Futures of Learning

Photo by cocoarmani

Ever since rapid adoption of the mobile Internet in the late nineties, Japanese mobile phone (keitai) use has been the object of international attention.  Although other countries have led in terms of wireless technology development, mobile phone adoption rates, and certain usage patterns, Japan is considered by many to define the future of mobile phone use (Fitzpatrick 2007). As mentioned in the introductory post, Japan’s information ecology is unique in that most people access the Internet primarily via keitai rather than through PCs. This was a trend that was established in the early years of the mobile Internet in Japan, and continues to persist to this day even as more Japanese adopt broadband access via PCs (shivya 2008).

Japan’s heavy reliance on mobile media needs to be located within a longer historical trajectory. Unlike most other national contexts, certain Japanese populations, specifically young women, have been using mobile communications media for up to fifteen years, representing a uniquely long-term and stabilized pattern of engagement with these media forms. Most trace current mobile messaging back to the “Girls’ Pager Revolution” (Fujimoto 2005) of the early nineties, when teenage girls first hijacked the uses of mobile media for their social purposes (Matsuda 2005a; Okada 2005). These youth eventually moved from pagers to the Personal Handyphone System (PHS), to cellular phones, and eventually to the mobile Internet, evolving their social practices along the way. Japanese mobile Internet adoption was driven forward by mobile messaging as young people, for the first time, were able to send messages of varying length across different terminal devices and mobile service providers. Within a space of a few years between 1995-98, mobile phones shifted from association with business uses to an association with teen street culture (Ito 2004). As part of this shift, keitai use also became strongly associated with girls’ sociability and cultures of cute. The customization of keitai with decorative stickers and straps was emblematic of the changing gender valences of the technology (Hjorth 2008).

In addition to this unique history of mobile youth cultures, Japan is characterized by dense urban ecologies with lively pedestrian cultures, long commute times, and heavy reliance on public transportation. Add to this a high level of traditional and media literacy and a history of innovation and affinity with portable media, and you have a sociotechnical environment that supports robust mobile media adoption. Today, keitai are a pervasive fixture of everyday life in Japan, across generations, and the mobile Internet is in widespread use. Even elementary aged children have been adopting mobile phones in large numbers now in Japan, and it has become a fixture not only of business uses and teen sociability, but of everyday family life as well (Matsuda 2009). In the early years, use of the mobile internet was largely restricted to email and occasional downloads of ringtones of wallpaper. Today, however, a majority of subscribers say they also access news, information and search on the mobile internet. Online games, blogs and social network site access is also popular (shivya 2008). The keitai and PHS penetration rate was about 95% of households as of March 2008, 109,993,500 mobile phone and PHS contracted quantity in November 2008. 4.1% of that market is PHS. CDMA2000/W-CDMA is most dominant technological standard, NTT DoCoMo and Softbank have adopted W-CDMA, KDDI have adopted CDMA2000. The cell phone market is led by NTT DoCoMo, with 49.1%, followed by Softbank 18.1%, KDDI 27.7% and PHS 5.1% (TCA 2008).

Selective Sociality and the Full-Time Intimate Community

The use of the mobile communications in Japan has centered on text message exchange. This is tied to the history of mobile communications, which originated with pager messaging, as well as cultural and infrastructural conditions. Given the density of the urban environment, particularly in public transportation, Japan has strong social norms against behavior that disrupts public space. The use of voice calls in public transportation and restaurants has been strongly discouraged, particularly after the uptake of keitai by young people, and this has been a major factor in the predominance of text communication (Okabe and Ito 2005).

The long history of mobile text exchange in Japan has resulted in a robust set of shared social practices that were initially centered on youth, but have now become pervasive across generations in Japan. Much of the research on text messaging has focused on youth practices, as they were the population that popularized these new forms of communication. In response to concerns that text communication was leading to more superficial kinds of social relationships, Misa Matsuda (2000, 2005b) has argued that one the contrary, these forms of communication result in what she calls “selective sociality” in relationships. Youth are able to develop different categories of social relationships and mobilize them selectively, building personal networks that are not as dependent on the contingencies of particular institutions or locales. For example, with the advent of keitai communication, more youth are able to keep in touch with friends who have moved on to different schools of localities.

Most studies that have looked empirically at youth text message exchange have focused on the dominant mode of social interaction, which is with a close, intimate group. Studying the initial practices of youth adoption, Ichiro Nakajima, Keichi Himeno, and Hiroaki Yoshii (1999) described the social relations supported by text exchanges as a “full-time intimate community” where youth are in constant, lightweight contact with one another. In a similar vein, Ichiyo Habuchi (2005) has described these relations as a “telecocoon” that results in a kind of “accelerated reflexivity” about close social relationships. In later work, Ito and Okabe (2005) analyzed teens’ text message logs and the “ambient virtual co-presence” that youth experienced through the exchange of text that shared the senders’ status to their close friends, family, and romantic partners. This kind of co-presence is one of a set of different “technosocial situations” that Okabe and Ito describe, where youth are building new kinds of social contexts by hybridizing the contexts of the social, physical, and technological. Far from being a technology for “any place, any time” communication, text message use is highly structured by specific social norms, practices, and the contingencies of particular locales.

Moral Panics and Controversies

Photo by Jan Chipchase

Ever since youth adopted mobile communications in large numbers in the late nineties, there have been public concerns over various aspects of the use of mobile media. As is typical when youth adopt a new media form, public media voiced a range of moral panics, ranging from issues about the disruption of public space, the use of keitai for youth prostitution, and the association between keitai use and crime. Matsuda (2005a) has written about the history of these concerns, and how they were tied to adult anxieties over youth culture more than real threats that were being posed by the technology. For example, Matsuda (2005a) and Hjorth (2008) describe the cultures of kogyaru, street savvy teenage girls who took up keitai as an icon, and challenged existing cultures of cute and passive femininity.

Perhaps the practices that came under the most sustained attack were those associated with deai-kei sites (encounter sites) which enabled keitai users to connect with those that they did not already know.  Although these sites have been among the most profitable and prolific sites on the keitai Internet, they have been widely stigmatized. One reason for the stigma is that they were associated with the practice of enjo kousai where teenage girls would date older men for money. In addition to being associated with enjo kousai, deai-kei sites were also promulgating a wide range of problematic practices, such as phishing, spamming, and fraud of various kinds. Deai-kei sites were first established on the PC Internet in the mid to late nineties. Eventually, these concerns led to new legislation, passed in 2003, the “Legal Plan to Address Entrapment of Children through Internet Dating Industries.” This legislation criminalized the use of online sites to arrange for dates with minors, and even enabled authorities to go after minors who engaged in liaisons with adults. Subsequently, further legislation was passed that required age verification through an ID or credit card for participation in deai-kei sites. This legislation had an immediate chilling effect on all online sites that enabled youth to build new relationships online, and in particular, mobile Internet providers removed all sites in this vein from their official menus of online options (Tomita 2005).  Todd Holden and Takako Tsuruki (2003) have argued that the stigmatization of these sites was unfortunate, because they potentially provide way for developing new kinds of relationships and forms of self-expression that are often limited in modern Japan. Today, as various kinds of Web 2.0 and social network sites are becoming popular on both the PC and mobile Internet in Japan, the discourse of risk around online meet-ups is changing once again. The more interest-centered space of the PC Internet and the intimate space of the mobile Internet are merging, and we have not seen the same kind of moral panic over teen use of these sites as we saw in the heyday of mobile deai-kei sites.

Although in today’s Japan keitai are pervasive and taken for granted, there continues to be writing that raises concerns about the downsides of a keitai-saturated society. For example, a bestselling book by Nobuo Masataka (2003) called Monkeys with Mobile Phones argues that young people’s text message exchange is identical to the “coo calls” that monkeys make to confirm that their group members are nearby. He sees these social practices as an indication that youth are devolving into monkey-like behavior, where they feel uneasy if they are not able to maintain this kind of ongoing contact with their peers. Kensuke Suzuki (2008) also writes about this need that young people have to be reassured of their connection to their peers. He is not critical in the same way that Masataka is, drawing from a survey he conducted on youth keitai use. He sees young people navigating a dilemma, where they feel they need to be connected to others in order to avoid social isolation. Yet these expanded connections through the keitai also mean that they need to constantly affirm those connections, and youth experience a sense of anxiety over not being able to maintain those relationships.

Other Facets of Mobile Media

Since keitai and mobile media are such a central part of new media use in Japan, we will be covering different facets of these media in subsequent blog posts. Here we conclude with just a few other dimensions of portable media use that will not be taken up elsewhere.

One strand of research that has been around since the early years of keitai research has been the issue of the relation between keitai and urban space. When keitai became popular in the late nineties, there was widespread public concern about the disruption of public space with voice calls (Matsuda 2005a, Tomita 2002). Since then, public transportation agencies made a concerted effort through signage and announcements to limit voice calls in public space, and to encourage people to use text messaging instead. Okabe and Ito (2005) have described how in addition to these measures taken by public transit agencies, passengers have also regulated one another in more subtle ways. Based on observations in trains and subways, Okabe and Ito describe how passengers rely on bodily position and gaze in order to maintain manners on public transportation. When they do take voice calls on a train, people will keep them to a minimum, often turning away from others are shielding their phone. When passengers violate this norm, other passengers will respond with negative gazes.

More recently, Okabe, Ito, and Anderson (2009) have documented the “mobile kits” of urbanites in Tokyo, and how they utilize a wide variety of portable media to navigate everyday life in the city. Expanding the focus out from keitai, they document the use of media players, digital cash cards, keys, PDAs, and wallets. These forms of portable media enable people to interface with urban infrastructures and appropriate public spaces for personal uses. For example, people will “cocoon” with media such as books and ipods, particularly in public transportation. They might also “camp” in restaurants and cafes by adding laptops and other work technologies to their mobile kit. Studies that examine work and more instrumental uses of mobile technologies are relatively rare, with the bulk of research to date focusing on social communication, particularly by teens. One exception is the work of Eriko Tamara and Naoki Ueno (2005), where they studied the use of the keitai by copier service engineers. They found that the use of an online system that enabled engineers to keep tabs on each others’ made the workspace visible to one another in new ways, facilitating coordinated action and help between the engineers. The relative lack of these kinds of studies of workplace use of portable media points to an important gap and bias in the existing body of research on Japanese keitai use.

References

Fitzpatrick, Michael. 2007. ”Why Mobile Japan Leads the World.” The Guardian. September 27, 2007.

Fujimoto, Kenichi. 2005. “The Third-Stage Paradigm: Territory Machines from the Girls’ Pager Revolution to Mobile Aesthetics.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hjorth, Larissa. 2008. Mobile Phone Culture in the Asia Pacific: The Art of Being Mobile. New York: Routledge.

Habuchi, Ichiyo. 2005. “Accelerating Reflexivity” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Holden, Todd Joseph Miles and Takako Tsuruki. 2003. “Deai-kei: Japna’s New Culture of Encounter.” In Japanese Cybercultures. Edited by Nanette Gottlieb and Mark McLelland. New York: Routledge.

Ito, Mizuko. 2004. ”Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Lessons from Japanese Mobile Phone Use.” A paper presented at Mobile Communication and Social Change, the 2004 International Conference on Mobile Communication in Seoul, Korea, October 18-19.

Ito, Mizuko and Daisuke Okabe. 2005. “Technosocial situations: Emergent structurings of mobile email use.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Masataka, Nobuo (正高信夫). 2003.『ケータイを持ったサル』中公新書

Matsuda, Misa (松田美佐). 2000.「若者の友人関係と携帯電話利用—関係希薄化論から選択的関係論へ」『社会情報学研究』　第4号

Matsuda, Misa. 2009. “Mobile Media and the Transformation of the Family.” In Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media. Edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth. New York: Routledge.

Matsuda, Misa. 2005a. “Discourses of Keitai in Japan.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Matsuda, Misa. 2005b. “Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Nakajima, Ichiro (仲島一郎), Keiichi Himeno(姫野桂一) and Hiroaki Yoshii(吉井博明). 1999. 移動電話の普及とその社会的意味，情報通信学会誌，16（3），pp79-92.

Okabe, Daisuke, and Mizuko Ito. 2005. “Keitai in Public Transportation.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Okada, Tomoyuki. 2005. “Youth Culture and the Shaping of Japanese Mobile Media: Personalization and the Keitai Internet as Multimedia.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Shivya. 2008. “Japan: Mobile Landscape”

Suzuki, Kensuke (鈴木謙介). 2008.「なぜケータイにはまるのか」南田・辻編『文化社会学の視座』ミネルヴァ書房

Tamaru, Eriko and Naoki Ueno. 2005. “Visualization of the Work Space of Service Engineers by Keitai Technology and Its Designs.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA). 携帯電話/IP接続サービス(携帯)/PHS/無線呼出し契約数.

Tomita, Hidenori. 2005. “Keitai and the Intimate Stranger.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hidenori Tomita(2002) 「ケータイと人間関係」岡田朋之・松田美佐編『ケータイ学入門』有斐閣選書

Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe and Ken Anderson. 2009. “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Spaces.” In The Reconstruction of Space and Time through Mobile Communication Practices Edited by R. Ling and S. Campbell. Edison, NJ: Transaction Publishers.