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Home . Wireless Report 03.25.03

Japan's Generation of Computer Refuseniks

Most teens and young adults in Japan rarely use computers to surf the World Wide Web. Instead they use cell phones to access a scaled-down wireless Web. The result: A growing computer literacy problem among Japan's youth.

Tim Clark Posted: 2003-03-12

Yasushi Takashita smiled sheepishly when his slender girlfriend Rika, clinging to the train stanchion next to him, suggested he use the Internet to search for some college-related information he needs.

"I don't know how to use a PC," he admitted as the orange Chuo Line train car bumped out of Yoyogi, an area in central Tokyo with a high concentration of private prep schools.

Takashita, a 19-year-old cram school student hoping to enter a four-year college this spring, is not alone. A surprising number of Japan's high school students graduate without learning how to use a personal computer, let alone the Internet.

How can this be in gizmo-crazed Japan? The answer lies in a combination of educational policy, peer pressure, and most importantly, the dramatic increase in the use of Internet-enabled cell phones in Japan over the last four years.

"Five years ago, before cell phone e-mail came into such widespread use, all college students felt the need to own their own PCs," says Hiroshi Hanamoto of the online marketing firm Promotions. "Today, students with cell phone mail can easily get by without buying their own computers. Besides, they don't have the money."

Peer pressure is a critical factor pushing students to own cell phones rather than computers. Almost every teenager in Japan has a mobile telephone with an e-mail address, and the fastest, easiest, and least expensive way to join the crowd is to subscribe to a mobile phone service.

"Younger students in particular tend to feel that they don't need a PC if they have a cell phone. Some even say that if they had enough money to buy their own PC, they would rather upgrade to a better cell phone." --Media strategist Minoru Sugiyama.

Indeed, the primary motivation for a Japanese student to go online these days is not to use the Internet, but to get an e-mail address -- far cheaper and easier to do with a cell phone than a computer.

For less than $100 and a few minutes of paperwork, a student can take home a phone and e-mail address from any number of retailers, which are often just a short walk from most train stations. Buying a personal computer means spending $500 or more, making room for the machine in limited space at home, and struggling to set up a dial-up, ADSL or cable Internet connection.

Mobile phones have replaced computers as the de facto e-mail terminal of choice for the majority of Japanese who are not in technology, finance, engineering or other computer-intensive occupations.

E-mail exchanges between high school and college students in Japan today take place almost exclusively via cell phones. High school clubs announce activities and meeting schedules via cell phone e-mail, and university class cancellation alerts are delivered primarily to handsets rather than computers. The reason is simple.

"Students have their handsets with them 24 hours a day, so they view messages immediately," says Hanamoto. "When they go to bed, it's on the nightstand next to them. Even if they have a computer at home, they may not bother checking mail on it."

Few universities allow students to check their school e-mail accounts off campus, so even students who use computers for e-mail tend to favor Web-based accounts like Hotmail.

A new government report claims that for the first time ever, more than half of the people in Japan are now using the Internet. But many are not using the Web at large -- they're using cell phones to access a scaled-down, Japanese language mini-Web built for small screens, slower speeds and minimal keypunching.

Most of Japan's Internet users primarily frequent "official" sites provided by NTT DoCoMo and other wireless carriers.

The most common way to get to non-carrier Web pages is to send e-mail to an address advertised in magazines and on billboards, television or Web sites. Replies contain embedded URLs, enabling users to get to them by using the handset's 12-button keypad. Most users rarely enter a URL manually.

"News is all around us -- there are televisions everywhere," says Nobuyuki Amano, 49. "I have no need to read the news on my cell phone."

"Typing an Internet address into a handset is a pain," says Chihiro Amano, an 18-year-old high school graduate who sends an average of 100 cell phone e-mail messages per day. "This past year I hardly used the PC at all. My homework problem sets were all handwritten."

Chihiro's younger sister, Tsukasa, 15, is even more engrossed in the cell phone lifestyle. Though she rarely talks on her mobile handset, on some days she transmits as many as 200 e-mail messages to her friends. Last month her telephone bill, consisting primarily of packet fees for e-mail messages, was about $213. During a five-minute interview in the Amano family's dining room, she received and responded to two e-mail messages.

Tsukasa and other young people here enter Japanese text into their handsets with amazing single-thumb speed, but are far less facile typing English and the ASCII-code periods, slashes, and colons that are the lingua franca of the Internet. But this hurdle -- and the fact that most Web sites are not formatted for viewing on cell phones -- only partially explains why few consumers venture onto the Internet from their handsets.

The main reason is that most simply do not feel the need to do so. The carriers' "walled gardens" are rich with preselected content. Consumers are bombarded with cell phone-specific offers, "specials" and other slick solicitations from magazines, television, billboards and direct-mail advertisements. Users get everything they need without having to search.

"There's almost no need for people to actively seek out information on their own," says Hanamoto. "Users are given information over cell phones -- they don't proactively look for it. This passive acceptance of 'push' content reflects a fundamental problem with Japan's educational system."

The result is a surprisingly passive approach to information gathering and media use via cell phones. While news headline and summary services are available via the carriers' networks, they attract only a fraction of the number of subscribers to entertainment and "lifestyle" offerings, such as ringtone downloads, cartoon character screensavers, weather reports, map downloads and train timetables. Many news service subscribers are interested primarily in sports scores or other "flash" updates.

"News is all around us -- there are televisions everywhere. I have no need to read the news on my cell phone," says Chihiro's father Nobuyuki Amano, 49.

None of the five cell-phone-carrying members of the Amano family use their handsets to read news stories, with one exception. During the World Cup soccer series held in Japan last year, Kazumi, Nobuyuki's wife, and Meguru, the couple's 12-year-old son, signed up for soccer match updates delivered by e-mail.

In the United States, the personal computer -- which provides direct access to alternative news sources and multiple one-to-many channels for opinion expression -- is the ultimate media literacy tool. In Japan, where few understand the term "media literacy," Internet-enabled cell phones play no such role.

"If asked whether mobile telephones are a positive factor in improving media literacy, I would have to say no. In fact, they are somewhat of a negative factor," says Minoru Sugiyama, 40, a Tokyo-based media strategist.

"Younger students in particular tend to feel that they don't need a PC if they have a cell phone," Sugiyama added. "Some even say that if they had enough money to buy their own PC, they would rather upgrade to a better cell phone and use more mobile services. But they tend to change their tune and get more PC-oriented as they approach graduation and job hunting."

Today, 17 percent of Japanese households -- about 8.3 million -- have broadband connections to the Internet. That number is expected to grow rapidly, but the cell phone seems for now to have displaced computer use to some extent, particularly among the young.

In part, this is due to the highly mobile lifestyle here, where it is not uncommon for children as young as 9 to commute 40 minutes or more by train to school every day. But in key ways, cell phones suit the Japanese mindset and communication style far better than computers.

"Cell phone mail in particular represents a very closed world, since people exchange mail almost exclusively with their existing circles of friends," says Promotions' Hanamoto. "It's not a gateway to a bright, broader view of reality. I can't equate online offerings available via cell phone with the Internet. Mobile is a great channel for intimate communications, but I wouldn't say it is especially useful in terms of broadening your horizons."

Tim Clark, author of the Japan Internet Report, serves as Senior Fellow at Tokyo-based venture incubator SunBridge and editor of the monthly Japan Entrepreneur Report. He is currently working on a book about service sector entrepreneurship with co-author Carl Kay.