Pajama Entrepreneur

I just returned from a trip to Japan. What amazed me was that I did not hear any mobile phones ringing in subway cars or trains. Neither did I hear (or see) people talking on their phones. I was so eerily quiet. But people are using their phones — texting, reading mini-novels, playing games, looking at video. Everyone’s staring into them, oblivious to the other passengers. Note that in Japan, nearly all the phones are the flip model (none of them from Nokia).

What accounts for the silence? On the shinkansen (high-speed train) people are requested to put their phones in silent mode. If you want to talk to someone, you have to do it in the area between the carriages. As a result, even though the subways and trains can be very crowded, it’s more civilized experience unlike in Europe or the US, where people chat loudly and talk about their personal problems within earshot of everyone. I also noticed that when two or more people are talking in a subway car, they do so in hushed voices.

I witnessed the same thing in a cafe at the train station in Kyoto where I was having coffee, waiting for the shinkansen to Tokyo. The guy sitting next to me suddenly rose and ran outside when his mobile phone rang. He did not take the call in the restaurant.

What amazes me though is that during the week and a half that I was in Japan, I did not see one person violate this “rule”. Not even the wildly dressed young guys with punky orange hair boarding the subway in Harajuku (a Tokyo district where a lot of young people hang out). Think of the thousands of people who use public transport in Japan.

What does this have to do with i-mode?

i-mode is a wireless service launched by NTT Docomo in Japan which provides access to mobile Internet sites. In other words, it delivers online content to mobile phones. It’s popular in Japan because on those long boring commutes and subway rides, people can simply stare at their phones and view the content. Since they don’t talk on their phones, it’s the one thing that occupies their time and allows them to not have to look at other passengers.

NTT Docomo entered into partnerships with European telecom operators a few years ago to launch i-mode in Europe. It was a flop everywhere. I know that in the Netherlands, KPN Mobile is giving it away and even then, most people I know who have it, rarely use it.

Why? People talk on their mobile phones in the Netherlands (which irritates other passengers but the chatting commuters don’t care). They don’t have such long commutes either. Many people bike or drive to work, too. Europeans and Americans are more “PC centric”, that is, when they think of online content, they like to look at it on a computer.