Commentary by Momus | Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Feb, 14, 2006 EST
Walking through Tokyo's Ginza district one Friday evening last month I saw an extraordinary sight that will soon become an ordinary one: A businessman was talking into his keitai (the Japanese word for cell phone), holding it out in front of him rather than to his ear. Suddenly, smiling, he raised the device to his lips and kissed the screen.
It wasn't hard to piece together an explanation -- the man was making a video call to his lover. His lover had asked for a screen kiss, or perhaps they'd synchronized one. It was my first glimpse of this behavior, and it happened in Tokyo, but I knew it wouldn't be my last. Soon enough we will see this scene repeated in New York, London, Paris, Berlin and San Francisco.
iMomus
As we've read by now in countless articles, the keitai isn't just a new technology, it's a new culture. New cultures bring new sights to the streets. Today I want to make a list of some of the ways keitai culture has made itself apparent in the two months I've been here in Japan.
First, though, I should explain that I'm very much a laptop guy. I like the big screen, the fully-featured internet with pictures. If I'm at home, I'm almost always on my laptop, surfing Wi-Fi. When I go out, I want to escape the web's sticky threads. I want to see people, and I want to see life.
But there's a problem. Increasingly, when I go out here in Osaka, what I'm observing in public places is people silently surfing on their i-mode keitais. I tear myself away from the internet only to enjoy endless vistas of other people using it.
I shouldn't be surprised. Japan Media Review tells us that there are 89 million keitai subscriptions in Japan. Seventy percent of the population owns at least one keitai.
This saturation has a very literal impact on my movements through the city: it's not unusual to have to jump out of the way of a young man wobbling along Osaka's narrow backstreets on a bicycle, concentrating on the glowing screen of his keitai. Perhaps he's lost and consulting a GPS navigation service, or, who knows, he may even be reading a Wired News column in translated, stripped-down Hotwired i-mode format. He may be reading me, which would be great, but has he seen me?
Xeni Jardin, reviewing a book called Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, compared the dextrous multitasking skills of Japan's oyayubi zoku (literally "thumb tribe") to Japanese folk heroes. Sontoku Ninomiya and Prince Shotoku Taishi were medieval multi-taskers so intelligent that they could, so the story goes, listen to what 10 people were saying, all speaking at once. But could they ride bicycles at the same time?
It's also a little worrying to see two girls in a cafe running out of things to say and sitting face to face in silence, each reading their keitai screen. The massive success of keitai culture in Japan is largely due to the decision, taken in the late '90s, to market the phones to women and young people. It would be sad if their online conversations had silenced their cafe conversations.
Then again, information ubiquity is great. You can sew facts into conversations on the fly. It's great, for instance, when you're in the middle of a si- or seven-hour drinking and eating session in a reggae izakaya, and someone mentions an island where there's an art installation, and with a few clicks you can call up and save the details of exactly how to get there.
It's also wonderful to see keitais being used for art themselves. My favorite Japanese photographer, Rinko Kawauchi, shows her photographs (taken with conventional cameras and mounted on gallery walls) all over the world. But if you can't get to one of her exhibitions, you can still see the photo diary Rinko keeps online, each day illustrated with one of her beautiful, subtle and understated keitai phone-camera snaps.
It may be a while before I see scenes like the ones I've been describing outside Japan; researcher Cho-Nan Michael Tsai estimates that "although the US was a dominant player in the telecommunication industry, today its cellular phone service industry is about 3 to 5 years behind Asia." Meanwhile, every day seems to bring more convergences and innovations: Keitais become mp3 players, they become e-wallets (you can now pay for goods in Japanese convenience stores by placing your phone against a reader), they become portable Playstations.
Given the theme of my last Wired News column about a return to the simple life, you might not be too surprised to hear that my favourite new keitai is one that comes full circle back to the simplest sort of telephone. Marketed to old people scared by today's increasingly complex everything-but-the-kitchen sink phones, the Tu-Ka S dispenses with all the frills. There's no camera, no mp3 player, no Playstation, no GPS, no e-cash, not even a screen. There's just voice service, a mike, an earpiece, a red Stop button, a green Go button and the numbers.
Don't be surprised if you see me kissing one.
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