Yumiko buys a can of coffee from a vending machine and pays her train fare using her cell phone. The train pulls in at the station, and Yumiko confluences with the tail end of a stream of rush hour commuters boarding the train. Gone are the days when the rail line hired dedicated Oshi ya—or “pushers”—to physically push commuters into packed railcars. Now, station staff fill that role as rush hour demands. A college student utters quiet apologies as he crams Yumiko forward. A recorded voice pleasantly admonishes passengers to refrain from talking on their cell phones and requests riders set their phones to mana modo—“manners mode” or “silent mode.” Having heard the announcement countless times before, it occupies only a peripheral part of her attention, like the sound of cicadas on a summer night. Standing shoulder to shoulder in the railcar, she is busy looking up reviews on tablet devices, wondering how she could use something so big in such a cramped environment as this. She then picks up where she left off on the keitai shousetsu—cell phone novel—she had been reading. This one is a particularly racy pregnancy romance, which Yumiko devours in 100-word morsels downloaded via SMS.
The phenomenon of the cell phone novel, with its very real real-world implications (in 2007, half of the bestselling novels in Japan were adapted from keitai shousetsu), serves as perhaps the most dramatic example of how keitai interrelates with culture, but let’s not forget that technology is the third leg in the keitai triangle. Most recently, DoCoMo exhibited some pretty compelling innovations at Japan’s mobile trade show CEATEC 2011 back in September. Notably, the company showed off a smartphone device which measures acetone levels in one’s breath to gauge the amount of fat burned, presumably in training for one of those punishing Japanese game shows. Also, the company offered up some fancy smartphone covers: one attained a full battery charge in under 10 minutes; others flaunted specialized sensors that detect UV light, body fat content, even bad breath. A prime example of how culture shapes technology is DoCoMo’s gamma radiation sensing phone cover, a clear corollary of the Tohoku earthquake of March.
Many features of keitai are now familiar to Westerners, like address books, clock features, calculators and schedulers, digital audio recorders and music and video players. Some are not so familiar, like pedometers and security apps based on fingerprint and face recognition.
Japan’s mobile industry and keitai culture have gone hand in hand in innovating cell phone features; some things we take for granted, even features that are just now gaining momentum here, have been around in Japan for ages. Short message service (SMS) first sprang up in Europe in the mid-‘90s, but in the early ‘90s, Japanese were already engaging in a proto-texting via pagers, which used a numeric lingo based on the Japanese words for numbers. Mobile gaming saw mainstream popularity in the early 2000’s.
On the mCommerce front, in 2004, DoCoMo introduced Osaifu-keitai—literally “wallet mobile”—a term which encompasses those cell phones outfitted with Sony’s Mobile FeliCa RFID smartcards as well as the mCommerce services imparted. Services like electronic identity and loyalty cards. Mobile Suica (an acronym for Super Urban Intelligent Card), launched by DoCoMo and au in 2006, is the railway fare payment service on the Osaifu-keitai system. Launched by DoCoMo in 2004, Cmode is the ePayment service for vending machine purchases.
Also, recall, DoCoMo first launched its 3G network back in 2001; this was the first commercial 3G network in not only Japan, but also the world.
However, most significant to the scope of this writing—with its far-reaching and really unforeseeable consequence—was DoCoMo’s launch of a service it called “i-mode” in February 1999. i-mode is a mobile internet service which allowed users to browse the web. However, it could only browse sites specifically tailored for the i-mode platform, and with the advent of smartphones running “real” browser software, seems to be heading the way of the dinosaur in the larger global scheme. But back then… six months after launch, i-mode had attracted a million customers and, another year after that, served 10 million. As of October of this year, over 51 million Japanese subscribe to i-mode, as do some 5 million people internationally. But, what’s really important here is that some, DoCoMo included, point to i-mode as the spark that touched off the whole of keitai culture, and with those numbers, they make a pretty strong case for it, too.
Romantic as it may be to attribute the creation of a whole cultural movement directly to a single, simple application, keitai would likely have arisen anyway, with or without i-mode. This notion that DoCoMo somehow breathed life into keitai resonates with primordial soup theories on the origin of life or, alternatively, with the image of Viktor Frankenstein exalting in all his fervor, “It’s alive!” The reality of it—considering the complexity of culture—is likely more Zen in that the relationship between technology and culture is less Frankenstein and monster than it is chicken and the egg. A hardboiled egg. Sliced down the middle and placed atop a steaming bed of ramen.
