By the time the sun gets to Europe, it's already been up here for at least six hours. By the time it gets to the next continent, it's another eight. Maybe that's why we are ahead of you. And yet the new smartphone generation sweeping over the world is hardly noticed here. Some of those new smartphones are given away for free　here, subsidized desperately ever again by the operator. Others are plainly forgotten. Why is that?

Technology
Japan is deeply in love with technology. Remember the teddy bear you used to hug for comfort? The Japanese had a robotic baby seal. Remember how you tried to learn to play a musical instrument? The Japanese taught robots to do it. You know these smooth new "contactless" commuter cards they're setting up on the public transport systems of European metropolises like Paris and Malmö? The Japanese had that since 2001. By now, you can use it to buy soda and sushi and it's not even a card anymore, but more often an integrated part of your mobile phone. Other things dreamt of for mobile phones in Europe and America - working push e-mail, silly game shows, streaming TV - it's here already.

Keitai literacy
All this technology - and more. Still, home desktop computers are fairly new and somewhat overlooked here. Why would you need an Amiga or a Commodore when you have Game&Watch, Famicom and Dreamcast, huh? This meant, and still means, that peoples' first experience of using a microchip device for anything that is not gaming, is the mobile phone, the keitai. In one of the first conversations I had with my Japanese boss he said "In Europe you talk about computer literacy. Here, it's more like keitai literacy". That is true to the extent that input of text in a Japanese computer mimics the way to input text in a mobile phone.

Operators
In Japan, the operators are not simply driving the market. They control it, and they do so fiercely. They decide how the phone should look, work, and interact with the net and the user. One of them made their own programming language! It's their net, their phones, their menus, their games and their customers. One phone model is not available through more than one operator, and they only sell their own customized models with their own logos. It is often as hard to know who actually made the phone as it is to penetrate the massive wall of funny Japanese characters thrown in your face whenever you turn the thing on. Occasionally, one of the more progressive operators launches an international model from an international brand if it is big enough, and has to do with fruits, but they will touch the device only with gloves and the consumer will have to sign papers to testify that he or she has understood that the device is not capable of the technological wonders he or she learnt to expect from products from a Japanese operator.

So what about smartphones?
First of all, regardless of how "smart" smartphones are, and the fact that they are platforms and extendable and what-not, they are, to Japanese consumers, a step back with regard to features and usefulness. Secondly, to sell something that "is a phone, but works kinda' like a computer" in a country where computers works kinda' like phones is just obviously the wrong angle.