Cellphones and things

Hello hello! This is Ian writing this post.


Forgive me if I forget to add a verb or a particle or anything else that use typically used in English. My written English has begun to deteriorate due to the amount of Japanese I use in a typical day. I know I will have some sort of typo in here. Anyway...

I haven't written anything for a while and I feel bad about that because I know that people want to know what life in Japan is like! So, I will give a quick update on things that have happened lately, and then I'll talk a little about having/getting a cell phone in Japan.

Here's a very very quick overview of things I've been doing: I have joined the tennis team as a 'first year student', which is appropriate because I am very bad at tennis. Tomorrow is the first day I'll be practicing with the junior high's Indoor Volleyball team. And I'm actually extremely intimidated because they are the 3rd best team in the prefecture, and 3 of the students are members of the prefectural team. So yeah, relatively speaking I think I'll be just as good at volleyball as I am at tennis. I have almost completely finished planning and readying my first lessons for each grade level. I have moved from one apartment (my predecessor's apt) to a different apartment in the same building (because they are renovating the building, room by room, so I had to move a bunch of stuff that I had only come to own for roughly 4 days, including a washing machine and a refrigerator). Our new kitchen has an 'IH' stove, which requires special pans in order for the burner to get hot (it's a safety precaution). I have been to 3-4 dinner parties at people's houses, so needless to say I have met too many people to keep track of. I went to Tottori-shi (Tottori City) for prefectural orientation, where I met ALL of the ALTs/CIRs in Tottori. Almost all of us when out to Karaoke after the meetings. Oh, another ALT with my exact same birthday, and a different ALT who is from Walla Walla, Washington. So that was kind of amazing. And I went to a 'concert', held by the ALT on the other side of town, for my birthday, and got an official Kotoura Town polo as my present. And chocolate cake.

Okay then, cellphones.

In my personal opinion, America has various pitfalls when compared to Japan. But cellphones are an area of life in which America reigns supreme, especially in comparison to Japan. To show you why, I'll explain my current cellphone situation.

I got a cellphone yesterday because my 'gaijin' (foreigner) residence card came yesterday. You need the gaijin card to get a cellphone and a car, both of which are very needed in my placement. Anyway, there are 3 major providers in Japan/this area. AU, Softbank, and NTT Docomo. For the most part, they are all the same... but to make things easy to understand, I went with AU and I'm only going to talk about AU. But don't think that my troubles are just with AU, cause they are universal troubles. Anyway, in Japan, cellphone plans are not structured around mins/month + texts/month + data/month, like America. Three hundred anytime minutes with unlimited texting and unlimited data is something that does not exist in Japan. In Japan, you have a service fee. Mine is 980 yen (about 10 dollars). That fee allows you to call anyone with the same provider, between 1am and 9pm for free. So that's nice. That fee also determines the price of what your calls to other provider users will be (and this is the crappy part). You don't get anytime minutes. If you call someone from an AU phone to an NTT Docomo phone/Softbank phone, you are charged 21yen/30seconds. That's 42yen/minute, or roughly 50cents/minute. That's for normal, non-roaming calls. Now, if you pay more per month, you get an allowance of up to a certain $ amount that they won't charge you for. For example, my 980 gets me 25 'free' minutes a month to call non-au phones. I believe it's like 6390yen/month for 600 minutes (or $70 for 600 minutes).

In addition to the service fee, you are charged a data usage fee. This is for smartphones, yes, but it also applies to all phones. You see, no one in Japan uses SMS to text each other. Everyone uses email. Everyone. In fact, at this point, it's often more expensive to have a plan that gives you more SMS than data usage. So, in order to text, you have to use the internet. The cost of data is not awful (but keep in mind I didn't get a smart phone), and the medium usage option is 1000yen ($12ish). So my bill is roughly $20 a month for 25 minutes and an undetermined amount of text messages.

But that's not the end of it. I got the cheapest phone they had available... which was 36,000yen (roughly $400). Japanese companies do no subsidize their phones when you sign their 2 year contracts, like they do in America. People usually get a free phone, or a $40 phone, when they renew their contract in America, but that's simply not an option here in Japan. They give you the option to pay in full right away, or to pay off the phone over the course of the contract. I chose to pay it off gradually, so that brings my bill up to 3800yen/month. So, I pay roughly $45 a month for 25 minutes and probably something like 500 texts a month.

Don't take your cellphones for granted.

Ian