Annoyance With Cell Phone Users Ignites National Backlash
By Doug Struck , Washington Post Foreign Service
A SECTION; Pg. A22
1060 words
TOKYO – Japan has put cellular phones to the mouths of the masses. Now it wishes they would shut up.The proliferation of cell phones here is creating a backlash from people annoyed by the constant electronic rings and one-sided conversations by users who natter away on buses and trains and in restaurants and other public places.
Many countries, including the United States, are starting to confront this nuisance of the
communications age. Japan, where social harmony is the supreme national virtue, is taking it more seriously than most, responding with rigid rules, appeals to the country’s famous
public-mindedness and the development of electronic gadgets that let the aggrieved fight back.
The cell phone scourge even has some people taking the un-Japanese step of speaking up to
strangers. At an otherwise empty rural coffee shop recently, the proprietress was willing to risk the loss of her only patrons by scolding them for using a cell phone. On a high-speed train, a rider stood over an offending cell phone user and tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for the call to end.
“The chief benefits of cell phones are going to be lost because of all the restrictions,” fretted
Yoshihiko Uesugi, 35, a restaurateur and confessed cell phone addict.
Signs of revolt are popping up everywhere. Restaurants are begining to post signs prohibiting cell phone use. One train line has designated even-numbered cars as “no cell phone” zones. Another has replaced its gentle appeals for courtesy with stronger announcements telling people to turn off their phones.
A company called Sampo System has developed a signal light to be mounted in trains and public places that will flash accusingly when anyone uses a mobile phone within 25 feet. The company already makes cell phone wrist straps that flash–a fashion accessory–but it has decided to diversify: “We thought there is a growing market over the issue of courtesy,” said spokesman Toshihiro Gunji.
Japan was slow to go for cell phones, but there are now 55 million of them in a country of 127
million people. The phones, which come in fluorescent colors with Hello Kitty wrist straps, flashing cords and blinking antennas, are ubiquitous. People hold conversations while they are walking, driving, eating, working out, even riding bicycles.
The result is a steady jingle of rings and streets full of people who seem, at first glance, to be
talking to them-selves–too loudly.
Most of all, it’s an offense against manners–and in Japan, courtesy among strangers is of supreme importance; social friction is suppressed by a huge weight of opprobrium so that 27 million people can live and work together in the world’s largest metropolitan area.
“Complaints come from inside trains, movie houses, hospitals–in all these places we are supposed to be quiet,” said Yoshitaka Yano, an official of the consumer awareness office at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. In a mail survey of 1,000 citizens earlier this year, his office found nearly 900 deemed cell phones offensive. “There is a lot of dissatisfaction,” he said.
“I can’t escape” cell phones, complained Rei Iwase, a 35-year-old accounting manager. If callers can’t get through on her home phone, they think nothing of dialing her keitai (mobile), as it is called here, which she feels obliged to leave on. And in public, “some young people seem proud of talking loudly. It’s as if they want to show that they have friends,” she said.
But the problem is not just one of courtesy. The National Police Agency became alarmed when the number of car accidents caused by drivers fumbling with cell phones began averaging 200 to 250 a month.
“It’s good to have a networked society, but it has some drawbacks,” said Inspector Hisaaki Abe, legal section chief of the department’s Traffic Planning Bureau. “Accidents can be a terrific drawback.”
A law put into effect last November prohibiting drivers from using cell phones cut the accident rate in half, despite a uniquely Japanese wrinkle that largely restricts enforcement of the law to those involved in accidents.
There are other dangers heightened in Japan. A government panel has warned that cell phones operating within nine inches of a heart pacemaker might affect the pacemaker’s operation. On Japan’s famously jammed commuter trains, that proximity is violated daily.
Perhaps the biggest reason that cell phones engender hostility in Japan is that the culture does not tolerate loud and extraneous noises. Drivers do not honk in anger. Car alarms are silent. People do not shout. Strangers rarely talk; when the city bus driver shuts off his motor, as he does at each red light, there is a funereal silence.
So the jangling of a phone is an excruciatingly intrusive offense, even if the ring has been replaced on today’s programmable cell phones with, say, the sprightly theme song to the Astro Boy cartoon show.
More annoying than the ring, cell phone critics say, is the distraction of people talking to machines. Even in places where normal conversation is expected, there is something irritating about someone on the phone, they say.
“Psychologically, if there are two people talking, they consciously or unconsciously absorb the
surroundings and adjust their conversation,” said Masahiko Horiuchi, a spokesman for East Japan Railway Co. “But someone talking on a keitai is more detached, and his voice can be loud.”
Japan’s cell phone companies are attempting to tackle the problem with technology and slogans. An association of 108 Japanese mobile phone service providers has mounted a campaign to appeal for courtesy. One slogan on billboards: “Everybody on the train is hearing what you wouldn’t tell your mother.”
Cell phones have a “manner mode” or “vibration mode” to silence the ring. And Japan’s innovation of offering instant e-mail on cell phones could take the talk out of communicating. It is all the rage, but the awkwardness of typing messages on a tiny cell phone has limited its use mainly to teenagers and young adults gossiping over the Internet.
“All the companies in this business are worried” about the backlash against cell phone offenders, said Yoichi Mi-zushima, spokesman for cell phone giant NTT DoCoMo. “We think this is a problem that a company has to tackle. We have to appeal to the morals of the user.”