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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