Can you hear me now?
Well, by now you must be tired of the recent string of posts about the beauty of Japanese autumn and/or the grace and power of wadaiko. So let's change tacks and geek out for a bit.
As in every other part of the world, cell phones, mobiles, or - as they are know here - keitai, are an indispensible part of an urbanite's life. They are invaluable in doing business, hanging out, finding a mate, keeping track of your kids, or just plain keeping up with the Joneses.
However, there are several things uniquely Japanese about keitai...
First off, you must immediately realize that cell phone technology here is about 2 to 3 years ahead of that in North America. And in gadget years that's equivalent to about 10 dog years. If that arithmetic confuses, then just know that keitai not only allow you to talk to people, text or email them, and take their pictures, but also give you true web-surfing internet access, function as a credit card at the check-out counter, and allow you to fix your position using GPS and then email it to a keitai-wielding friend. Plus, no doubt, a myriad other things I am not yet aware of.
As in other parts of the world, there are some in Japan who are tragically addicted to this piece of technology...
However, probably the most-used feature of keitai is email and/or text messaging. At around ¥25 (!) per minute for voice, the pricing scheme in Japan encourages people to send messages rather than to call. Consequently, it is quite rare to see a keitai held up next to an ear, and very common to see people using their fingers to do the talking (ha!). This, of course, is very welcome behaviour. Contrast this to the usual joys of being forced to listen to one side of yet another Extremely Important Conversation that seems to be such a common feature of most public spaces in North America...
The arrangement of hiragana characters on the keypad is also quite logical and easy to use. Traditionally (not just on keitai but also in primary school), hiragana characters have always been grouped in fives), so that, for example, all the vowels (a-i-u-e-o) are accessed with the "1" key, all the k's (ka-ki-ku-ke-ko) with the "2" key, and so on. This makes things very easy, even for me, as you don't have to think in detail how a word is spelled before you start typing. As long as you know that "Hiroshima" starts with the "H" sound, you can hit the "6" key (ha-hi-hu-he-ho) and keep hitting it until the right character (hi, ひ) appears.
Of course, once you have typed in a sequence of hiragana that the keitai's on-board dictionary recognizes, you are given the opportunity to convert it to the more sophisticated kanji script. I, being illiterate foreign scum, usually ignore this option.
Keitai messaging is nicely used to fill people's 'dead time'. Commutes can be long in Japan, but this is a great time to ping mom & dad, arrange lunch with a friend, or break up with your boyfriend. On a typical commuter train or subway about a third to half the people are checking their email at any given time. Indeed, keitai have true email capability (as opposed to just text messaging that we are more used to in North America) and so you can trivially reach and be reached not just from cell phones of the same provider, but from all points of the Internet.
Keitai have one additional, extremely important function. They giving you the ability to easily ignore your surroundings - an ability that is crucial in Japanese society. Eye-to-eye contact between strangers is not the done thing here in Japan and indeed is considered rude if not downright threatening. In the olden days, the keitailess commuter on the crowded train home was forced to invoke his/her Zen-like ability to gaze with detachment right through the solid (but impermanent) body of his/her vis-a-vis neighbor and into the vacuous infinity beyond. Now, thanks to the progress brought to you by modern science and technology, all you have to do is bury your gaze in your keitai. One might lament this as the impending loss of yet another traditional Japanese art... but that is a topic for a different post.
As in every other part of the world, cell phones, mobiles, or - as they are know here - keitai, are an indispensible part of an urbanite's life. They are invaluable in doing business, hanging out, finding a mate, keeping track of your kids, or just plain keeping up with the Joneses.
However, there are several things uniquely Japanese about keitai...
First off, you must immediately realize that cell phone technology here is about 2 to 3 years ahead of that in North America. And in gadget years that's equivalent to about 10 dog years. If that arithmetic confuses, then just know that keitai not only allow you to talk to people, text or email them, and take their pictures, but also give you true web-surfing internet access, function as a credit card at the check-out counter, and allow you to fix your position using GPS and then email it to a keitai-wielding friend. Plus, no doubt, a myriad other things I am not yet aware of.
As in other parts of the world, there are some in Japan who are tragically addicted to this piece of technology... However, probably the most-used feature of keitai is email and/or text messaging. At around ¥25 (!) per minute for voice, the pricing scheme in Japan encourages people to send messages rather than to call. Consequently, it is quite rare to see a keitai held up next to an ear, and very common to see people using their fingers to do the talking (ha!). This, of course, is very welcome behaviour. Contrast this to the usual joys of being forced to listen to one side of yet another Extremely Important Conversation that seems to be such a common feature of most public spaces in North America...
You might think that sending emails or text messages in Japanese would be difficult, given the combination of a tiny keyboard and the fifty+ characters even in the phonetic hiragana syllabary, let alone the thousands that form the kanji script. But, not so. If anything, I find that things are easier than on a Western cell phone (modulo my inability to speak the Japanese language, of course). All the typing on a Japanese keitai is done in the phonetic hiragana, which means that rather than having to type individual letters, you type in whole syllables all at once. This, it turns out, is a much faster way to go. For example, to type "Hiroshima" on a western phone you'd have to type
44 [enter] 444 777 666 7777 44 [enter] 444 6 2
but on a keitai you just hit66 99999 33 7
which gives you ひろしま (hi-ro-shi-ma). Voila... you pressed things only 10 times and moved between keys only 3 times, as compared to 24 keystrokes and 10 key changes on a Western cell phone. [Yes, yes, I know about predictive text in English... but predictive text gets things wrong half the time for me. Try predictive text with "Marcin", "wadaiko", "Krakow", or, for that matter, "Hiroshima".]The arrangement of hiragana characters on the keypad is also quite logical and easy to use. Traditionally (not just on keitai but also in primary school), hiragana characters have always been grouped in fives), so that, for example, all the vowels (a-i-u-e-o) are accessed with the "1" key, all the k's (ka-ki-ku-ke-ko) with the "2" key, and so on. This makes things very easy, even for me, as you don't have to think in detail how a word is spelled before you start typing. As long as you know that "Hiroshima" starts with the "H" sound, you can hit the "6" key (ha-hi-hu-he-ho) and keep hitting it until the right character (hi, ひ) appears.
Of course, once you have typed in a sequence of hiragana that the keitai's on-board dictionary recognizes, you are given the opportunity to convert it to the more sophisticated kanji script. I, being illiterate foreign scum, usually ignore this option.
Keitai messaging is nicely used to fill people's 'dead time'. Commutes can be long in Japan, but this is a great time to ping mom & dad, arrange lunch with a friend, or break up with your boyfriend. On a typical commuter train or subway about a third to half the people are checking their email at any given time. Indeed, keitai have true email capability (as opposed to just text messaging that we are more used to in North America) and so you can trivially reach and be reached not just from cell phones of the same provider, but from all points of the Internet.
Keitai have one additional, extremely important function. They giving you the ability to easily ignore your surroundings - an ability that is crucial in Japanese society. Eye-to-eye contact between strangers is not the done thing here in Japan and indeed is considered rude if not downright threatening. In the olden days, the keitailess commuter on the crowded train home was forced to invoke his/her Zen-like ability to gaze with detachment right through the solid (but impermanent) body of his/her vis-a-vis neighbor and into the vacuous infinity beyond. Now, thanks to the progress brought to you by modern science and technology, all you have to do is bury your gaze in your keitai. One might lament this as the impending loss of yet another traditional Japanese art... but that is a topic for a different post.








2 Comments:
yeah, Japanese cell phones definitely rule. You could practically run your whole world with just a cell, no need for laptops or anything. They dice, they slice, can predict the weather...
Thoroughly enjoyed this,-phones and language.
from an 'old dame' who has never used a cell phone and is amused at the number of cell phones in use here,-CAR, street,store,etc. I believe in the technology and commend the Japanese on their advancement.
Wud like 2 discus language further in future.
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