M804314FRONT.qxd 10/31/05 7:43 AM Page 1 Mizuko Ito is Research Scientist at the Annenberg computer-human interaction Personal, Portable, Pedestrian Center for Communication, University of Southern Mobile Phones in Japanese Life California, Los Angeles. Daisuke Okabe is Lecturer at “Start with this book if you want to understand the broadest social and technological impacts edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda the Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio of the mobile phone. Although focused on the keitai in Japanese society, the authors provide Personal, University, Shonan Fujisawa Campus, Japan. Misa a conceptual toolkit for examining the effects of emerging communication practices across The Japanese term for mobile phone, keitai (roughly Matsuda is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Chuo the boundaries of nationality and discipline. This is not just about a technology or the way it translated as “something you carry with you”), evokes University, Tokyo. is used in one country. It’s about understanding one of the most important ways that twenty- not technical capability or freedom of movement but first century lives will differ from those of the twentieth century.” Portable, intimacy and portability, defining a personal accessory —Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs: The Next Social that allows constant social connection. Japan’s enthu- Revolution siastic engagement with mobile technology has become—along with anime, manga, and sushi—part of “This is an important book. Through a range of well-designed and intelligently contextual- its trendsetting popular culture. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian ized case studies, it both locates and dislocates common assumptions about the singulari- Pedestrian, the first book-length English-language ties of technology and of culture in determining how the keitai is finding its place in Japanese treatment of mobile communication use in Japan, cov- society. Reaching beyond Japan and beyond the mobile phone, the book provides a theoreti- ers the transformation of keitai from business tool to cally rich and empirically sophisticated template for all future work that seeks to understand personal device for communication and play. the nature of sociotechnical change in personal communications.” The essays in this groundbreaking collection doc- —Roger Silverstone, Professor of Media and Communications, London School of Economics ument the emergence, incorporation, and domestica- and Political Science tion of mobile communications in a wide range of social practices and institutions. The book first considers the “Lead users play a key role in determining the fate of both technological and industrial devel- social, cultural, and historical context of keitai develop- opment in the digital era. The only way we can fully understand the astonishing development ment, including its beginnings in youth pager use in the of keitai services is through a multiperspective analysis of Japan’s youth, the cutting-edge early 1990s. It then discusses the virtually seamless lead users of mobile technology. This book is critical to thinking about technological integration of keitai use into everyday life, contrasting it advancement in the twenty-first century.” to the more escapist character of Internet use on the —Ichiya Nakamura, Executive Director, Stanford Japan Center PC. Other essays suggest that the use of mobile com- munication reinforces ties between close friends and family, producing “tele-cocooning” by tight-knit social groups. The book also discusses mobile phone man- ners and examines keitai use by copier technicians, multitasking housewives, and school children. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian describes a mobile uni- verse in which networked relations are a pervasive and persistent fixture of everyday life. Mobile Phones in Japanese Life The MIT Press Massachusetts Institute of Technology edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 http://mitpress.mit.edu and Misa Matsuda ,!7IA2G2-ajadjb!:t;K;k;K;k 0-262-09039-2 804314 06/20/05 Personal, Portable, Pedestrian Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda, editors Personal, Portable, Pedestrian Personal, Portable, Pedestrian Mobile Phones in Japanese Life edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ( 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail To our children, Amane Matsuda, Madoka Matsuda, Taisei Okabe, Luna Ito-Fisher, and Eamon Ito-Fisher, among the first generation of kids born into a keitai-saturated society. Contents Acknowledgments ix Editors’ Note on Translation xi Introduction: Personal, Portable, Pedestrian 1 Mizuko Ito I The Social and Cultural Construction of Technological Systems 1 Discourses of Keitai in Japan 19 Misa Matsuda 2 Youth Culture and the Shaping of Japanese Mobile Media: Personalization and the Keitai Internet as Multimedia 41 Tomoyuki Okada 3 A Decade in the Development of Mobile Communications in Japan (1993–2002) 61 Kenji Kohiyama II Cultures and Imaginaries 4 The Third-Stage Paradigm: Territory Machines from the Girls’ Pager Revolution to Mobile Aesthetics 77 Kenichi Fujimoto 5 Japanese Youth and the Imagining of Keitai 103 Haruhiro Kato III Social Networks and Relationships 6 Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality 123 Misa Matsuda viii Contents 7 The Mobile-izing Japanese: Connecting to the Internet by PC and Webphone in Yamanashi 143 Kakuko Miyata, Jeffrey Boase, Barry Wellman, and Ken’ichi Ikeda 8 Accelerating Reflexivity 165 Ichiyo Habuchi 9 Keitai and the Intimate Stranger 183 Hidenori Tomita IV Practice and Place 10 Keitai in Public Transportation 205 Daisuke Okabe and Mizuko Ito 11 The Gendered Use of Keitai in Domestic Contexts 219 Shingo Dobashi 12 Design of Keitai Technology and Its Use among Service Engineers 237 Eriko Tamaru and Naoki Ueno 13 Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structuring of Mobile E-mail Use 257 Mizuko Ito and Daisuke Okabe V Emergent Developments 14 Keitai Use among Japanese Elementary and Junior High School Students 277 Yukiko Miyaki 15 Uses and Possibilities of the Keitai Camera 300 Fumitoshi Kato, Daisuke Okabe, Mizuko Ito, and Ryuhei Uemoto References 311 Contributors 341 Index 345 Acknowledgments This book represents an extended collaborative effort by a great number of individuals and institutions in Japan and the United States. We would like to acknowledge here the people who most directly supported the writing and production of this book. Most of the papers collected in this volume were initially presented at a workshop sponsored by the DoCoMo House design cottage at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. DoCoMo House also provided financial support for translation and editing. The initial translation into English of the papers written in Japanese was in the capable hands of Yoko Takahashi. At the other end of the editing process, Justin Hall contrib- uted a keen eye as well as mobile media expertise in polishing the papers into final form. Kunikazu Amagasa reformatted and prepared most of the figures and tables and provided invaluable help in the final production details. We would also like to thank our editors at MIT Press, Douglas Sery and Deborah Cantor-Adams, for their ongoing help and support in guiding us through the editorial process.