustaining familiar social structures, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian also examines how mobile devices facilitate new links, like that of the "intimate stranger."

Through controversial phone-dating websites or between text-message buddies, mobile media makes it possible for bonds to evolve between individuals who may never meet in real space, but who nonetheless share a vivid experience of disembodied closeness that follows them as they move through the world.

While traditional notions of cyberspace promise to unlock us from the limitations of offline relationships and geographic anchors, keitai space flows in and out of ordinary, everyday activities, nimbly integrating the virtual and physical realms.

The book reaches far back into Japanese history for the origins of that integration, pointing to the legend of Sontoku (Kinjiro) Ninomiya, a Johnny Appleseed-like national folk hero often represented in statues outside bookstores and schools.

Born into a poor family of farmers in the late 18th century, Ninomiya became an educator, entrepreneur and politician through dogged work and self-education. He is most often remembered reading as he walks, burdened with bundles of firewood gathered in daily chores.

The book points to this multitasker ancestor as a precursor of contemporary nagara ("while-doing-something-else") mobility, a concept now embodied in students who wander from home to class and back again, eternally gazing into a palm full of e-mails.

While Personal, Portable, Pedestrian is packed with an abundance of rich, empirically dense vignettes, what makes the book a refreshing read is the unremarkable, familiar tone with which it frames keitai culture in Japan.

As one college student is quoted as explaining to his professor, "A lifestyle with keitai is so natural that one without (it), or one from which (it) is taken away, sounds unreal."

And by understanding how a once-alien technology became such a natural extension of everyday life in Japan, we may yet understand what is in store for the rest of the world.