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 yellow 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.
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"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. |
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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.
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