Anyone who’s spent time in Japan — any at all — recognizes the importance of mobile phones in today’s Japanese lifestyle. Wherever you go, whether it be on the train, walking along the street or waiting for a bus, you’ll see people around you staring fixedly into their little folding window to the world, which is called a keitai (in Japanese 携帯), which translated literally means “something you carry around”.

By the time they reach middle school, over half of Japanese kids carry their own keitai and use it not only as a way to stay in touch with friends and family, but also to play games, play music, navigate around town, view videos, take pictures, pay for things, not to mention surf the Internet.

Of course, it can be a little unnerving to see someone riding down the street on a bicycle while texting (and, yes, it’s not all that uncommon a sight). Nevertheless, it is still rather amusing to watch how people often crowd around a device, the likes of which didn’t really exist just a few years ago. After all, today’s keitai is so much more functional than its “cellphone” ancestor the two kinds of devices are simply hard to compare.

What’s interesting to me is to pay attention to the generation gap of heavy users of keitai. Naturally, nearly everyone uses a keitai these days, from children straight through to the aged.  However, the people who are incessantly pushing at their keitai dialpad to compose a new text, are they all high school students?  I’d say no. Surely usage of this kind decreases in the 40s and 50s, but the culture of long train commutes and the desire for impersonal communication breeds a desire to use messaging in nearly all age categories.

However, perhaps there is such a thing as “too much of a good thing.”  Schools have reportedly started clamping down on keitai use at school (see report from Mainichi Shinbun, below) and even on trains there are sections of most train cars that are reserved for pregnant women and the elderly. In these sections, keitai use is not only prohibited, but they must be switched entirely off, ostensibly for the protection of those who are more fragile.

With the mobile Internet booming around the world, Japan, which already boasts a very advanced 3G wireless telecommunications network, is well positioned to move ahead technically in the mobile communications market.  What I’m mostly wondering about is what impacts these changes will have on society.  We’re moving ahead full speed, so I imagine the results will become apparent in the coming years.

政府の教育再生懇談会は17日の会合で、6月初めにまとめる報告書に小・中学生の携帯電話の使用制限を盛り込む方針で一致した。報告書には(1)小・中学生に携帯電話を持たせない(2)機能を通話と居場所確認に限定する(3)有害サイトへの閲覧制限を法的に義務付けるーーなどの内容が盛り込まれる見通し。