After over two months of living in Japan, I now finally have a cellphone, or keitai as the Japanese call them. Anyone who has recently lived in or been to Japan will know that not having one of these appendages glued to your hand basically assures one pariah status. Granted, what I ended up getting after salivating over the higher-end phones and their various options like taking photos or playing games or looking up GPS maps or making coffee in the morning was a relatively bottom-of-the-line model by Sony Ericsson.
This particular model only does the basics, you know, send and receive email, look up certain web sites, create my own custom rings (I mean actually create a ring, from scratch, not just select one from various options), voice memo recorder, bilingual setting so I can read the menus in English, as well as make phone calls (oh yeah, that feature, remember that one?). All for about $3 after sales tax, and I think I overpaid!
For my carrier/plan I also aimed my sights a bit lower, which is to say I didn’t go with NTT DoCoMo, which currently has about 58% market share of Japan’s wireless market. Rather, I went with it’s old archrival KDDI’s au service, currently No. 2 in the keitai wars although soon to be surpassed by J-Phone (known for their bells-and-whistle phones). My reasons were more financial and practical and less anti-kingpin: NTT DoCoMo requires a huge deposit from non-Japanese residents, and their plans and per-call charges are more expensive than KDDI’s (or J-Phone’s for that matter).