Tuesday, January 16, 2001

Thanks to Cell Phones, Japanese Students Swap E-Mail Even in Class By ALAN BRENDER Tokyo Cell-phone mania, which has swept Japanese campuses, shows no signs of abating. Students dangle colorful plastic cell phones -- kei-tais -- from their wrists, hang them around their necks, or stow them in pockets or bags. But mostly they use them. In the distant past -- maybe a year ago -- students were talking to friends on their kei-tais in hallways, cafeterias, public areas, and even classrooms. Now they are silently engrossed in more-advanced functions, like sending e-mail messages, surfing the Web, shopping online, listening to downloaded music, and, as of last month, watching videos. "It's like everybody has access to everybody else all the time," says Colin Williamson, an exchange student from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. "It's a nation of telepaths." Hiroshi Shimada, a professor in the human-relations division of the literature department at Konan University, in Kobe, was 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 kei-tai monitors. All of the students were busy with e-mail. Mr. Shimada decided to conduct a study of 915 university students at seven universities last June -- several months before the full kei-tai tsunami swept the land. Even back then, he found that 90 percent of the students owned kei-tais capable of sending and receiving e-mail messages. About 65 percent of the students in the survey also admitted to receiving or sending at least one e-mail message during class. Thirty percent owned up to sending or receiving as many as four. "I just can't resist looking at my messages," says Haruna Kubo, a student at Kyorin University. Yumi Hisato, at Waseda University, says: "My friend gets more than 150 messages per day, and I want to get more messages than she does." Each e-mail message costs only about 3 cents, but sheer volume produces big bills. "I pay 7,000 yen [about $70] for the cell phone per month," says Mari Mizoguchi, a student at Temple University Japan. The messages are necessarily short. For example, one popular cell-phone service, called i-mode, cannot handle e-mail messages longer than 250 kanji characters. And users must punch several keys on the Lilliputian keyboard just to form one kanji character. "But this is not a problem for a generation of young people who are used to manipulating video games with their thumbs," says a computer consultant, Junichi Saito. "They are incredibly fast in using their thumbs to push the buttons -- and most can do it blindfolded." Several Japanese universities are now developing other uses for i-mode, like informing students of canceled classes and nagging those who are behind in their tuition payments. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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