Battle of the Keitai Companies

In Japanese the word keitai means portable and is usually short for keitai denwa, which translates as portable phone, or for us Americans, cell phone. In Japan a cell phone is a necessity if you plan to have a social life. We all have them, and every single friend I know you fought having one, now cannot live without it.

In Japan we have four major cell phone companies, being Docomo, au, TU-KA, and Vodafone, as well as a scattering of minor ones. Docomo is currently the market leader for the country and claims the best service and technology. While they are definitely the most pricey they have Swiss cheese service, which means my apartment gets fine service, but the hallway, nope and I don’t want to even talk about Justin’s apartment… They do have the coolest phones as well as Kenji Sakaguchi and the ultra popular Kyoko Hasegawa (I love her, if you’re reading this Hasegawa-san, please marry me!) as stable long term spokes models.Ai Kato also pops in from time to time.

The second biggest is Vodafone, which was called J-Phone when I moved here and was acquired by the British cell phone giant in an attempt to create one of the largest cellular companies in the world. They are currently getting their asses kicked by Docomo, main for using European phones that aren’t fit to Japanese tastes. They also change their spokes models too often for anyone to keep up. Before it was David Beckham (who likes soccer, I mean honestly), and then Yu Yamada and now Misaki Ito, make up your mind. They’ve recently made a come back with better phones and better service aimed at a previously ignored market share: foreigners.

Next up, au, with I think some of the coolest looking phones and apparently the best service in Japan. My friends with au never have any connection problems. Which is more than I can say for my Docomo phone, and my NTT VDSL as well (yes it’s DSL not some optical fiber bullshit, otherwise it would be faster, and stop sending me garbage in my email and s-mail!). They also have Yukie Nakama, who is insanely famous for the movie Game (great movie by the way), Trick and the show Gokesen (the Japanese actually says Yankumi Returns, Yankumi is short for Yamaguchi Kumiko, which is her character’s name) has helped a bit. I’m considering a change, but it’s such a pain in the ass to email everyone that I have a new phone, yadayadayada…

Finally we have TU-KA, whose spokesperson is an old man who is happy since TU-KA makes what they call kantan keitai, or the easy cell phone. Finally technology for old people. Otherwise their phones are shit and there is service is about the same as Docomo. At least they are ultra cheap. Definitely good for the gaijin on a budget.

Anyway, what brought up this post was that I was sitting in Namba station waiting for the train and I notced that nearly all of the ads were for cell phones. Or at least all the big ones. I’ll shut up now…

Wisdom of the Day: Brevity is golden