Main services Since the beginning of i-mode, DoCoMo's focus has been on data or non-voice services due to much higher growth rates in the data communication market. (45) As a result, although basic voice airtime fees still account for over 80 percent of the revenue i-mode generated from its users, a wide range of non-voice services have been developed such as e-mail, horoscopes, transportation schedules, banking, and ticket reservations. (46) The most popular services remain those that enable person-to-person interaction, such as messaging. (47) Simple entertainment like games, downloading ring tones and bandai characters is very prevalent. (48) Other major services include e-mail and news updates. (49) DoCoMo's M-Stage offers music on demand to users over a PHS network at 64.4 kbit/s. (50 Research has also demonstrated that heavy i-mode users tend to use more voice calling. (51) Image transmission is among the fastest growing services in recent years. Most notable is the i-shot service that has generated, by the end of 2003, 21.85 million photo transmissions using built-in cameras. (52) The widespread (use) of camera phones and wireless photo exchange has led to new perceptions of and practices in urban social space, some of which raise ethical issues followed by official regulation as well as restrictions imposed by private companies. (53) DoCoMo was also the world's first to offer a mobile video telephony service through its 3G videophone, FOMA P2101V. (54) Launched in January 2001, the "i-appli" (or i-application) is an enhanced i-mode service that enables users to download and run Java applets, which support more sophisticated applications. (55) According to ITU, "applet access to information and entertainment falls into two categories: stand-alone applets and agent applets. Stand-alone applets, such as games, can be saved in the handset's memory. Agent applets are used for timely information alerts (such as stock quotes) and therefore must connect to a server to provide up-to-date information. The applets are usually around 10 kb in size and handsets can save at least five such applets in their memory." (56) In March 2002, there were 13 million i-appli users in Japan, up from 4.5 million in June 2001. (57) DoCoMo's major m-commerce operations are under the rubric of "DoCommerce," which include services allowing subscribers to purchase beverages (c-mode), withdraw cash (IYBank mobile cash card), and buy groceries (the Loppi system). (58) C-mode is a most publicized service jointly launched by Coca-Cola, DoCoMo and Itochu Corporation in 2002. A compound term combining i-mode and the initial "C" for Coca-Cola, Culture, Communication, C-mode enables users to buy sodas and other items from vending machines. (59) In June 2001, DoCoMo launched a location-based service called "i-area," which provides weather, dining, shopping, traffic and other information for over 400 areas in Japan. (60) Subscribers do not need to enter their location since i-mode base stations automatically recognize the handset's area code. Such location services can also serve to enhance personal protection for a wide range of target groups. For instance, parents can be informed of the whereabouts of their children via DoCoMo's "ima-doko" service, which allows parents to access the location of their children's PHS phone by fax, Internet or i-mode, but without the use of GPS technology. (61) Reasons for success Many researchers attempt to explain the success of i-mode and NTT DoCoMo. First, the phenomenal growth is often explained as resulting from the relatively slow diffusion of PC-based Internet access. When i-mode was introduced in 1999, only 13 percent of the Japanese population was online. (62) Yet in its first year of operation, DoCoMo's subscriber base rose beyond the level that the country's main ISP (NiftyServe) had reached after 15 years. (63) This is because i-mode has a fairly low initial cost, its billing is based largely on a pay-as-you-use mechanism, and that PC-based Internet services remain expensive. (64) The phenomenal success is also widely attributed to the technologies DoCoMo utilizes. The packet network and cHTML establish i-mode as a wireless Internet operation sharing high technical similarity with standard Internet service, which facilitates the participation of other content and service providers. (65) Unlike WAP, the interface of i-mode is simple and intuitive, requiring no tedious user name and password entry, with higher access reliability. (66) Other user-friendly settings such as the i-mode access button and the use of Japanese characters on mobile keypads have also facilitated the take-up of Internet services. (67) While DoCoMo does spend heavily on its own research, a probably more important factor is its organizational strategies to stimulate and sustain innovation. (68) Hence, "the creation of new markets through the deliberate and strategic maintenance and subsequent integration of paradoxical organizations and strategies under a single corporate umbrella." (69) The company also sits at the center of a large network of commercial entities. Characterized by revenue sharing and cross-promotion, such a network includes official and unofficial ICPs, handset makers, and marketing agencies. (70) While all these different parties are somehow connected through joint ventures and consortiums, DoCoMo exerts its centrality in the network by controlling the i-mode gateway, format of content, the release of new services, and the vertical integration of chip, handset, and infrastructure R&D. (71, 72) Since NTT is the market incumbent, the Japanese government, especially the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, also owns most of NTT's shares, a structural factor with undeniable importance in the Japanese context. (73) The brand name of NTT as an established and respected voice provider adds to the public trust in DoCoMo and i-mode, which was fortified in a cultural environment characterized by general pro-technology sentiments, strong social conformity, and normative beliefs attaching high values to significant others (e.g. friends, colleagues, or family members). (74) Through joint venture and partnerships, i-mode has already expanded to Europe, America, and other parts of Asia. In this global expansion, DoCoMo enjoys the first-mover advantage in wireless Internet services. (75) Keitai cultures: issues and findings Led by the success of DoCoMo, the mobile phone (or keitai) has spread to different parts of Japanese society. Social groups and institutions all use the technology and appropriate it in their own ways, leading to contestation, compromise, and the formation of social norms in a variety of cultural spaces. The dependency of the general population on mobile phones has reached such an extent that, according to Mizuko Ito, "To not have a keitai is to be walking blind, disconnected from just-in-time information on where and when you are in the social networks of time and space." (76) A broad consensus has been formed that the usage of keitai, including especially the myriad wireless Internet applications, is central to the transformation of the Japanese information society, a process significantly distinct from the development of Internet in the United States. At the personal level, this is a very different Internet access experience without the conventional, indoor PC-based experiences that are immersive and stationary. 977) Survey results in Japan have demonstrated that "the mobile Internet serves distinctly different social functions from the PC Internet." (78) At the social level, the formation of norms and the emergence of new structures in the historical context of contemporary Japan constitute "an alternatively technologized modernity." (79) Among those who study the social uses of keitai, very few focus on DoCoMo or specific i-mode services. (80) The majority of studies are carried out for mobile phone usage in general including those based on services provided by KDDI and J-Phone, the other two major cell phone operators in Japan. However, in terms of their social uses, the other two operators do not offer services substantially distinct from what DoCoMo provides. We therefore will not distinguish among the three in this review unless specifically mentioned. Youth and keitai Although the mobile phone (or keitai) was originally started as a business oriented technology, it was the Japanese youths, especially students, who constitute the most prominent mobile phone user group. (81) According to the Mobile Communications Research Group, keitai penetration is much higher among high school (76.8 percent) and college (97.8 percent) students than the general population (64.6 percent). (82) Students also have higher monthly cell phone bills (on average JPY 7,186 or US$ 67.5) than the general population (JPY 5,613 or US$ 52.7). (83) In Tokyo, young urbanites spend an average amount of US$ 150 on their cell phones each month to exercise their consumer power, resulted from the fact that "a generation of declining birthrates has filled Tokyo with one-child families." (84) While the rise of oyayubisoku -- a term meaning literally "the Thumb Tribe" that describes the youngsters who can type cell phone messages by moving their thumbs at extraordinary speed, sometimes without even looking at the handset -- continues to amaze Western scholars, Japanese researchers such as Tomoyuki Okada see keitai cultures as developing "out of the fertile ground of youth street practices and visual cultures and a history of text messaging that extended back to youth pager use from the early nineties." (85, 86) These practices, while being facilitated by new technologies, reflect the structural conditions that constrain social activities of the Japanese youths. According to Ito and Daisuke (87): "While youth do have large amounts of discretionary time, energy, and mobility that is (sic) the envy of working professionals and parents, they are limited in their activities by their weak social position and limited access to material resources. Their lives are governed by certain structural absolutes, such as dependence on parents, educational requirements, and regulation in public places." Besides financial dependence on adults, other fundamental structural constraints include the tiny size of average Japanese households, which means urban youth usually have to socialize in public spaces such as the streets, the prohibitively high cost to set up a landline (from US$ 600 and up, about twice to get a cell phone), and the tradition for parents to use the home phone to monitor and regulate children's relationships with their peers. (88) Under such circumstances, the prevalence of keitai among the urban youths provides a relatively autonomous "space of persistent connectivity," operating within the "power geometry of space-time compression" that involves social dynamics inherent in the institutions of family, school, public spaces, and peer group relationships. (89, 90) The Japanese youth are, however, not a monolithic social group but one with a high degree of internal variation. The social activities of high school kids, for example, are often coordinated around local fast food restaurants on the way home from school, whereas the lifestyle of college students are more flexible with gatherings in cafes, stores, bars, and karaokes. (91) With increasing command on material resources, young professionals may enjoy even more autonomy, although many of them still have to share a room or apartment with their families due to high prohibitively rent in Japan's urban areas. (92) Intergenerational issues surrounding youth keitai cultures can be examined under the household structure or in streets, trains, and other public spaces where young people would convene with keitai-facilitated "augmented co-presence," which functions at the center of the youth groups before, during, and after the social events. (93, 94) In business settings, the rise of i-mode itself means a power shift to the new generation of content and service providers, both within and outside DoCoMo, continuing the trend since the economic recession of the 1990s, which has been "discrediting Japan's rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs." (95) School is another great institution for the study of youth and keitai. A survey found that, although only 35 percent of Japanese college students have personal computers, 92 percent of them have mobile phones. (96) Given such findings, Rikkyo University of Tokyo launched a Web site so that students can use Internet-capable mobile phones to check lecture schedules, communicate with staff, and catch up on missed lecture material. Rikko also designed a system to convert standard PC Web site to i-mode reception. In addition to mobile e-learning applications, students also use keitai to challenge the authorities of educational institutions. For instance, the rampant use of cell phones during classes worry some university professors. One of them became "so intrigued by the intense silence in his classes that he decided to investigate what had caused the change. He found out by turning off the lights, revealing the glow of myriad keitai monitors. All of the students were busy e-mailing." (97) "Long gone are the days when students babbling amongst themselves plagued university professors' classes. Instead, students are now more likely to ruin a class by being totally silent." (98) In response, some high schools have banned mobile phones in classrooms and high school teachers would take the phones if discovered. (99) Despite the heightening of school-imposed control, all respondents in Ito and Daisuke's study, including both high school and college students, said that they would read and sometimes send messages during class, although they would not use voice call. (100) Gender and the culture of kawaii Among the most essential social uses of keitai is the manifestation and celebration of the female gender in the culture of kawaii, also known as Japan's "cute culture." (101) Mobile phones are lightweight, portable, and easy to be customized to suit different lifestyles and fashions (thanks to the manufacturers). As a result, keitai decorations and their associated cultural expressions have become the latest epitome of the culture of kawaii, in sharp contrast with the stereotypical depiction of Japan as a strongly patriarchic society. According to Hjorth, "the implications for women in Japan, who have been both key consumers and producers of keitai technology, are considerable." (102) "(T)he colonization of high-tech spaces such as the Internet by the cute characters usually associated with the female realm in Japan is an important signfier of the power afforded women by this new technology." (103) The best symbolic illustration of this new found power is probably Ms. Mari Matsunaga, one of the masterminds in the launch of i-mode. Given her 20-year editorship at Recruit, many have attributed DoCoMo's success in part to Matsunaga's female perspective as both consumer specialist and media producer. (104) The image of a trendy female mobile phone user is not without its critics, though. Kogawa, for instance, criticized that Japan's "independent" woman has become no more than "a new consumer." (105) This line of thinking suggests that the culture of kawaii further promoted by keitai usage does not really empower women. In fact, what it does is to further subdue females to the dominance of technologized capitalism. The duality of power relationship is most manifest among cell phone equipped kogyaru (high school gals), "a label attached to the newly precocious and street savvy high school students of the nineties who displayed social freedoms previously reserved for college students" (106): In certain city centers, kogyaru continue to be highly visible, sporting platform sandals, brightly colored fashions, sun-tanned faces, colored hair, and often a highly decorated mobile phone hanging from their necks. Unlike the male otaku (techno-geeks) associated with video games and computers, media-savvy girls have been associated with communication technologies such as pagers and mobile phones. Kogyaru are commonly thought to be the social group that pioneered and popularized uses of mobile communications, first with their appropriation of pagers in early nineties, and then with mobile phones the latter half of the nineties. 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. This shift coincided with the high visibility of kogyaru in the media and on the streets." (107) According to Ito and Daisuke, the kogyaru phenomenon carries on "a succession of highly visible but transient youth subculture" in postwar Japan. (108) On the one hand, it "flies in the face of mainstream norms that insist that young women be modest, quiet, pale, and domestic." Yet, on the other hand, most Japanese girls, including full-blown kogyaru, "tend not to have oppositional relationship(s) with their parents and teachers." (109) They often maintain a split personality and hide their kogyaru identity in front of elders. Identity, sexuality, and consumerism Youths and females both play a remarkable role in defining the social uses of keitai. This is indicative of a particular power dynamic in which issues of identity and sexuality are subsumed into the operations of a fundamentally commercial culture. The captivation of youths and women, functioning in tandem with the consumerist empowerment of individuals, is not a random result. Instead, it is central to the marketing strategy of DoCoMo. As Ms. Matsunaga articulates: "For me, i-mode is a declaration of independence. It's 'I' mode, not company mode. That's the message I wanted to deliver: this is me in individual mode. Japan's system of lifetime employment, which always meant you had to live your life for the company, is crumbling. The 'i' in i-mode is about the Internet and information, but it's also about identity." (110) Indeed, considerations of identity have been deliberately incorporated in the design and promotion of new mobile phones and wireless services. Keitai R&D taskforces have routinely consulted teens and females to find out about their cultural needs in using mobile phones. The findings are integrated in gadget/service design, which would then go through experiments or trial usages by members of the target social groups for further improvement. This consumer-centered model of technological development has reached beyond generations, as exemplified by the release of DoCoMo's raku-raku (or "easy-easy") handsets in September 2001. (111) Specifically designed for the elderly with a bigger keypad and an easier-to-read screen, the new cell phone proved to be an instant hit, selling over 200,000 units in the first two months. On a note of consumer culture, one can see keitai as the latest culmination of "Japan's gross national cool" that continues the country's tradition of small electronic products such as Walkmans, Tamagotchi, Pokemon cards, and Game Boys, which are all "intimate, personal, and portable media technologies." (112, 113) It's not just cell phones, but a "wide range of accessories and peripherals," including battery packs, universal serial bus (USB) cables, straps, adaptors, carrying cases, car holders, earphones, attachable digital cameras, and attachable keyboards. (114) It's not just gadgets, but also the content and services provided by i-mode's official and unofficial Web sites -- not all kinds of content and services though, but those that are the easiest to generate instant gratification and therefore are the most convenient to be commodified for profit. According to Lindgren et al, more than half of i-mode's data traffic points to entertainment content such as games. (115) It is also reported that more i-mode users click through banner ads and e-mail ads, 3.6 percent and 24 percent respectively, compared to less than 0.5 percent for PC-based online banner ads. (116) Closely related to the identity-consumerism dynamic is the issue of sexuality. Holden and Tsuruki maintain that cellular phone "has become a staple of the faddish, mobile, mediated, gadget-centered, youth-oriented, licentious lifestyle of contemporary urbanized Japan." (117) One illustrating example is the practice called enjo kousai "that started in the nineties, where school girls, particularly kogyaru, meet older men on the street and date for money," arguably made possible by mobile phones. (118) Another case is the usage of deai, i.e. online encounter services for people to meet virtually or in the flesh, which are "strongly associated with issues of dating, companionship, sexuality and romance" for mostly heterosexual but also homosexual relations. (119) Unlike earlier matchmaking and friends-making settings, "individuals (using deai) are able to operate in virtual isolation, freer of weighty social structure and claustrophobic external surveillance." (120) Many deai services hence become a hotbed for fraudulent dating, online pornography, and even open solicitation of prostitution. (121) Yet the combination of keitai connectivity and commercial operations does not necessarily mean moral corruption. Holden and Tsuruki point out that deai may also "afford(s) some of the advantages of the institutional orbit -- namely trust and self-defense. In this way, dual benefits are provided: individually-established and managed social connections, as well as a modicum of security." (122) The example they use to make this point takes place in Nakashibetsu, a farming community in the eastern tip of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island. (123) Due to agricultural mechanization and modernization, local young people, especially women, have been leaving to live independently or enter college. The city of Nakashibetsu then started to use deai to promote matchmaking, which had proven to be very successful. In this case, wireless Internet was not only used to facilitate online interpersonal communication, but also to select single people who will attend "the biannual, three-day pre-marital mixers." Another socially productive use of deai is exemplified by groups such as zenkoku furusato koryu foramu, a site fostering exchange between "home towns," which promote individual and personal communication that are nonetheless communal and outward-reaching. (124)
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