Cellphone Queries

[mobiuschic42]

Whoah, you said a lot, Cliodhna! Very helpful stuff, but I'm just clipping out the pieces to which I want to reply:

Another point is how Japanese cell phones are actually used. You do not make phone calls on your phone.

This is true for the most part. Also, communicating mainly by text takes the pressure out of translating what your Japanese friends are saying (either from Japanese or from "English").

When you receive your bill in the mail, all you have to do is go to your nearest convenience store (as long as it's listed as ok on the back of the bill- generally 711 is the place to go), and as you're shopping, put your bill on top of your items of purchase and the bill will be added as part of the price. You pay them (cash), they stamp your bill in two places, hand you back the stub, and you've paid your cell phone bill. Incidentally enough, you can also pay your utility bills in the exact same way. It's pretty nifty. Don't be afraid when you have to thumb out ¥30,000 on the counter for bills, though. It's normal, and you're not going to get mugged on your way out.

It's true that you can do this, but there is a small fee for paying this way (or there was 4 years ago, at least). I don't remember exactly what I did, but I know I paid at the combini only once. I know I paid a couple months up front, so that took care of part of the issue. I think you can go to one of your provider's stores and pay for free there? That being said, if you're inaka, it's probably easier to just pay the fee at Lawson's or whatever.

Side-note for the being mugged part: I'm not going to say that nothing will happen to you crime-wise in Japan, because there are definitely (rare) instances where people were attacked (I know I read an account of a near-rape on either the JET site or in the handbook), but you'll probably feel and be safer than you would be in America (I don't know about other home countries, but I assume it's similar).
During the orientation at my Japanese school, there was the following exchange with the exchange students coordinator:
Coordinator (asking a room full of Westerners): How many of you think Japan is the safest country in the world?
(almost everyone raises his or her hand)
Coordinator, shaking his head and completely serious: It may seem like it, but let me tell you something: We have a shoplifting problem.
(the room was full of stifled laughter)

I would not buy a phone from another jet, simply because you're going to want a new phone with your own email address...

Excellent point - I agree! You'll also want to see what your friends have before you decide on a phone or a provider, and shopping for a phone and seeing all the differences from your own country's phones is very fun.

After you cancel your contract, you keep your phone.

I think this can actually go either way. Cancelling my cell phone was one of the few financial-type things I did without a fluent Japanese speaker, a salesperson who spoke English, or a precise note from the (Japanese) exchange student coordinator along with me. The lady was very nice, but there was some miscommunication about whether or not I wanted to keep my phone, so she almost took it from me. I don't know if I would've gotten money back; I was frazzled enough trying to express that I wanted to keep it without trying to ask other questions.

And now I've said almost as much as Cliodhna did - oops!

[Cliodhna]

It's true that you can do this, but there is a small fee for paying this way (or there was 4 years ago, at least). I don't remember exactly what I did, but I know I paid at the combini only once.

Personally I was never charged a fee, and this was from 2008-9. That's kinda odd that you were.

Side-note for the being mugged part: I'm not going to say that nothing will happen to you crime-wise in Japan, because there are definitely (rare) instances where people were attacked

For the record, I wasn't suggesting that there was no crime in Japan, just that it is not unusual for people to carry several mon on them on a regular basis and that the novelty of thinking someone might be carrying that much isn't as profound as in the states where we've very much become a plastic economy.

I don't know if I would've gotten money back; I was frazzled enough trying to express that I wanted to keep it without trying to ask other questions.

From what I understand, not signing the contract would've had you paying the price of the phone. Since you already signed up for it and were cancelling it, returning the phone wouldn't have gotten you a discount.


@bananathursdays: Glad I could help!

[Jax]

When you receive your bill in the mail, all you have to do is go to your nearest convenience store (as long as it's listed as ok on the back of the bill- generally 711 is the place to go), and as you're shopping, put your bill on top of your items of purchase and the bill will be added as part of the price. You pay them (cash), they stamp your bill in two places, hand you back the stub, and you've paid your cell phone bill. Incidentally enough, you can also pay your utility bills in the exact same way. It's pretty nifty. Don't be afraid when you have to thumb out ¥30,000 on the counter for bills, though. It's normal, and you're not going to get mugged on your way out.

It's true that you can do this, but there is a small fee for paying this way (or there was 4 years ago, at least). I don't remember exactly what I did, but I know I paid at the combini only once. I know I paid a couple months up front, so that took care of part of the issue. I think you can go to one of your provider's stores and pay for free there? That being said, if you're inaka, it's probably easier to just pay the fee at Lawson's or whatever.

Most JETs I know have their cellphone bill (and many other bills) taken directly out of their bank account. I have Softbank and they won't charge me to pay at the conbini, but they will charge me 100 yen for a paper copy of the bill that I would take to the conbini to pay.

And guys, please be careful when comparing living in Japan to your study abroad experience. Even a thing like a cellphone could be very different.

[Cliodhna]

And guys, please be careful when comparing living in Japan to your study abroad experience. Even a thing like a cellphone could be very different.

Could you please elaborate for me, please? I could understand potential city vs. inaka differences, but I went in to the store as a foreigner with another non-university-related foreigner who could better speak the language and had no problems. Going in ill-equipped as a foreigner I could see being potentially problematic, sure, but even if I had been living there outside of academia and done the exact same thing (which could still be a possibility if shortlisted), how does that affect the outcome? I never went with a university official or anything of the sort, and I like to think I had zero problems because I came prepared. I understand that living arrangements can and will be an entirely new animal, and I'm actually looking forward to that, but cell phones seem pretty straight forward, barring store staff bias.

[losdutchmen]

Ok, the Master of Stupid Questions has another.....

"Cliodhna wrote:
Another point is how Japanese cell phones are actually used. You do not make phone calls on your phone."

This totally confuses me. If a cell phone isn't used for calling people, then.....is it just a text/gps/game/music/internet/translator device? Really? People don't use them for calls? All of that convenience seems wasted. It also seems like a lot of trouble to go through to buy a phone that I won't be using as a phone. Do most people still have a landline at home that they use for actual calls? Seems redundant. I'm guessing most people here in the States have ditched the landline in favor of the cell phone. No use keeping both.

I have to be missing something. I'm probably paying 50$ a month, unlimited texts ,data plan, tons of minutes that I dont worry about going over. I don't know that I would pay for a plan that dissuaded me from using it as a phone.

[Patryn]

I think it's more the fact that not many people use their phones for calling people in public. Almost no-one talks on their phone on public transport, and in restaurants as it is considered rude - and if they do, they do it super quietly. On the street, I don't think it's super rare to find people talking on their phones, but I guess I don't see it as much as in Australia.

I've seen plenty of people making calls in their cars or at home and stuff.

[Cliodhna]

This totally confuses me. If a cell phone isn't used for calling people, then.....is it just a text/gps/game/music/internet/translator device? Really? People don't use them for calls? All of that convenience seems wasted. It also seems like a lot of trouble to go through to buy a phone that I won't be using as a phone. Do most people still have a landline at home that they use for actual calls? Seems redundant. I'm guessing most people here in the States have ditched the landline in favor of the cell phone. No use keeping both.

Phones in Japan don't use SMS (texting), everything is email. Some carriers might have a close-circut messaging system, AU had 'cmail', that you can only send between those also with your carrier with a crazy short character limit like sms but it's free to send. Phones are used mostly for email. Next up is internet, third tends to be train schedules/routes/etc. Amongst other things, your phone can be used to buy things at the convenience store, buy things from vending machines (which are everywhere), some can double as your train/bus pass, they act as your evacuation navi in the event of a disaster or impending disaster, they're portable books/comic books, you can watch live tv, listen to live radio, the list goes on.

Basically what I realized personally was that functional priorities in Japan are different than those in the west. You can find games on your phone, but most people bring a hand-held device for that (psp, ds, etc), and some phones are meant to double as mp3 players but most people have an ipod or equivalent already on. Another thing you have to remember is that before phones had internet in the west, Japanese phones had internet. Same with portable literature. Internet and email is their primary function, and it is through those functions that pretty much everyone you meet there will communicate with you by. Information is easily exchanged through IR ports in the phones and the profiles you exchange can be personalized on your end before you trade it with a friend. So, you see the emphasis on this side of the functionality instead of things like brick breaker and our phones being portable how-many-forms-of-media-can-we-shove-into-one-thing devices.

To give another example of shifted technological priorities, Japanese news broadcasts are a great example. In the middle of a report, a news anchor will pull out a poster board with a bar graph or a pie chart or something pasted on it. Yes, physically pull it out from under the desk. It is not a fancy graphic cnn-style. However, when it comes time for the weather report, my favorite is, and I can't remember which channel this is, but one where Japan or the earth literally pops out of the floor in 3D as the weather girl walks around it. It's impressive stuff. So, the technology's there, but the cultural priorities for how it is applied to something tends to be different but no less suited to the necessary purposes, if that makes sense.

So, I guess the thing to keep in mind is that things are done differently in Japan. We all know this, but the way it is different sometimes takes a little while to wrap your mind around to figure out why it's different, and to understand why just takes a little time experiencing life there.

I hope this makes sense. It's a little hard to explain perfectly I think. I know some things are shifting, i.e. a lot more phones are getting touch screens since the iphone finally got licensed there, so people tend to watch things like movies on their phones a bit more I think, haha. But yeah, from what I've been able to tell, it all boils down to different priorities for technology compared to the west's.

To mirror Patryn's post, you do see a lot of phone talking in cars, probably because it's a 'private' space. Also, pay phones are still widely used in Japan, and you see many people who really need to make longer calls using them instead of their cells. As a side note, green pay phones are also useful for making international calls. 8D But from what I've been told by friends and what I've seen first hand, cell phone calls are used more for helping find friends meeting up at a place quickly and then hanging up, haha. I can't really comment on how common land lines are, though, other than they exist. sorry. :/


Also, sorry for another silly long post.

PS: another thing to think of, too, about why there might be so few minutes attached to phone plans is because people there really tend to meet up more, I think, than we do. Meeting up, visiting, doing something, eating, walking- a lot of that is done in person instead of over the internet/phone calls. With this in mind, though, this is a lot easier and more practical to do in big cities. This could then beg the question of whether or not cells are geared almost entirely to those living in the major cities, but that's perhaps a philosophical question for another day.

[Ertai87]

OMG this thread is tl;dr.

I got back from Japan after a month and a half there in January, and, as I was there for a while I did pick up a cell phone. I got a prepaid phone, and this was the plan I got:

Provider: SoftBank
Cell Type: Flip Phone (not Smart, just one of those ones that were popular back in the early '00s), bilingual JP/EN.
Price: Roughly Y8K for phone, wall charger (which, interestingly enough, is sold seperately from the phone, but don't ask me why), and Y3K worth of airtime.
Abilities: Y300/mo for unlimited free text and email, Y6/min talk. No data. Refillable by buying prepaid cards in denominations of Y3K and Y5K from SoftBank stores (which are usually conveniently located).

From what I understand, this deal is somewhat difficult to find. I got mine at Yodobashi Camera (a large chain electronics store) near Yokohama Station. On a related note, when I got the phone, the representative was an English speaker. His English wasn't super-fantastic, but it was good enough to explain what I needed to know.

EDIT: There was discussion of packets earlier in the thread, and someone mentioned they don't know what that means. For a brief explanation of what that means, it's a Computer Science term. As a CompSci major, here's a (very brief, likely factually suspect) description of what it is:

When you do anything on the internet, your computer gives you the illusion that everything you do is one-shot. That is to say, you request a website in your browser, and the host server sends you the entire site in one shot, and then your browser displays it. That's not actually how it works. The reason is because, if the transmission gets interrupted, the host has to resend all that data all over again, which takes a lot of time and a lot of bandwidth ("internet speed", if you will). Instead, the host server sends the site bit by bit, in smaller clumps. If one clump gets interrupted, the client (you) simply needs to re-request that one clump, which takes a lot less time/bandwidth. These "clumps" are called "packets".

Now, that description is not very techincal and I've likely misstated a whole bunch of stuff (network technology wasn't my area of focus), but that's a very very brief and very very basic overview of how it works.

[Patryn]

if you get a smartphone, more than likely, they will try and refuse to sell it to you without packet-houdai (unlimited internet). You can argue with them about it and probably get it without it, but it's your money. More than likely, it'll save you money if you use the internet on your phone a bit (i use google maps quite a bit).

And if you do get the packet houdai, you'll find more uses, and won't have to worry about reaching your limit or whatever and get a surprise when they take the money out of your account, or you get the bill!

[EricaHartmann]

if you get a smartphone, more than likely, they will try and refuse to sell it to you without packet-houdai (unlimited internet). You can argue with them about it and probably get it without it, but it's your money. More than likely, it'll save you money if you use the internet on your phone a bit (i use google maps quite a bit).

And if you do get the packet houdai, you'll find more uses, and won't have to worry about reaching your limit or whatever and get a surprise when they take the money out of your account, or you get the bill!

Where did you buy your smartphone? When I went to Akihabara, they just gave us a leaflet and I went right for the unlimited data plan, no pressure at all. They seemed a lot less pushy than back in Australia anyway, and were surprised when I just told them I didn't need advice, I just want an iPhone with unlimited data.

[hatefulsandwich]

Well, considering that it appears that most communication in Japan seems to revolve around text-based data rather than voice, I don't personally have a problem with the unlimited data plan thing. Goodness me, I would love to have unlimited data available in this country.

I think most voice-type communication would be dedicated to conversing with people back home, in which case I think Skype would be the best tool.

[Patryn]

I went to a Softbank shop out here in the inaka. xD
Ended up with the iPhone, but I was actually wanting another one, but had to pay an extra 2000yen/month coz it had TV, and I was like... -.- no. lol.

But yeah, they wouldn't accept my blue slip of paper (that said I was getting an alien card) and so I had to wait for my actual alien card before I could get my phone. -.-
In the same city but different shop, a few other JETs got theirs using that blue slip of paper that was rejected at my shop.
Having said that though, I bought my phone outright, so I wouldn't have to bother with all that stuff about monthly payments and whatever, and I wouldn't have had the money at the time anyway. xD

[Eigen]

Well, considering that it appears that most communication in Japan seems to revolve around text-based data rather than voice, I don't personally have a problem with the unlimited data plan thing. Goodness me, I would love to have unlimited data available in this country.

I think most voice-type communication would be dedicated to conversing with people back home, in which case I think Skype would be the best tool.

Unlimited data would definitely be the way to go! I use my iPhone everyday for 3G enabled google maps, Facebook, e-mail, weather reports, games, you name it. And I pay around 8,500 yen a month for Softbank unlimited data and bundled home phone/high speed net service. It's quite a good deal if you bundle it, considering many places charge 5,000 or more yen a month for high speed net by itself.

if you went with a base rate package for data and went over, it would take almost nothing to surpass the costs of the unlimited data packages. It's amazing how much data packets cost here if you pay by useage on smartphones.

Also, for coverage: if it helps I'm in rural Gifu, in the mountains, and travel the area. I have complete coverage from Softbank here. Sometimes the 3G flickers but it reconnects within seconds.

[Cliodhna]

Unlimited data plans seem to be a new development there that's come with the touch screen/smart phone phones. With your general, run of the mill Japanese cell phones, there aren't, to my knowledge, any unlimited data plans. This could be different these days, however, if the idea has somehow caught on for regular phones as well. That'd certainly be nice, haha.


Also, softbank bundle for ¥8,500??? Nice to see AU finally getting real competition, ahaha! That's a very tempting deal. I had PPoE internet when I was there and it suuuuuuucked.

Also, for coverage: if it helps I'm in rural Gifu, in the mountains, and travel the area. I have complete coverage from Softbank here. Sometimes the 3G flickers but it reconnects within seconds.

Actually, this is really good to know. Thanks for sharing this!!

[Patryn]

about the coverage, it's probably best to ask your predecessor when they contact you. There'll probably be some recommendations.
I know in Shiga, most JETs have Softbank because it's free to call between Softbank phones between 1am and 9pm and because at the time, most ppls wanted an iPhone and Softbank were the only carrier with them. Now au carry iphones as well, but free calls is pretty useful. Where I am, the signal sometimes drops out for a few minutes, but comes back eventually, but yeah, it's just a bit annoying.