A MEDIA GENEALOGY OF THE JAPANESE
MOBILE PHONE, 1997–2007
by
CHRISTOPHER J. ST. LOUIS
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the School of Journalism and Communication
and the Division of Graduate Studies of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
September 2023
DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE
Student: Christopher J. St. Louis
Title: A Media Genealogy of the Japanese Mobile Phone, 1997–2007
This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for 
the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the School of Journalism and Communication by:
Biswarup Sen Chair
Janet Wasko Core Member
Amanda Cote Core Member
Dong-hoon Kim Institutional Representative
and
Krista Chronister Vice Provost for Graduate Studies
Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School.
Degree awarded September 2023.
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©2023 Christopher J. St. Louis
SOME RIGHTS RESERVED
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Images are copyright their respective owners.
3
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Christopher J. St. Louis
Doctor of Philosophy
School of Journalism and Communication
September 2023
Title: A Media Genealogy of the Japanese Mobile Phone, 1997–2007
The mobile phone—in its present form, the smartphone—has become a ubiquitous part of
everyday life. We use it to facilitate personal and professional communications, access 
entertainment media, and purchase goods and services, among other things, and yet it has 
become so thoroughly familiar that it is seen as unremarkable and we take its presence for 
granted. These meanings of mobile media—what it is to be used for, and in what ways—are not 
intrinsic to the form of the mobile phone itself or the natural outcomes of technological 
development, but are instead the result of significant processes of negotiation of meaning that 
have occurred and continue to occur throughout media history.
This dissertation is a media genealogy of the keitai denwa (lit. “mobile phone”) in Japan 
from 1997 to 2007, when the keitai denwa emerged and transformed from a limited office 
technology aimed at professionals to a commonplace fixture used by people of all ages to 
facilitate the experiences of everyday life. Drawing from a range of contemporary print media, 
this dissertation shows how the keitai was constituted as a discursive formation through media 
representations, and how these changing representations subsequently helped shape the 
expectations of what mobile media could do, for whom, and how. As a media genealogy, the 
dissertation attends to the social and technological conditions of 20th-century Japan which made 
it possible for the keitai to emerge and assume its particular form, at the same time contesting 
4
mainstream Western histories of media and the Internet that frame the keitai ecosystem as an 
inconsequential, geographically-limited failure. Instead, I argue that what we have come to 
understand as “mobile media” today is an assemblage of affordances, expectations, and cultural 
meanings that are the result of the contingent negotiations and technological developments that 
were in constant play during this period of media transition, and that understanding how 
discourses of keitai and mobile media became established in this period is vital to our 
understanding of mobile media today.
5
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Christopher J. St. Louis
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Southern Oregon University, Ashland, OR
DEGREES AWARDED:
Doctor of Philosophy in Media Studies, 2023, University of Oregon
Master of Science in Media Studies, 2017, University of Oregon
Master of Arts and Sciences in Information Studies, 2014, University of Tokyo
Bachelor of Arts in English, 2009, Southern Oregon University
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Internet Studies
Media Histories
Japanese Computing Histories
Science and Technology Studies
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Instructor of Record, University of Oregon, 2019–2021, 2023
Graduate Employee, University of Oregon, 2015–2023
GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS:
Columbia Scholarship, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon, 
2017
PUBLICATIONS:
Laufer, Peter, John V. Pavlik, and Christopher St. Louis. “Slow Journalism: Synthesizing 
Digital Journalism and Slow News.” In Reporting Beyond the Problem: From 
Civic Journalism to Solutions Journalism, edited by Karen McIntyre Hopkinson 
and Nicole Smith Dahmen. AEJMC – Peter Lang Scholarsourcing Series. New 
York, NY: Peter Lang, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3726/b14727.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Bish Sen, whose support has
been invaluable in helping me to refine my initial ideas for the dissertation, and shepherding me 
through the writing process, especially when it stalled during the early years of the pandemic. 
Drs. Janet Wasko, Amanda Cote, and Dong Hoon Kim were also valuable sources of guidance 
over the process of producing this dissertation in terms of offering ideas, resources, suggestions 
about my methodological approach, and constructive criticism on the dissertation as it 
developed. The formal process of writing began right around the start of the COVID-19 
pandemic, and I regret that I wasn’t able to interact with all of you more regularly during this 
period.
Kevin McDowell provided valuable assistance in searching for and acquiring research 
materials, from bringing to my attention the Ōya Sōichi Bunko library (which I was never able to
visit anyway, on account of the COVID-19 disruption), to acquiring access to academic journals 
in the library, to providing advice on international inter-library loan requests.
Courses I have taken across the university have been invaluable in introducing me to new
tools and perspectives that shaped the ways I approached my dissertation. Though they may not 
remember it, I’m grateful to the instructors of these courses for their work which helped broaden 
my intellectual horizons and provided me with new conceptual tools to employ in developing the
dissertation: Dan Buck, Anita Chari, Yukari Furikado, Colin Koopman, HyeRyoung Ok, Carol 
Silverman, and Marsha Weisiger.
I owe a great personal thanks to a number of people who have been particularly 
supportive or influential over the course of producing this dissertation in myriad different ways, 
whether providing inspiration through their own scholarly journeys, serving as a sounding board 
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for my embryonic ideas, commiserating about the experience of graduate school, or offering 
human connection in the isolation of the initial pandemic years (among many others). Though 
they may not realize the extent of their contributions (or even that they contributed at all), I want 
to extend my gratitude to Greg Dewar, Alexandra Hambleton, Adrienne Johnson, Patrick Jones, 
Jason Karlin, and Lucas Schmidt.
Of course, my time in the School of Journalism and Communication has been marked 
with a number of experiences and encounters with staff, faculty, and colleagues over the years 
that are too numerous to mention, but I am grateful for every one of them. I want to extend a 
specific thanks to Dr. Peter Laufer for the support and collaboration over the years, and for 
taking the time to attend my dissertation defense presentation!
Finally, I am eternally grateful to my family: my parents, for their unflagging support 
(even if it wasn’t always clear what I was doing or when I would be finished) and to Heather and
Hazel. To Heather, who has been a source of support and refuge along every step of the way of 
this journey (and even before it began): thank you for all of it, and I’m looking forward to 
starting on the next journey with you. To Hazel, for reminding me what is really important in life
when I get lost in the minutiae, and of the critical necessity to keep working for a better future. I 
love you both.
This dissertation was produced using entirely free and open source software. It was 
written using in VSCodium, Markdown, Pandoc, and LibreOffice. References were managed 
with Zotero. Photos cropped and adjusted in the GNU Image Manipulation Program. All work 
was done on computers running Fedora Linux. Typed on a Happy Hacking Keyboard 
Professional 2.
8
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter       Page
Introduction: Studying Mobile Media.......................................................................................14
Outline of Chapters............................................................................................................18
Chapter 1.  Origins? A Mobile Genealogy.................................................................................22
Introduction........................................................................................................................22
Thinking ‘Genealogically’ about Mobile Media................................................................23
On Being ‘Mobile’.............................................................................................................30
Remediation as Genealogy in Mobile Media.....................................................................40
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................43
Chapter 2.  Conditions of Possibility: Information and Communications Technologies in 
Late 20th Century Japan........................................................................................................46
Introduction........................................................................................................................46
“All the Best Stuff is Made in Japan:” Discourses on Japanese ICTs...............................47
“Asia as Method” in Computing Histories........................................................................57
From State Monopoly to Open Infrastructures: The 20 Century Telecommunications 
Industry..............................................................................................................................60
The Role of Science and Technology in Japanese Public Life..........................................67
Localizations and Adaptations in Information and Communications Technologies..........72
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................78
Chapter 3.  Formations: Defining “Keitai” and the Analysis of Documents..........................81
Introduction........................................................................................................................81
Keitai as Discursive Formation..........................................................................................83
“Words and Things”.....................................................................................................85
PHS and the Keitai Denwa..........................................................................................86
Analysis of Documents......................................................................................................90
Print Media and Cultural Formation............................................................................94
Media Representation and Advertising........................................................................96
Limitations...................................................................................................................97
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................99
Chapter 4.  Emergence: Discourses of Keitai, 1997–2007.......................................................102
9
Analysis (Discourses of Keitai).......................................................................................102
1997–1998: Competing Standards and Ideas of “Mobile Media”.............................102
1999–2001: i-mode Introduction and Popularization................................................115
2002–2004: Standardization and Convergence.........................................................131
2005–2007: Public Manners, Late Majority, and Early Smartphones.......................145
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................152
Chapter 5.  Closure: From i-mode to iPhone..........................................................................155
Introduction......................................................................................................................155
“A Revolutionary Mobile Phone”....................................................................................157
Limitations and Avenues for Future Scholarship.............................................................160
Conclusion: “Historically Minor” Platforms...................................................................164
BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................169
10
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure       Page
Figure 1.1: Apple Computer, “What to Give the Computer that Has Everything,” 
(advertisement), Newsweek, 1994, accessed August 20, 2023, 
http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/gallery3.html.....................................................33
Figure 2.1: Pager with numerals-to-Japanese conversion chart. Source unknown........................77
Figure 3.1: Yahoo! Mobile, “PHS vs. keitai, plunging into civil war [of the warring states 
period]!” 2021, accessed August 20, 2023, https://www.ymobile.jp/sp/goodbyephs........89
Figure 4.1: Toshiba Genio (advertisement), Dime, June 19, 1997, 60.........................................103
Figure 4.2: Panasonic Pinocchio (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, Feb. 28, 1997, 11..................103
Figure 4.3: Toshiba, “Toshiba no Keitai” (advertisement), Dime, June 19, 1997, 28.................104
Figure 4.4: Feature of various PHS handset models, Dime, June 19. 1997, 107.........................104
Figure 4.5: Toshiba Data Carrots PHS handset overview. Dime, June 19, 1997, 66–7...............105
Figure 4.6: Kyocera, “Dokodemo mēru,” (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, December 5, 1997, 
104–5................................................................................................................................106
Figure 4.7: Cover of Dime, June 19, 1997...................................................................................106
Figure 4.8: NTT DoCoMo, “Kou mietemo, denshi mēru jushinshiteiru” (advertisement), Dime, 
June 19, 1997, 88–9.........................................................................................................107
Figure 4.9: NTT, “The network becomes a gigantic library” (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, 
February 14, 1997, 80–1..................................................................................................109
Figure 4.10: NTT, “Global village” (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 21, 1997, 26–7..109
Figure 4.11: NTT DoCoMo satellite phone network used in volcano monitoring (advertisement), 
Shūkan Asahi, December 05, 1997, 144–5......................................................................110
Figure 4.12: NTT DoCoMo, “Satellite phones solve the mystery? The little-known ecology of 
the albatross,” Shūkan Asahi, March 06, 1998, 122–3.....................................................111
Figure 4.13: NTT DoCoMo next-generation cellphone development (advertisement), Shūkan 
Asahi, March 07, 1997, 102–3.........................................................................................112
Figure 4.14: NTT DoCoMo’s work with the MPEG-4 video codec (advertisement), Shūkan 
Asahi, December 19, 1997, 146–7...................................................................................112
Figure 4.15: NTT DoCoMo facilitating network logistics for the 1998 Nagano Olympics 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 06, 1998, 146–7.............................................113
Figure 4.16: Wristwatch-style PHS phone from NTT (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 
13, 1998, 132–3................................................................................................................114
Figure 4.17: “Bring/carry your manners with you.”....................................................................115
11
Figure 4.18: NTT DoCoMo, “Hanasu keitai kara, tsukau keitai he. ‘i-mōdo’ honjitsu tōjō” 
(advertisement), Yomiuri Shinbun, February 22, 1999, 20–1..........................................117
Figure 4.19: Fujitsu F501i Hyper i-mode handset (advertisement), Yomiuri Shinbun, February 22,
1999, 23............................................................................................................................118
Figure 4.20: IDO and DDI Cellular announcement of upcoming cdmaOne service 
(advertisement), Yomiuri Shinbun, March 24, 1999, 16..................................................119
Figure 4.21: NTT DoCoMo ad featuring the food company Kagome, which used a PHS system 
for internal communications and to connect traveling sales representatives 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 05, 1999, 58–9...............................................120
Figure 4.22: Panasonic, “Goshujin-sama, botan no kawari ni boisu de go-meirei wo” 
(advertisement), Yomiuri Shinbun, March 9, 1999, 36....................................................121
Figure 4.23: KDDI, Sony SPP-E777 answering machine unit with KDDI α-Email service 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, December 29, 2000, 18–9.............................................122
Figure 4.24: Sharp, “Email culture for each person,” (advertisement), Yomiuri Shinbun, February 
21, 1999, 20–1..................................................................................................................123
Figure 4.25: Handspring Visor (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, March 9, 2001, 96...................124
Figure 4.26: NTT DoCoMo, uploading images of a disaster scene to the fire department dispatch 
office (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 9, 2001, 94–5.......................................125
Figure 4.27: NTT DoCoMo, mobile communications base station established in Yamanashi 
Prefecture (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 23, 2001, 18–9..............................126
Figure 4.28: NTT DoCoMo, Korochan company’s use of i-mode in business operations 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, December 14, 2001, 18–9.............................................126
Figure 4.29: Cover, i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200, vol. 3, January 2001.............................................127
Figure 4.30: “i-mode keitai buying guide”, i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200, vol. 3, January 2001, 12–3.
..........................................................................................................................................128
Figure 4.31: Feature overview and walkthrough of the NEC N502it handset, i-mode Jōhō Saito 
1200, vol. 3, January 2001, 20–1.....................................................................................129
Figure 4.32: Model-specific features of the Sony SO502iWM, i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200, vol. 3, 
January 2001, 14–5..........................................................................................................130
Figure 4.33: A selection of websites offering information on specific activities or resources 
within a city or region, i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200, vol. 3, January 2001, 68–9.................130
Figure 4.34: NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA service allows the streaming of live video. Shūkan Asahi, 
February 22, 2002, 18–9..................................................................................................132
Figure 4.35: NTT DoCoMo, wireless computer-guided tours in the Shinjuku Gyoen using the 
FOMA network, Shūkan Asahi, February 8, 2002, 18–9.................................................133
Figure 4.36: NTT DoCoMo, using an i-mode phone to purchase movie tickets through the Pia 
ticketing agency, Shūkan Asahi, December 5, 2003, 106–7............................................135
12
Figure 4.37: NTT DoCoMo, searching for and locating books in the Academy Hills library 
through i-mode search services, Shūkan Asahi, February 6, 2004, 95–6........................135
Figure 4.38: NTT DoCoMo’s “Ie♥Zoku” advertising campaign, Shūkan Asahi, December 24, 
2004,2–3...........................................................................................................................136
Figure 4.39: Feature review of the NEC FOMA N900i, i-mode Best, June 2004, 14–5.............138
Figure 4.40: The Mitsubishi FOMA D900i, i-mode Best, June 2004, 20–1................................138
Figure 4.41: Comparisons among different models of 900i-series i-mode keitai, i-mode Best, 
June 2004, 24–5...............................................................................................................141
Figure 4.42: Email features of 900i-series phones, i-mode Best, June 2004, 28–9.....................141
Figure 4.43: Comparison of GPS navigation features and camera quality among selected 3G 
keitai models, Nikkei Trendy, April 2004, 32–3...............................................................144
Figure 4.44: Keitai sporting unconventional designs “outside of the mainstream,” Nikkei Trendy, 
April 2004, 228–9............................................................................................................145
Figure 4.45: NTT DoCoMo, “My keitai is an adult’s FOMA [phone]” (advertisement), Shūkan 
Asahi, December 31, 2004, 18–9.....................................................................................145
Figure 4.46: Unique keitai features such as customizable external LED display, “osaifu keitai,” 
and an early smartphone with touchscreen and WiFi. Shūkan ASCII, July 12, 2005, 49.
..........................................................................................................................................147
Figure 4.47: NTT DoCoMo, public manners campaign (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, December
20, 2005, 12......................................................................................................................149
Figure 4.48: NTT DoCoMo, “I thought of things I want to ask my grandfather.” (advertisement), 
Shūkan Asahi, February 18, 2005, 18–9..........................................................................149
Figure 4.49: NTT DoCoMo, “Here, there is unforgettable scenery, and unforgettable flavors” 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 24, 2006, 22–3...............................................150
Figure 4.50: DoCoMo’s Rakuraku Phone Simple, Shūkan Asahi, February 10, 2006, 4............150
Figure 4.51: Keitai featuring full web browsers, GPS navigation, TV tuners, and more. Shūkan 
ASCII, March 20, 2007, 41..............................................................................................151
Figure 4.52: EMobile’s Sharp EM-ONE, one of the first modern smartphones on a Japanese 
carrier, Shūkan ASCII, March 20, 2007, 22.....................................................................153
Figure 5.1: “Important changes in the domestic telecommunications industry.” Ministry of 
Internal Affairs and Communications (Sōmushō), accessed August 20, 2023, 
https://www.soumu.go.jp/johotsusintokei/whitepaper/ja/r01/html/nd231720.html........163
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Introduction: Studying Mobile Media
Over a span of less than 30 years, the Internet has gone from a novel communications 
technology for academic and military researchers, early adopters, and other technology 
enthusiasts, to an inescapable feature of everyday life, where much of the modern everyday 
experience is mediated through Internet-connected information and communications 
technologies. From the early 2010s there has been an explosion in the use of smartphones, and 
through the decade the smartphone has become the dominant paradigm for accessing the 
Internet, especially for general consumer use. The International Telecommunications Union 
reported in 2011 that coverage of the second-generation (2G) mobile networks reached 90% of 
the world’s population, with third-generation (3G) coverage reaching an estimated 45%.1 By 
2021, over 90% of the global population had access to “mobile broadband” (3G, 4G, and faster 
networks), while the reach of 2G had declined to 5–7%, owing in part to the phasing-out of 2G 
networks in many countries starting from the late 2010s.2 The change has been significant in so-
called developing nations in particular, regions of the world where traditional wired 
communications infrastructures are inadequate or highly expensive.
In 2021, the ITU estimated that there were only 13 subscribers of fixed (wired) 
broadband Internet access per 100 inhabitants of “developing” regions, while mobile broadband 
subscriptions numbered 74 per 100 inhabitants. In the so-called developed regions, there were 36
1. “Measuring Digital Development: Facts and Figures 2011,” Facts and Figures (Geneva, Switzerland: 
International Telecommunications Union, 2011), 4, 
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2011.pdf.
2. “Measuring Digital Development: Facts and Figures 2021,” Facts and Figures (Geneva, Switzerland: 
International Telecommunications Union, November 25, 2021), 8, 
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/FactsFigures2021.pdf.
14
and 131 subscribers3 per 100 inhabitants to fixed and mobile broadband services, respectively.4 
Even in areas where more developed wired infrastructure is present, the number of mobile 
broadband subscriptions vastly exceeds subscriptions to wired broadband services. The increase 
in broadband-capable network coverage from 2011 to 2021 points not only to the rapid 
development of necessary infrastructure, but more importantly to a significant shift in the way 
people around the world access the Internet, with mobile media replacing more stationary, wired 
modes of access. This shift was brought about by a number of overlapping factors: the increased 
availability of low cost Android-based smartphones; the continuing visibility of Apple’s iPhone 
as a status symbol in regions with established, emerging, or developing middle classes; advances 
in manufacturing technologies which allow for increasingly powerful hardware to fit inside 
smaller mobile form factors; trends in web design that call for websites to scale their content for 
consumption on either a PC screen or a mobile display; the ability of these powerful mobile 
devices to access more complex web technologies previously reserved for traditional computers; 
shifts away from the prior PC-based model of computing and the development of more and more
applications that reside “in the cloud” (e.g. email services, collaborative office software, media 
streaming services), and so on.
The title of mobile media scholar Richard Ling’s 2011 book, Taken for Grantedness, 
reflects a conceptual theme that runs through most of Ling’s work (and much of the scholarship 
on mobile media in general in the 2010s): the notion that mobile media—which in most cases is 
generally synonymous with the mobile phone—has arrived at a point where it is nearly invisible 
in everyday life. Ling is largely concerned with the social effects of the mobile phone and its 
integral role in interpersonal communication and coordination—it is, he says, “a device that 
3. More than 100 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants indicates that some individuals may have multiple 
service subscriptions, e.g. a work and a personal phone.
4. “Facts and Figures 2021,” 8–9.
15
embeds us in our web of social interactions,” where our inability or reluctance to use the mobile 
phone at a social level negatively affects not just ourselves but the people around us who may 
have to alter their communicative practices to accommodate our technological isolation.5 The 
mobile media of today, however, plays a role in more than immediate, interpersonal 
communication and coordination. We rely on mobile media when we want to navigate through 
an unfamiliar place, consume entertainment media and play games, shop for goods and services, 
access information in general while away from a computer, etc., and we take its presence for 
granted even as it has become an indispensable part of facilitating all of these tasks.
The mobile phone has become naturalized and normalized, as invisible a fixture as the 
electrical infrastructure that powers our homes. A central concern of this dissertation is to engage
in pushing back against narratives that are also “taken for granted” in media history through 
calling attention to the very intentional processes by which history is arranged in a linear fashion.
The processes by which media becomes normalized function ahistorically, and the experience of 
media that is always-already present serves to erase the vestiges of a time in which life in the 
presence of mobile media was not taken for granted.
This dissertation is concerned with a particular period in media history: the years from 
1997 to 2007 in Japan, when the mobile phone—or keitai denwa—exploded in popularity and 
became a fixture of urban Japan (especially among youth and trendy businesspeople) and the 
envy of much of the rest of the world. This was a period of transition, in which the mobile phone 
moved from an expensive, niche technology generally thought of as a purely business device to a
familiar, commonplace, and unremarkable consumer good. The dissertation proposes to, as Lisa 
Gitelman articulates,
5. Richard Ling, Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication into Society 
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 2–3.
16
[look] at a specific moment of media transition, when things seemed particularly 
contingent and far from inevitable or natural. Moments of media transition are 
periods in which the perceptual and semiotic patterns, the technological forms, 
social practices, economic structures, and legal constructions later defining a 
particular medium within a dominant media system remain unsettled and under 
negotiation.6
The period covered in this dissertation was one of intense technological development 
across all domains of information and communications technologies. The Internet, which in 
America first became available to the general public on a broad scale in 1995, grew from the 
domain of hobbyists and early adopters to become a much more integral part of personal and 
professional life, and was accompanied by growing expectations as to what exactly it could be 
used for. The mobile phone also grew by leaps and bounds, from a device that was literally not 
much more than a mobile phone in the early to mid–1990s to a convergent device that serves a 
number of important functions in our everyday lives, from facilitating personal and professional 
communications to providing access to entertainment media. This transition could hardly be 
predicted by looking at the state of mobile phones in 1997, and it was hardly inevitable at any 
point during this period, when a greater variety of competing mobile media existed and the role 
of the mobile phone within this landscape—who would use it, how it would be used, and what 
would it be used for—was still an ongoing question.
By focusing on the keitai denwa in this formative period, I intend to draw attention to an 
important media technology that is often forgotten or overlooked by new media scholars outside 
of Japan. The keitai will also serve as the focal point for a broader argument about the 
subsequent development of mobile media. Placing the keitai denwa in a linear narrative of 
technological progress as the distant ancestor of the Apple and Google smartphones of today 
6. Lisa Gitelman, “Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital, Or, The Case of Sheet Music and 
the Problem of Piano Rolls,” in Memory Bytes, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (Durham, 
NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 200.
17
would hardly constitute a novel or radical argument. Instead, I argue that while the contemporary
smartphone certainly follows the keitai chronologically and adopts a significant number of its 
affordances, there was nothing predetermined or inevitable about the smartphone’s emergence at 
the keitai’s peak, especially since the two paradigms existed side-by-side for a number of years. 
The information and communications technologies of the 1980s and 1990s, especially ones 
leaning towards a more portable form factor, did not have to take the form of the smartphone or 
mobile tablet in our present day; they did not have to develop alongside an app economy that 
sees the functionality of these devices extended through thousands of third-party applications and
services; and they did not have to come to signify certain practices and attitudes towards 
communication, the networked self, the relationship of the phone to the owner’s body and the 
relationship of the body to surrounding space. There was nothing in the features of these 
historical media that unequivocally point to the functionality and meaning of mobile media 
today. Instead, what we have come to understand as “mobile media” today is an assemblage of 
features, affordances, and cultural meanings that are the result of contingent negotiations and 
technological developments that were in constant play during these historical periods.
 Outline of Chapters 
The first chapter of this dissertation begins by exploring the property of ‘mobility’, and 
how it has been defined in the context of information and communications technologies. 
Mobility as a concept underwent its own processes of negotiation as computers became portable,
and there is a significant amount of discursive meaning present in the difference between a 
‘mobile’ device and a ‘portable’ one. A settled definition of ‘mobility’ allows for the construction
of ‘mobile media’ as a category which carries its own expected affordances and practices. By 
18
first understanding the implications of ‘mobile media’, we are then able observe the ways in 
which discourses of mobile media are shaped by their constituent devices.
The chapter also introduces the central theoretical/methodical approach of the dissertation
in the concept of media genealogy. This work is primarily a work of media historiography, but I 
seek to avoid dealing in the linear narratives of technological process which present each 
development as either an evolutionary step on the way to the artifacts of the present day, or a 
failed adaptation (to market forces, is the unspoken implication) that is forgotten along the 
wayside. Instead, this work will draw from the genealogical method developed by Michel 
Foucault and extended by a number of succeeding scholars into the area of media studies. Media 
genealogy represents one of many recent approaches to critical (new) media historiography, one 
which “looks at the many origin stories of technological innovation and the negotiations and 
decisions that accompanied it, as well as the alternative, not-yet-realised possibilities.”7 While 
self-reflexive approaches to historiography in general have become common in recent years, 
media genealogy places a deliberate emphasis on the rejection of linear organizations of history 
(and especially narratives of “progress”) to instead attend to the processes by which discourses of
media history become established in the first place. The chapter employs the new media theory 
of remediation as one way of approaching mobile media from a genealogical standpoint and 
making visible the descent and emergence of new media forms that, despite the discursive 
attempts at severing them from the past, still call back to the older media forms they are 
attempting to adapt.
Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of the changing discursive practices that refer to 
‘Japanese technology’ through the 20 century, and the transition from Japan being seen as a 
7. Clemens Apprich and Götz Bachmann, “Media Genealogy: Back to the Present of Digital Cultures,” 
in Digitisation: Theories and Concepts for Empirical Cultural Research, ed. Gertraud Koch 
(Routledge, 2017), 295.
19
maker of low-quality, copycat goods to the emergence of techno-Orientalist discourses that 
proclaim “all the best stuff is made in Japan!” The chapter offers an overview of the structural 
and technological conditions in late 20 century Japan that allowed for the keitai denwa to emerge
in its particular form. The chapter discusses three separate attributes of these conditions: the 
development of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure in the postwar era, first as state 
monopoly and later as competing privatized corporations; the public role of and attitudes toward 
scientific research in the postwar era and the constraints that the memory of the war placed on 
the funding and reception of public research; and the initial Japanese experience with foreign-
developed information and communications technologies—specifically computer systems and 
networks—that necessitated specific adaptations and approaches to the lack of Japanese 
language support. These three attributes, the chapter argues, were instrumental in shaping the 
form and contexts in which the keitai denwa eventually emerged.
Chapter 3 addresses the methods employed in the materials analyzed in Chapter 4, as well
as the intentional choice to use the terms keitai/keitai denwa in this dissertation. The choice of 
words is done to emphasize the specific Japanese experience of mobile media, instead of 
speaking in more global terms about ‘the mobile phone’. Keitai and keitai denwa also function as
discursive formations, (drawing again from the work of Foucault) statements which work to 
divide the keitai from other forms of mobile media, and even from superficially similar 
technologies like the Personal Handyphone System (PHS). The chapter also addresses the 
methods used in selecting and analyzing documents in Chapter 4. I draw on criteria for assessing 
historical documents according to their authenticity, credibility, representativeness, and meaning 
to justify the use of the selected documents. The work of scholars in the field of game studies is 
20
also used to support the interpretation of magazine texts and advertisements and their 
relationship to cultural practices.
Chapter 4 examines contemporary print media to see how mobile media is represented 
and how these representations have changed over the period from 1997 to 2007. The chapter 
deals primarily with weekly news magazines as well as a sample of monthly magazines, 
specialty mooks, and newspaper issues. Through analysis of the portrayals and discursive 
framing of mobile media in these materials, the chapter will show how the discursive formations 
that defined the keitai shifted during this time period and how they reflected the process of 
negotiation of meaning.
Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation with a discussion of the 2007 release of the Apple 
iPhone in the United States, and the way it was positioned as a revolutionary new step in mobile 
media. This chapter will look past 2007 to look at the slow adoption of the iPhone in Japan, a 
process that was likely the result of the established meanings of mobile media that already 
privileged the keitai. Finally, this chapter will conclude by looking at how the affordances and 
design of the keitai helped to establish the expectations we have for what mobile media can and 
should do, how those expectations are still reflected in the mobile media of today.
21
Chapter 1.
Origins? A Mobile Genealogy
 Introduction 
To describe a certain media technology as ‘mobile’ sets an expectation for the capabilities
of that technology and the physical forms it takes. We have come to understand, culturally, 
certain things about what ‘mobile’ media can do, what is implied through this property of 
mobility. A mobile medium suggests a particular form factor (which itself constrains or facilitates
potential uses of the technology), and promises particular modes of interaction with the 
technology itself, as well as implying other networks of relations that the mobile medium relies 
upon. For example, a device which has no internal battery and must be tethered to a power outlet 
at all times is in no way mobile in the strictest physical sense—it can only be used in locations 
that allow easy access to some sort of charging infrastructure, no matter if it otherwise assumes a
portable form. And a mobile phone, for example, is not a self-contained device; to function at all 
in its expected way requires, as Greenfield describes it, “the smooth interfunctioning of all the 
many parts of this infrastructure—an extraordinarily heterogeneous and unstable meshwork, in 
which cellular base stations, undersea cables, and microwave relays are all invoked in what 
seems like the simplest and most straightforward tasks we perform with the device.”8 The mobile
phone is just one tiny endpoint in a complex assemblage of networks, all of which are vital for 
these devices to function in the most basic manner we expect from a mobile device. Especially to
our contemporary understanding, the meaning of ‘mobile’ media is as much about the invisible 
infrastructures that produce its functionality as it is about the endpoint devices themselves.
8. Adam Greenfield, “Smartphone: The Networking of the Self,” in Radical Technologies: The Design 
of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2017), 29.
22
In defining ‘mobility’, it is also important to identify the technologies which are excluded
by this term, at least broadly. In contrast to its seemingly-obvious physical implications, there are
a huge number of mobile (in a literal sense) media technologies—game consoles, ebook readers, 
music and video players, even car audio systems (for what is more ‘mobile’, especially in 
contemporary America, than the automobile?) that are commonly described as ‘portable’ but not 
generally thought of as ‘mobile media’. That there is a conceptual distinction between these two 
seemingly synonymous words suggests there is something deeper and more complex to be 
investigated: that ‘mobile media’ is not just a tidy category of that-which-is-untethered, a catchall
of those technologies that have shed their cables like vestigial tails in the grand forward march of
technological evolution. What makes some portable devices mobile and others not? We take for 
granted that the smartphone is a mobile media technology, but generally don’t question why a 
laptop computer does not also fall under this classification. ‘Mobility’ is defined in part by its 
implied affordances and the expectations for how it may function.
This chapter introduces media genealogy as a method and theoretical approach for doing 
media history, and the main theoretical foundation of this dissertation. The chapter will address 
the concept of ‘mobile media’ and the construction of the property of ‘mobility’ from a 
genealogical perspective, looking at the meanings that have come to define this term and the 
ways they differentiate it from portable media. Finally, this chapter will discuss the new media 
theory of remediation, and its use as a theoretical tool for uncovering lines of descent as part of a 
work of media genealogy.
 Thinking ‘Genealogically’ about Mobile Media 
For much of the history of physical media, mobility could be said to have been one its 
main, though entirely unremarkable, properties. Media such as stone or clay tablets, papyrus 
23
scrolls, or codices and illuminated manuscripts were all of sufficient dimensions as to be easily 
transported from one physical location to another—‘mobile’ in the most literal sense. Beyond 
eyesight, literacy, and sufficient natural or artificial light, there were no additional requirements 
for accessing these media on the go, at least in a ‘read-only’ fashion. Early institutions of 
learning such as the fabled Library of Alexandria were known for their collections of written 
media from all across the world, and the classical empires of Asia, Africa, and Europe were 
known to accumulate and diffuse the written works of the cultures they encountered.
With electronic and digital media, this default property of media mobility changed. In 
their initial forms, the telegraph, radio, telephone, and television were all objects very much 
rooted in a specific place, such as the home or office. This is ironic considering that these new 
media technologies allowed for the instantaneous transmission of information over the vast 
distances that previously restricted the flow of information to the speed with which a physical 
medium could be transported. Carey famously notes that while telegraph lines followed 
preexisting conduits for physical communications media such as roads, railroad tracks, or canals,
the telegraph’s revolutionary effect on communication was that it “permitted for the first time the
effective separation of communication from transportation.”9 While the telegraph made 
communication instantaneous, it also tethered the telegraph as a media technology to one of a 
few locations such as the telegraph or newspaper office, and likewise the radio and television set 
meant the news was consumed in the home or other stationary location and not on the go, as one 
of the newspaper’s affordances. In later years, advances in battery and other technologies 
allowed for these media to become portable—the portable television, the portable radio, etc. But 
9. James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” Prospects 8 (October 1983):
304–5, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0361233300003793.
24
these were media technologies modified by an adjective—the portable television—indicating 
that this portability was not the default state of affairs.
While the distinction between ‘mobile’ and ‘portable’ media may seem superficial at best
—they are almost perfect synonyms, after all—the use of either term to describe media carries 
significant expectations for what the media is supposed to do, and how it relates to other media 
technologies around it. Rather than attempt to identify an ‘origin’ of mobile media or of the 
concept of mobility, I will instead draw from media genealogy to attend to the ways in which 
‘mobile media,’ as a concept and an object, was produced through various discourses and 
remediations. Alper reminds us that “the emergence of mobile media and its afforded uses as we 
know them today were not inevitable or predetermined,”10 and it is that process of determining 
the afforded uses and meanings of mobile media that I want to explore. Media genealogy 
provides an appropriate framework for thinking about the emergence of this concept, not in the 
linear fashion emphasized in historical methods which seek an unbroken lineage from the past to 
the present, where each new development was obviously destined to fall from its predecessors, 
just as it itself contains the blueprints for its inevitable successor.
What does it mean to do a genealogy of media, or mobile media in particular? Why not 
simply write a ‘history’, and what specifically does ‘genealogy’ mean? Genealogy and its 
predecessor/complement archaeology are derived from analytical methods developed by Michel 
Foucault, whose work in the 1960s is generally regarded as archaeology and who then shifted to 
a focus more on genealogy in the 1970s.11 At least without turning this dissertation to an 
exclusive examination of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods (a task which has 
10. Meryl Alper, “Portables, Luggables, and Transportables: Historicizing the Imagined Affordances of 
Mobile Computing,” Mobile Media & Communication, no. 3 (2019): 336, 
https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157918813694.
11. Alexander Monea and Jeremy Packer, “Media Genealogy and the Politics of Archaeology,” 
International Journal of Communication 10 (January 2016): 1.
25
already been undertaken by more qualified, actual philosophers), the archaeological method is 
perhaps best seen in Foucault’s own familiar explanation in Discipline and Punish: it is not 
“writing the history of the past in terms of the present” but instead “writing the history of the 
present.”12 An archaeological approach doesn’t try to construct a direct lineage from the past to 
the present, where the role played by the past is simply to produce the inevitable present.13
Inspired also in part by German media theory in the later 20 century, in particular the 
work of Friedrich Kittler, media archaeology roughly adopts Foucault’s archaeological methods 
(focused as they were on the archive) to media technologies that could be “read” in the same 
way. Parikka describes archaeology as “a methodology for excavating conditions of existence. 
Archaeology here means digging into the background reasons why a certain object, statement, 
discourse or, for instance in our case, media apparatus or use habit is able to be born and be 
picked up and sustain itself in a cultural situation.”14 Chapter 2 will utilize a primarily 
archaeological approach in looking at the conditions of possibility and existence for the keitai 
denwa in Japan around the turn of the century, investigating the social and economic factors of 
that moment but also previous developments in information and communications technologies 
that contributed to the emergence of the mobile phone as a cultural artifact. Nicoll adds that 
media archaeology, while not exactly a “unified methodology,” can be described as “a 
Foucauldian search for epistemic ruptures, discontinuities, and gaps in media history, as opposed 
to linear sequences of progress.”15 This dissertation focuses on the Japanese mobile feature phone
as one of these “ruptures, discontinuities, and gaps”—not, perhaps, entirely unknown to media 
12. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 
1977), 31.
13. Much like Francis Fukuyama’s now-infamous proclamation of the “end of history” after the fall of the
Soviet Union and the seeming global triumph of neoliberal American-style democracy, viewing the 
present moment as the inevitable result of all historical processes before it assumes foolishly that the 
present is somehow unique in all of history.
14. Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 6.
26
scholars of various orientations, but one that is often not narrated in ‘Western’ histories of the 
Internet and new media, especially now that contemporary mobile media for the past decade has 
been largely synonymous with American technology companies.16
While Foucault’s own work is said to have shifted from the use of archaeology to 
genealogy as an analytical method, the separation between media archaeology and media 
genealogy is much murkier, especially as various scholars who situate themselves within one of 
these two approaches often claim to be doing the same thing. Apprich explains the difference as 
“while media archaeological investigation examines certain technical media apparatuses…in 
their respective discourse-historic settings, media genealogy contains a research programme that 
focuses not so much on how such a media historical discourse is established, but rather how it 
became established or becomes established.”17 Foucault’s work in developing genealogy as an 
analytical method focuses explicitly on this process, and he notes that “a genealogy…will never 
confuse itself with a quest for…‘origins’…on the contrary, it will cultivate the details and 
accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; 
it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other.”18 Similar to a social-
constructivist approach to the history of technology, Foucault’s genealogy stands in opposition to
a linear model of history, where aspects of the present are seen as inevitable products of 
15. Benjamin Nicoll, Minor Platforms in Videogame History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 
2019), 16.
16. Or at least, in terms of the software ecosystem. As is so often the case in today’s global division of 
manufacturing labor, the production of the actual hardware is generally performed in China or other 
countries outside the Euro-American sphere of cultural influence. This division is both signaled and 
obscured on the packaging of contemporary Apple devices such as the iPhone: “Designed by Apple in
California” functions as a presumably more premium indication of origin than the more pedestrian—
though accurate—“Made in China.”
17. Clemens Apprich, Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures, trans. Aileen Derieg (London, 
UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 6.
18. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New 
York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1984), 80.
27
historical progression, and the writing of history highlights only that which points to the present 
and excludes that which is left in the past. Perhaps most productively to the doing of media 
genealogy, Koopman argues that Foucault’s turn to genealogy did not replace archaeology, but 
instead was a necessary extension to what he saw as unresolvable problems in his conception of 
archaeology.19 In perhaps a less structured or rigorous fashion, this dissertation too will draw 
from both media archaeology and media genealogy, and from Foucault’s own conception of 
genealogy as a guiding approach to this study.
Foucault borrows several terms from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (which is a major 
starting point for Foucault’s formulation of his genealogical method), in particular descent and 
emergence which both help differentiate genealogy from a history that is concerned with 
‘origins’. Descent is an affiliation with a group that is nonetheless characterized by differences 
and not similarities, and is a way of accounting for contemporary events or objects that display 
the heterogeneity of the past beyond a literal chain of historic events. For Foucault,
an examination of descent also permits the discovery, under the unique aspect of a trait or
a concept, of the myriad events through which—thanks to which, against which—they 
were formed. Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken 
continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to 
demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to 
animate the present…20
Media genealogy is similarly concerned with descent. Apprich states that media 
genealogy is “not solely a matter of making an implicit knowledge visible, but rather of 
uncovering the processes of emergence and negotiation, the search for dispersed descents that 
constitute the own present.”21 To focus on descent is to attend to the media technologies or 
19. Colin Koopman, “Foucault’s Historiographical Expansion: Adding Genealogy to Archaeology,” 
Journal of the Philosophy of History 2, no. 3 (January 1, 2008): 338–62, 
https://doi.org/10.1163/187226308X335994.
20. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 81.
21. Apprich, Technotopia, 5.
28
practices which are no longer extant yet at the same time were critical to the formation of the 
present. As this dissertation will show, the period of emergence of the keitai denwa was a site of 
negotiation of the meaning of ‘mobile media’, with various features and affordances not just of 
the keitai denwa itself but of other contemporary mobile or portable media technologies 
contributing to the general expectations of what mobile media should (or should not) do and be. 
This period of negotiation is critical for understanding the keitai denwa and understanding the 
meaning of mobile media today. Attending to these descents “is to maintain passing events in 
their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the 
complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to 
those things that continue to exist and have value for us.”22
Descents give way to emergence, which in a media genealogy attends to the particular 
moment a media technology appears and becomes capable of being seen as the object of 
analysis. Foucault cautions that “as it is wrong to search for descent in an uninterrupted 
continuity, we should avoid thinking of emergence as the final term of a historical 
development.”23 The keitai denwa at the center of this dissertation is clearly not the “end of 
history” of mobile media, and the smartphone which today is synonymous with mobile media is 
in no way the final evolution of these processes, either. As is described in Foucault’s exploration 
of genealogy above, I want to avoid both ‘ends’ and ‘origins’ in this research, and instead attend 
to the fleeting emergences that characterize the developments in this time.
In using media genealogy as an analytic method, the objective is to attempt to understand 
the mobile media of today—almost entirely synonymous with the Apple- or Google-developed 
smartphone—through the period bracketing the turn of the millennium in Japan, where many of 
22. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 81.
23. Foucault, 83.
29
the contemporary meanings and expectations for the phone as mobile media were negotiated and 
established. In this time period in Japan we see the keitai denwa as the site of emergence of the 
mobile phone as a device for accessing the web, for purchasing and listening to music, for the 
development of communication practices that actually discourage the primary function of a 
mobile phone, and for many other qualities that we take for granted in mobile media today. To 
the extent that Henry Jenkins’ sketches towards a theory of convergence24 retain their relevance 
today, there is no inaccuracy in describing the keitai denwa as the convergent device par 
excellence. Of a secondary focus in this dissertation are the ‘mobile’ media that have existed on 
the periphery of the mobile phone—media that are ‘portable’ but for whatever reason have fallen 
by the wayside in our understandings of what mobile media are and could have been. Foucault 
states that emergence “designates a place of confrontation,” the space between the struggle of 
different forces where one suddenly emerges dominant, and in true genealogical fashion this 
dissertation will attend to some of the forces of the time which failed to emerge as alternatives to 
the keitai25. First, however, it is necessary to return to the discussion from the beginning of the 
chapter on the concept of mobility itself in order to define this central term of the dissertation: 
how it has been theorized in the context of information and communications technologies, the 
meanings we have assigned to it in that context, and the expectations we have for what it should 
do.
 On Being ‘Mobile’ 
‘Mobile’, as a common English adjective, is not a term fraught with nuance or burdened 
with multiple potential meanings. To be mobile is to be movable, synonymous with ‘portable,’ a 
property arguably inherent to 20 and 21-century media and communication technologies, and to 
24. Henry Jenkins, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” International Journal of Cultural 
Studies 7, no. 1 (March 1, 2004): 33–43, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877904040603.
25. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 84.
30
life itself. The ubiquitous presence of the automobile and the relative accessibility of air and train
travel locate the experience of being-mobile as one central to everyday life (albeit altered 
somewhat under the lingering realities of the COVID-19 pandemic): the commute to and from 
work and school, business travel to meetings or conferences, the vacation (during which we are 
likely to bring some form of work with us, thanks to the array of mobile information and 
communications technologies at our fingertips). It is in this last context that mobility acquires a 
number of additional connotative meanings. Mobility is strongly tied to work, to the narratives of
‘upward mobility’ of aspirational labor under neoliberal capitalism. Work takes place, or is 
predominantly assumed to take place, in bounded spaces: the construction site, the office, the 
classroom—and for some of these, where possible, ‘mobility’ implies a separation of the work 
itself from these physical locations. Kakihara and Sørensen note that wireless devices, like 
mobile phones, PDAs, and laptop computers free the office worker from the geographic 
restrictions of the office, and argue that “being mobile” is not simply about the physical 
movement of the body but the interactions between people, which are then freed from a place-
bound, face-to-face modality through these technologies.26
In the focus on these changing interactions in the business context, Kakihara and 
Sørensen identify three main dimensions of human mobility: spatial, temporal, and contextual.27 
Spatial mobility encompasses the movement of objects, symbols, and space. The mobility of 
objects is the most familiar definition of the term, the easily-recognizable idea of objects passing 
through physical space. The mobility of symbols is also a familiar concept: the diffusion of 
semiotic texts and images through space, to be found in the global recognition of Coca-Cola, 
26. Masao Kakihara and Carsten Sørensen, “Mobility: An Extended Perspective,” in Proceedings of the 
35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2002, 2, 
https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2002.994088.
27. Kakihara and Sørensen, 2.
31
Disney, McDonald’s and their signifying symbols. The silver cursive script, mouse ears and 
stylized letter “D,” or the golden arches all convey specific meanings and associations that could 
be said to be nearly-universal. Finally, there is the mobility of space or spaces, the decoupling of 
particular interactions or activities from the spaces in which they are commonly expected to take 
place. Examples of this can be found in the relatively-recent phenomenon of online communities,
where the formation of ‘community’ takes place not in a physical location (the community of a 
small town, a neighborhood, a workplace) but is paradoxically located out there online, 
somewhere.28
Alper discusses a period in the early 1980s when the portable computer first emerged as 
an object of general interest as a way of drawing attention to histories of mobile media outside of
and beyond the mobile phone.29 Rather than the neat category of the ‘laptop computer’ that is 
familiar today, this early period which produced the computer as a device that could be 
untethered from the office space was fraught with negotiations as to the meaning of what a 
‘portable’ or ‘mobile’ computer would look like and do. This period is significant, Alper says, 
because these devices “altered users’ anticipations for how and where mobile communication 
could possibly be incorporated into daily life.”30 The computers described as ‘portable’ in the 
early years of this time period were certainly—technically—portable, in that they could be 
transported from one location to another by a single able-bodied individual, but they would still 
require being connected to a wall outlet for power and provided none of the wired or wireless 
connectivity we associate with mobile media today. Nonetheless, while these early portable 
devices lacked actual de facto portability, they still allowed users to begin to think of the 
28. Kakihara and Sørensen, 2–3.
29. Alper, “Portables, Luggables, and Transportables.”
30. Alper, 323.
32
possibilities of truly portable devices. From today’s perspective there is nothing remotely 
‘portable’ about the original Apple Macintosh, though it does weigh about 15–20 pounds (well 
within the ability of an able-bodied human to carry, at least for short distances), has a carrying 
handle integrated into its outer shell, and was sold with an official padded carrying case—in 
addition to a number of other ‘portable’ accessories—intended to facilitate a certain ease of 
travel (fig. 1.1). In merely making visible/possible the spatial mobility of the personal computer, 
highly-impractical examples like this contributed nonetheless to “the imagined affordances of 
contemporary mobile media.”31
Figure 1.1: Apple Computer, “What to Give the Computer that Has 
Everything,” (advertisement), Newsweek, 1994, accessed August 20, 
2023, http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/gallery3.html
Temporal mobility, according to Kakihara and Sørensen, is the effect of networked 
information and communication technologies on the time expected or required to complete a 
work tasks. The examples of typography as accelerating the pace of the production of printed 
material or the assembly line accelerating the production of goods in a factory are both familiar, 
but the use of Internet-enabled devices and software now allows information to be sent and 
31. Alper, 323.
33
received nearly-instantaneously. At the same time, the emphasis on the computer as a device for 
multitasking further encourages this temporal compression of workday tasks: the worker is able 
and expected to be replying to emails while preparing documents and conducting research, tasks 
which are also accompanied by managerial expectations of increased workday productivity.32 
The same capitalist logic of advanced technology enabling increased productivity also extends to
the continued blurring of the boundaries between home and workplace—the spatial mobility of 
Internet-connected devices means that the time for ‘work’ is no longer fixed to the traditional 9–5
hours of the workday, nor is it bounded to the physical confines of the office. The connectivity 
afforded by mobile devices now places additional expectations on the worker to be available to 
respond to text messages or emails outside of the office space and working time.
The dimension of contextual mobility extends from spatial and temporal mobilities to add
the choice of “in what way” to engage in a task or interaction, to complement the previous 
dimensions of “where” and “when.”33 The flexibility afforded by mobile media in time and space
additionally allow the user to choose the manner in which they engage in interactions—to reply 
to a text message with a phone call, or an email, or a face-to-face visit to the sender’s desk or 
cubicle, all further enabled by the previous dimensions of spatial/temporal mobility.
McCrea, writing about the differences between ‘portable’ and ‘mobile’ game systems,34 
describes the negotiations players of portable/mobile video game systems undertake in 
attempting to find times/places that are considered socially acceptable for playing video games in
public, ultimately engaging in “a type of spatial co-option, or a type of carving out of private 
32. Kakihara and Sørensen, “Mobility,” 3–4.
33. Kakihara and Sørensen, 4.
34. Unfortunately, this article fails to articulate a productive distinction between ‘mobile’ and ‘portable’ 
game playing practices, opting instead to argue that these concepts are roughly equivalent to the 
tedious dichotomy of ‘casual’ versus ‘hardcore’ modes of play that frequently appear in popular 
gaming culture.
34
space from the broader public space.”35 Not only do portable video game systems—another new 
media form usually classified as ‘portable’ rather than ‘mobile’—allow the users to engage with 
a game-playing experience with a choice of “where” and “when” outside of “the home” and 
“designated home leisure times,” respectively, but they then require the user to negotiate a more 
contextual arena of social norms and the balance of private uses of public space.
The relationship to place/space is important to how ‘mobile media’ is conceptualized, but 
not only in the sense that mobility implies a going-out of media from the home, office, etc. The 
relationship between media user and place has been of as much (or potentially more) interest to 
the discipline of urban studies than it has to media studies. Wilken notes that “how we 
understand and engage with place is in key respects transformed by mobile media,” with regards 
to the mobile phone’s role in ad-hoc coordination of social activities, the growing reliance on the 
phone for navigation that allows users to depart for a destination without being fully aware of the
route they will take (and ultimately, discard physical maps altogether), and for making direct 
communications with another mobile phone user, instead of calling a physical place and hoping 
to catch them there.36 Purkarthofer offers a more nuanced look at the interaction between mobile 
media and place. The use of mobile media “individualise[s] perception and provide[s] immediate
augmentation” of local space, producing “diversified discourses that dissolve a shared 
environment.”37 But in this mobile media use that fragments the individual experience of urban 
space, there is also the production of and participation in a local public sphere through the acts of
35. Christian McCrea, “We Play in Public: The Nature and Context of Portable Gaming Systems,” 
Convergence 17, no. 4 (November 1, 2011): 393, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856511414987.
36. Rowan Wilken, “Mobilizing Place: Mobile Media, Peripatetics, and the Renegotiation of Urban 
Places,” Journal of Urban Technology, February 9, 2009, 39–42, 
https://doi.org/10.1080/10630730802677939.
37. Florian Purkarthofer, “Tokyo behind Screens: Participant Observation in a City of Mobile Digital 
Communication,” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 50, no. 3–4 (2019): 61, 
https://doi.org/10.11588/iqas.2019.3-4.10706.
35
interaction via mobile media—sharing pictures or posts describing a particular location or event, 
for example, or communicating to establish a meeting point through references to shared 
landmarks or other physical features.38
But mobile (or portable) media has been acting on our sense of and relationship to place 
since before the mobile phone, and some of the investigations of early transformations of space 
have had portable media as their focus. Heike Weber, in a survey of radio use in West Germany 
in the 20 century, describes how monaural earbuds were used with portable radios up through the
1970s. While binaural headphones became popular among home listeners interested in a high-
fidelity audio experience or when loudspeakers were inappropriate, the use of monaural earbuds 
with portable radios spoke to a media culture of “respectful listening.”39 Practices of radio use at 
this time emphasized the user’s coexistence with public space—of “listening without bothering 
anyone,” where the use of portable media was intended to co-exist with the external 
environment.40 The binaural headphones of the Sony Walkman, in comparison, make the device a
point of contention through, as Du Gay et al. describe it, “taking private listening into the public 
domain.”41 What can be seen as an unacceptable encroachment of the private into the public can 
also be taken as the listener imposing their own autonomy in the urban environment through a 
“mobility of the Self,” distancing themselves from the urban soundscape through immersion in 
the Walkman.42
38. Purkarthofer, 62.
39. Heike Weber, “Head Cocoons: A Sensori-Social History of Earphone Use in West Germany, 1950–
2010,” The Senses and Society 5, no. 3 (November 1, 2010): 346, 
https://doi.org/10.2752/174589210X12753842356089.
40. Weber, 345.
41. Paul Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles, 
CA: Sage Publications, 2013), 106.
42. Shuhei Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect,” Popular Music 4 (1984): 175.
36
Turcotte and Ball draw upon Foucault’s concept of the “heterotopia” or other spaces of 
crisis or rupture that exist within the real world yet are simultaneously set away and closed off 
from it by means of certain selectively-permeable boundaries.43 While their use of Foucault’s 
heterotopia in this example is not entirely correct—especially in light of Purkarthofer and the 
portable media examples above, where the mediated experience of the city is highly 
individualized and has no lasting duration beyond that moment—they do explore the notion of 
the mediated experience of everyday life in a way that productively contributes to a definition or 
understanding of mobile media. They make the claim that “all transportation is local,” meaning 
that mobility (movement through physical space, as with Kakihara and Sørensen’s spatial 
mobility) is just as much about the layers of information that we move through as it is our real-
world surroundings.44 Here “transportation” is framed not just as long-distance travel but of our 
everyday movements, and the distance itself is rendered irrelevant through through our constant 
connections with/to the digital networks facilitated by what Turcotte and Ball term “mobile 
digital network technologies” (MDNTs), which “assert the individual’s agency by allowing 
individuals to feel secure, connected, and in control while moving through spaces.”45 Rather than
the fragmentation of social ties that was feared in the era of portable audio media, the networking
of MDNTs allows the users to maintain and participate in relationships that no longer depend on 
or are tied to physical locations of bodies or sites of interaction. In their emphasis on the 
networked nature of MDNTs, Turcotte and Ball offer an additional, highly useful way we might 
define and conceptualize mobile media: they note that “unlike previous social media forms, such 
43. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (April 1, 1986): 22–
27, https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.
44. Joseph F. Turcotte and M. Len Ball, “‘All Transportation Is Local’: Mobile-Digital-Networked-
Technologies and Networked Orientations,” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 
3, no. 1 (2013): 121–2, https://doi.org/10.3167/trans.2013.030109.
45. Turcotte and Ball, 123.
37
as the book which did not allow for reciprocal communication, these networks allow social 
interactions to transpire in ‘real-time,’ peripheral to physical interactions in public space.”46 
While this definition is complicated somewhat by recent technological advances in portable 
media—everything from game consoles to standalone media players to e-readers have some 
form of Internet connectivity—it does point to one more potential way to distinguish portable 
from mobile media: we could say that one of the overwhelmingly primary or intended functions 
of mobile media is to facilitate communication (in a variety of mediated forms).
As should be clear by this point, much of the existing research on mobile media takes a 
sociological or anthropological approach to studying the phenomenon, as exemplified by the 
focus on social interaction. Ling counts the mobile phone among “social mediation 
technologies,” and points out how mobile media doesn’t just function in a vacuum: “the use of 
social mediation technologies is not simply a matter of personal choice; it is in general an 
assumed part of social interaction.”47 Ling argues that the mobile phone is similar to the 
mechanical clock and the automobile in that they have all had significant effects on social 
practices through their ubiquity—as these technologies become further embedded in society, they
generate “reciprocal expectations” that other members of society will rely on them as well: the 
clock to be on time for meetings or events, the car to guarantee transportation to distant 
locations, and the mobile phone as a means of “microcoordination,” the iterative modification of 
social arrangements thanks to the immediacy of mobile communication.48 Important to the 
discussion of Japanese mobile media and the uptake of the keitai denwa in Chapter 4, Ling 
points out that a technology of social mediation must first develop a “critical mass”—that is, 
46. Turcotte and Ball, 126.
47. Ling, Taken for Grantedness, 7.
48. Ling, 9–10.
38
having progressed from individual hobbyist use or experimentation to being taken up by more 
people in a general audience. This critical mass takes the technology from an individual use and 
transforms it into a social necessity, where people who fail to adopt/adapt to this new technology 
may be excluded from social circles or considered a burden on the group, etc.49
While there exists a significant amount of literature on the social effects of mobile media 
(or increasingly, social media as synonymous with mobile media, which makes interesting 
suggestions as to the current role of mobile media today as potentially subordinate to social 
media platforms), the property of ‘mobility’ itself is not always explicitly defined or explored. 
For the purposes of this dissertation, though, the scholarship explored above allows us to 
cultivate a working definition of ‘mobility’ to be employed in the genealogical investigation of 
the keitai era. First, mobility is comprised of spatial, temporal, and contextual aspects, allowing 
interactions to take place without regard to physical location, time (both in terms of time of day 
and as discrete versus overlapping activities), or the ‘format’ the interaction takes (SMS, voice or
video call, messenger app, etc.). Mobile media devices are light enough to be carried on the body
with little to no additional effort, and can come to be seen as intimate extensions of the body 
itself rather than separate, discrete tools. Mobile media is used in a way that alters our perception
of and relationship with physical space, overlaying our immediate physical location with 
networks of data that provide information or facilitate communication. Finally, by virtue of their 
mobility, mobile media impose social expectations on us in terms of their presence and use in 
conducting social interactions; mobile media are connected not simply to the Internet or other 
informational networks, but they connect us to other members of society as well.
The scholarship used in producing this definition of mobility in this section all draws 
from different eras of mobile media scholarship which take different examples of 
49. Ling, 24–5.
39
mobile/portable media as their objects of inquiry: the portable computer, the portable game 
console, portable stereo, and finally the mobile phone. This points to one additional defining 
property of contemporary mobile media, and one that ties into genealogy as method in this 
dissertation: remediation.
 Remediation as Genealogy in Mobile Media 
As one way of attending to the descents that occurred in this history of mobile media, 
Bolter and Grusin offer the concept of “remediation,” described as “the representation of one 
medium in another,” which is “a defining characteristic of new digital media.”50 The process of 
remediation can work in a number of ways: by simply reproducing or re-presenting older media; 
by emphasizing the difference between the old and the new; by trying to refashion older media 
while still marking its presence; or through “trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that 
the discontinuities between the two are minimized.”51 Steve Jobs’s infamous announcement of 
the iPhone at the 2007 MacWorld Expo and his description of the iPhone as comprising an iPod, 
a phone, and an Internet communications device is an almost too-perfect example of the 
remediations that produced the smartphone.52 Even in the smartphone of today—which in some 
senses is as vastly different from the iPhone of 2007 as the iPhone was to the keitai denwa, the 
traces of the media it is descended from cannot be entirely erased. Even as the iPhone attempts to
fully erase the respective iPod, phone, and Internet communications devices as a new convergent
device, Bolter and Grusin argue that “the very act of remediation, however, ensures the older 
medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in 
50. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass: 
MIT Press, 2003), 45.
51. Bolter and Grusin, 45–7.
52. “Steve Jobs Introduces iPhone in 2007,” 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJzXM7a6o.
40
acknowledged or unacknowledged ways.”53 The dependencies the iPhone relies on for its 
functionality are hardly unacknowledged (a dual debt to previous technologies is carried in its 
name alone), yet everything about the device itself—its hardware and software, the cultural 
discourses that surround it—would prefer that the iPhone erase both the telephone and the iPod.
Bolter and Grusin characterize remediation as being defined by two characteristics, 
immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is represented in the desire to erase all traces of 
mediation so that the boundaries between a medium and what it claims to represent—the ‘real’—
are rendered completely transparent.54 Hypermediacy is the overwhelming plurality of media, 
especially in the case of digital media, where multiple different forms are enlisted to create the 
desired impact—think of the contemporary website which draws on plain text, photographs, one 
or more video streams, etc. In contrast to immediacy, hypermediacy makes explicit the mediation
of the content we are consuming.55 In the “double logic of remediation,” immediacy and 
hypermediacy rely on each other—the immediate impact of media is achieved by the reliance on 
multiple competing media forms, while hypermedia strives for immediacy through its curation of
media forms for the most spontaneous-seeming impact.56
While Bolter and Grusin’s work shows its age in the wide-eyed ways in which the new 
digital media of the 1990s are discussed, remediation offers a complementary theoretical 
orientation to the genealogical method in its refusal to privilege a linear narrative of 
technological history. Through remediation new media forms constantly call back to older media,
and extant older media can attempt to refashion themselves in the more immediate image of 
newer media. Alper, quoting Wortman (1985), notes how the term ‘mobile’ is borrowed from 
53. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 47.
54. Bolter and Grusin, 30.
55. Bolter and Grusin, 34.
56. Bolter and Grusin, 4–6.
41
radio history to “distinguish hardware that can easily be carried from place to place and easily 
plugged in and used.”57 While a somewhat superficial example, this makes the case that even 
using the term mobile media in the context of feature or smartphones itself remediates the 
concept of ‘mobility’ that may have been established much earlier in the history of a different 
medium. This cyclical borrowing and refashioning from past media (and past media attempting 
to do so from the present/future) is in line with a media-genealogical approach emphasizing a 
number of descents which surface briefly and are subsumed again, or which finally emerge in 
that moment of conflict and are recognized for however long that dominance remains.
While this dissertation is arrayed around the central axis of the keitai denwa, I don’t wish 
to suggest that it represents the whole of mobile media during its time of emergence, just as it is 
a grave oversight to imply that today’s smartphone represents the whole of contemporary mobile 
media. The 1990s and early 2000s were an especially fruitful time in a genealogy of mobile 
media; while all forms of mobile phones were engaging in negotiations over what sorts of 
features and uses the mobile phone could take, there was a thriving ecosystem of other devices 
testing the limits of mobile communication, work, and leisure. Many of these technologies can 
be said to have ‘failed’ in a purely economic sense—they were somewhat limited in their 
lifespans overall, though some produced short- or long-term dynasties of product lines from their
parent companies and a short persistence of new models based on minor or major iterations of 
successful features. Whether extant or extinct, many of the devices at this time in some sense had
features that were reabsorbed/remediated in newer, later developments in mobile media. This 
dissertation will attend to some of these moments of remediation as a significant part of the 
descents and emergences that media genealogy seeks to make visible.
57. Alper, “Portables, Luggables, and Transportables,” 331.
42
 Conclusion 
Benjamin Nicoll’s Minor Platforms in Videogame History is a media-archaeological 
examination of what Nicoll terms “minor platforms,” a term used “not to imply insignificance, 
but rather to describe a set of objects, subjects, and spaces that are, for various reasons, ancillary 
to conventional narratives of videogame history.”58 While the keitai denwa is probably not 
considered “historically minor” in the same vein of the platforms that Nicoll examines, the 
argument can be made that it is generally excluded from most mainstream histories of modern 
computing in general, and in histories of mobile media it remains an under-examined object 
largely due to the “other-ness” of its Japanese origins and the largely Anglo-European orientation
of most mobile media studies. In this chapter I discussed the theoretical/analytical approach of 
media genealogy and the new media theory of remediation, which will help to frame the 
remainder of the dissertation. I also reviewed applicable scholarship on mobile media for the 
purpose of developing a working definition of ‘mobility’ which defines and situates the objects 
which are the focus of this work. The continuing dissertation aims to address the same questions 
posed by Nicoll as a rationale for the choice of platforms in his work and for how they can be 
approached as objects of study: “What can be gained by going against the dominant narratives of
videogame history? What does a history of minor platforms reveal that standardized accounts of 
technological development do not? And what kinds of archives can be deployed for analysing 
minor media histories?”59 The basic topics are, of course, different—minor videogame platforms 
and geographically-isolated mobile phone technologies—but the questions and their applicable 
approaches remain valid.
58. Nicoll, Minor Platforms in Videogame History, 13.
59. Nicoll, 17.
43
The next chapter will trace the conditions of possibility for the emergence—that allowed 
for the emergence—of the keitai denwa in the 1990s through a survey of the changing economic,
social, and political landscape in Japan in the later part of the 20 century, especially with regards 
to information and communications technologies. The peak and collapse of Japan’s “bubble 
economy” forms the economic background of this period, with its period of great social affluence
contributing to social expectations of and demand for modern, high-technology living. The 
chapter will discuss three attributes that laid the technological, political, and social foundations 
for the emergence of the keitai in the late 20 century. The first is Japan’s redevelopment of its 
telecommunications infrastructure following World War II, and how the initial public monopoly 
and later privatization of the national telephone carrier produced a competitive market for the 
development of telephone services. The second attribute draws from science and technology 
studies in Japan to produce an outline of the general social attitudes towards technology in the 
late postwar era and examine the role of scientific research in the government and private 
sectors. The final attribute concerns recent scholarship in the field of Internet histories which 
attempts to decentralize familiar Euro-American narratives of Internet development (with their 
focus on Cold War technologies such as ARPANET etc.) and instead attends to the different 
cultural and geographic factors that drove Internet diffusion and adoption in different ways 
across the world. The development of information and communication technologies in Japan was
marked by the dual tension of trying to meet the needs of the domestic business and recreational 
markets while also negotiating adoption of, or adaptation to, emerging global platforms and 
networks. These adaptations and localizations of global technologies for the specific Japanese 
market and business expectations, along with the structural features of the domestic 
44
telecommunications industry and existing attitudes towards high technology, helped to create the 
conditions of possibility for the emergence of the keitai denwa.
45
Chapter 2.
Conditions of Possibility: Information and Communications Technologies in Late 20th
Century Japan
 Introduction 
In Robert Zemeckis’s science-fiction movie trilogy Back to the Future, an eccentric 
inventor/mad scientist archetype, Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd), creates a time 
machine in the form of a 1981 DMC DeLorean automobile which he and the films’ teenage 
protagonist Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) use to travel between their home year 1985 and 
various dates in the 19, 20, and 21 centuries. In the trilogy’s third installment, Back to the Future 
Part III, an accident with the DeLorean traps Marty alone in the year 1955, and he must enlist 
the help of 1955 Doc Brown to repair the DeLorean’s damaged electronics using contemporary 
parts. In a scene where they attempt to diagnose the nature of the problem, Doc peers through a 
magnifying glass at an electronic chip extracted from one of the car’s components. “No wonder 
this circuit failed,” he scoffs. “It says ‘Made in Japan’.” Marty laughs and shakes his head. 
“What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan,” he says matter-of-factly. Doc 
gazes into the distance, pondering this fantastical notion: “Unbelievable.”60
While this minor bit of dialog likely elicited a knowing chuckle from audiences in 1990 
who were familiar with the high-tech and high-quality connotations of “Made in Japan” 
discourse and ‘branding’, it also serves to perfectly illustrate the shift in both the material reality 
and the international perception (and reception) of Japan in the second half of the 20 century. 
Japan of 1955 was just three years past the end of its occupation by the US-led Allied Powers 
following the end of World War II. The country was still extremely impoverished and reeling 
from the destruction of Allied bombing campaigns that left many major cities completely 
60. Back to the Future Part III, DVD (Universal Pictures, 1990).
46
devastated. Japan of 1955 was beginning the track to a rapid post-war modernization (though its 
“economic miracle” was still some years off), but was also confronting its own role in the post-
war world, as a former imperial power now as an occupied quasi-colony, held up (with little of 
its own input in the matter) as the prime example of an American experiment in international 
democratization. The Japan of 1985 was at the peak of a post-war asset price bubble—a truly 
“unbelievable” progression from the nation’s condition 40 years previously. But the bubble 
collapsed shortly after the film’s release in 1991, leading to a period of economic stagnation 
referred to as the “Lost Decade”61 and later as the “Lost Decades” encompassing the 2000s and 
even the 2010s. However, even during this period of economic and social turmoil, the imaginary 
of ‘high-tech Japan’ persisted through much of the world; despite the general economic 
conditions many of Japan’s consumer electronics industries continued to produce devices 
targeting Japanese audiences which became the envy of much of the rest of the world, whether 
through their intrinsic qualities or functionality, or through the enduring cultural stereotypes of 
Japan as the futuristic Other.
 “All the Best Stuff is Made in Japan:” Discourses on Japanese ICTs 
Before the idea that “all the best stuff is made in Japan” could become a pop-culture 
axiom, the popular representation of Japanese technology, at least in the US, passed through a 
much less complimentary era. From the 1970s, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry 
(MITI, now succeeded by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, METI) wanted to make 
Japan’s economy internationally competitive, but recognized that certain kinds of manufacturing 
could potentially be done more cheaply in other developing nations. MITI decided that 
electronics and advanced industrial manufacturing would be the area in which Japan stood the 
61. Fumio Hayashi and Edward C Prescott, “The 1990s in Japan: A Lost Decade,” Review of Economic 
Dynamics 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2002): 206–35, https://doi.org/10.1006/redy.2001.0149.
47
best chance of international success, and the state invested heavily in manufacturing of 
automated machinery and industrial robotics. More importantly, MITI also provided substantial 
investment and support for microelectronics research and development.62 Japanese corporations 
began producing integrated circuits in the mid-1960s to compete with the United States in 
developing consumer audiovisual goods such as televisions and radios, and sales of Japanese-
made goods in these areas passed sales of those made in the United States by the middle of the 
1970s.63
The Japanese state’s significant support for and investment in its growing high-
technology industries eventually sparked a wave of panic among competing US industries, and 
inspired a lucrative publishing genre of books that attempted to explain Japan’s sudden economic
rise, the danger it posed to US dominance of these industries, and what must be done about it. 
This genre spanned the 1980s and even extended into the early 1990s, and combined hysterical 
proclamations about Japan’s plan for economic world dominance with comparative analysis of 
US and Japanese industries and business practices. A 1981 report by the Datapro Research 
Corporation on Japanese minicomputers promised “the first unbiased objective report on 
Japanese Computers [sic] ever published in English” on its cover.64 In the introduction, however, 
the report laments that IBM’s recent announcement of the IBM Personal Computer and the IBM 
PC-compatible standard that would go on to define personal computing specifications even today
had “throw[n] open the world’s computer markets to the Japanese” and that with the availability 
of the IBM PC specifications as an open standard, “the Japanese must have celebrated all 
62. Shigeru Nakayama, Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan (London: Kegan Paul 
International, 1991), 164.
63. Nakayama, 163.
64. Datapro Research Corporation, All about Japanese Computers (Chicago, IL: McGraw-Hill, 1981).
48
night.”65 While the actual report on the various minicomputer models thankfully sticks to a much 
more objective description of the different models and their features, the introduction is full of 
editorial commentary framing “the Japanese” as a sinister external force determined to pry open 
and dominate American’s technology economy at any cost.
One hardly needs to read past the titles of these kinds of books to understand their 
discursive framing of these issues, but the prefaces leave no doubt as to the authors’ ideological 
orientation. Feigenbaum and McCorduck’s The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and 
Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World ostensibly covers the Fifth Generation Computer 
Systems Project, a MITI-led research project that attempted to develop a new generation of 
general-purpose computers which would utilize AI-based natural language processing as the 
interface. The intent was that the systems could be accessed and controlled by any user—not just 
those already proficient in the conventions of computer use—through standard human 
languages.66 Feigenbaum and McCorduck however saw something much more sinister in this 
project: “the Japanese have seen gold on distant hills and have begun to move out. Japanese 
planners view the computer industry as vital to their nation’s economic future and have 
audaciously made it a national goal to become number one in this industry by the latter half of 
the 1990s. They aim not only to dominate the traditional forms of the computer industry but to 
establish a ‘knowledge industry’ in which knowledge itself will be a salable commodity like food
and oil.”67 This paragraph alone overflows with implications to unpack. The imagery of “gold on 
distant hills” calls back to the frenzied push to stake claims for hopefully-lucrative gold mines in 
65. Datapro Research Corporation, 1.
66. Hideo Aiso, “The Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project,” Future Generation Computer Systems
4, no. 3 (October 1, 1988): 159–75, https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-739X(88)90001-5.
67. Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and 
Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1983), 2.
49
the mid-19 century American West; this could also suggest the exploitative and environmentally-
catastrophic nature of industrialized mining for gold and other precious metals that developed 
later, and possibly the violent and often genocidal interactions between miners and Native 
inhabitants of the gold-bearing regions.
Comparisons to familiar moments in American history (and the implications for what 
would have happened had things turned out differently) abound in this genre. Davidson writes 
that “for the Japanese, the information technology sector offers a vehicle to achieve their 
manifest destiny,” and that the Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project is “equivalent to the 
American moon shot, and the country is funneling national resources and energies into 
information technology with single-minded zeal and dedication.”68 “Manifest destiny” evokes the
mandate of continued westward expansion of the United States across the north American 
continent in several stages of American history (and the attendant subjugation/genocide of the 
Native inhabitants of the land), and of course the “moon shot” imagery is clear in its implications
of Cold War politics, scientific progress as (barely veiled) proxy for armed conflict, and the 
wholesale mobilization of the national economy for a political project.
The above examples are at least slightly more creative in their allusions to sites of 
conflict within American history. Forester writes of Japanese industry “launching coordinated 
attacks on overseas markets—especially the US,” a framing which hardly fails to evoke the 
coordinated attacks on Pearl Harbor and other targets in east and southeast Asia on December 8, 
1941.69 Unlike that day which would live in infamy, Forester tempers his grim warning with at 
least the promise of understanding and combating the coming threat: “Japan is about to overtake 
68. William H. Davidson, The Amazing Race: Winning the Technorivalry with Japan (New York, NY: 
John Wiley & Sons, 1984), vii–viii.
69. Tom Forester, Silicon Samurai: How Japan Conquered the World’s IT Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: 
Blackwell Business, 1993), x.
50
the US to become No. 1 in information technology, the key strategic technology of our times. 
This book tells the story of how the Japanese did it…”70 The book is apparently set up like a 
journalistic exposé, a dramatic reveal of a criminal act: it was the butler in the parlor, the 
Japanese in the IT sector. This is how the Japanese did it. Davidson draws from even further back
in history, noting that since the Meiji Restoration in the mid–1800s, Japan has “sought a position 
of leadership, pride, and prestige in the Western world,” and arguing that “by gaining 
preeminence in information technology,” Japan is finally able to realize this centuries-old goal.71 
If so, this would be an incredible achievement—contemporary nations are barely able to play a 
long game of working towards a unified national goal in the span of a decade, much less follow 
these plans over the course of contemporary modernity.
These books sound their respective alarms by recounting the growth of Japanese 
consumer technologies on the global stage in the post-war era. For Feigenbaum and McCorduck, 
the prospect of Japanese dominance in the computing industry would be just the latest in a string 
of incursions into other industries:
We now regret our complacency in other technologies. Who in the 1960s took seriously 
the Japanese initiative in small cars? Who in 1970 took seriously the Japanese national 
goal to become number one in consumer electronics in ten years? (Have you seen an 
American VCR that isn’t Japanese on the inside?) In 1972, when the Japanese had yet to 
produce their first commercial microelectronic chip but announced their plans in this vital
“made in America” technology, who would have thought that in ten years they would 
have half of the world’s market for the most advanced memory chips? Are we about to 
blow it again? The consequences of complacency…will be devastating to the economic 
health of our most important industry.72
Forester deploys the imagery of a predator quietly, patiently making its way “up the food chain,” 
posing a disruption to an implied natural order in its refusal to know its place:
70. Forester, ix.
71. Davidson, The Amazing Race, vii.
72. Feigenbaum and McCorduck, The Fifth Generation, 2.
51
Starting four decades ago with transistor radios and televisions, the Japanese had by the 
1970s come to dominate audio, video, and most other areas of consumer electronics. In 
the 1980s, Japanese companies targeted and swiftly captured leadership of the vitally 
important semiconductor industry. Since then, the Japanese have steadily moved up the 
so-called technology “food chain,” quietly building market share in laptop computers, 
workstations, mainframe computers, supercomputers, and software. Along the way, they 
have gained a stranglehold over key areas of advanced manufacturing technology such as
automated machine tools, robots, and flexible manufacturing systems.73
Success in high technology industries is framed exclusively as a zero-sum game: either 
America dominates on the world stage, or Japan controls everything and America is demoted to 
the status of a peripheral nation, existing only in Japan’s shadow. Forester warns that “the entire 
high-tech sector…is at risk from Japanese domination” and that without a focused effort to 
“[learn] the lesson of Japan’s high-tech business strategy and [change] course, there is a grave 
danger that America and Europe could become little more than industrial museums—and Japan’s
economic triumph will be complete.”74 Davidson reiterates that there is only one acceptable 
outcome in this economic competition, and offers that “[i]f the United States is to retain its world
leadership in [industrial endeavors], it must dominate those sectors that are critical for success.”75
But the most hysterical tone is set by Feigenbaum and McCorduck, who close their preface with 
the warning that “the stakes are high. In the trade wars, this may be the crucial challenge. Will 
we rise to it? If not, we may consign our nation to the role of the first great postindustrial 
agrarian society.”76
The real-world anxieties of Japan’s sudden economic success in the high technology 
sectors are reflected in contemporary popular entertainment of the era, though with a notably 
different stance (though still often lacking in nuance) on the phenomenon. While certain media 
73. Forester, Silicon Samurai, ix–x.
74. Forester, x.
75. Davidson, The Amazing Race, vii.
76. Feigenbaum and McCorduck, The Fifth Generation, 3.
52
perpetuated the negative portrayal of Japanese industry to often racist extremes, such as Michael 
Crichton’s 1992 novel Rising Sun and its 1993 film adaptation, the general tone was much more 
celebratory, possibly as a result of the increasing prominence of Japanese consumer electronics 
in the consumer space. The contradictions between longstanding narratives of the exotic Orient 
(wherein Japan and China, as well as other east Asian nations, were often portrayed 
interchangeably) and the recent concerns with Japanese economic growth combined to produce a
phenomenon that Morley and Robins describe as “techno-Orientalism,” wherein “these 
postmodern [new media and communication] technologies become structured into the discourse 
of Orientalism.” 77 But rather than a unidirectional ‘Western’ gaze that produces an imaginary 
Japan, techno-Orientalism sees a much more porous combination of popular culture depictions of
Japan (Neuromancer, Blade Runner, much of the cyberpunk sci-fi genre) and from Japan (otaku 
culture, Japanese cyberpunk science fiction such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, etc.) in ways that 
make it difficult to separate the Orientalist gaze from domestically-produced reflections on 
economy, culture, and nation. Before later descending into a pastiche filled with empty signifiers,
the cyberpunk science fiction genre provided a critique of the increasingly global nature of 
neoliberal capitalism in its vision of a future in which Japanese corporations had achieved the 
sort of worldwide cultural dominance and recognition previously afforded to names like Nike, 
McDonald’s, or Coca-Cola. Popular Japanese science fiction works like Akira and Ghost in the 
Shell that had achieved international popularity seemed to mesh comfortably with the overall 
cyberpunk politics and aesthetics, though Bolton, Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Tatsumi note that 
“Japanese science fiction texts have frequently been double coded, evoking Japanese national 
77. David Morley and Kevin Robins, “Techno-Orientalism: Japan Panic,” in Spaces of Identity: Global 
Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), 169–70.
53
concerns and popular myths while resonating strongly with foreign audiences.”78 As a result, the 
techno-Orientalist imaginary of ‘Japan’ is seemingly reinforced through domestic production of 
media that support these perceptions—‘even Japan sees itself in this way!’—while the Japanese 
production and reception of these media are engaged in their own independent processes of 
meaning-making.
This section provides a brief overview of the complex and contradictory portrayals of 
Japan in the American popular consciousness in the last decades of the 1900s, not as analysis of 
these portrayals themselves (which is likely to be found in greater detail and rigor in other 
disciplines) but to draw attention to the actually-existing nature of these contemporary 
discourses, as simply one contribution to the discursive formation of ‘Japanese high technology’ 
in the later 20 century. And as this chapter will later show, Japan’s economic policies regarding 
high technology were less aimed at the sort of post-war retribution seen in so many of the 
panicked accounts above, and more concerned with rebuilding domestic industries in an 
economy that had been thoroughly transformed by the experience of the war and the Occupation-
era changes to the nature of domestic science and technology, and with cultivating a 
technological independence in an era where Japan’s accelerated modernity was initially driven 
by foreign technologies that were often culturally and linguistically incompatible.
These shifting discourses of ‘high-tech Japan’ are part of what this chapter discusses as 
the conditions of possibility of the keitai denwa: the particular configurations of political and 
economic systems, technological developments, and social and cultural attitudes that allowed 
this particular technology to emerge in its particular way in Japan in the 1990s. This is not to 
78. Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, “Introduction,” in Robot 
Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, ed. Christopher Bolton, 
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 
2007), vii–xxii.
54
argue that any of these structures or technologies would have inevitably produced the keitai 
denwa, or that it was the inevitable result of these configurations. Rather, the configurations 
produced an environment (épistémè) where it was possible to think of that which would become 
the keitai, which was then able later to emerge as a discrete socio-technical artifact. And while 
the overlapping, rhizomatic inputs of these configurations produced the conditions of possibility, 
this argument should not be read as implying that the keitai denwa could ONLY have been 
developed in Japan, or that there is some sort of Japanese techno-exceptionalism which enabled 
this device to only emerge there, but rather that the historical and material conditions of Japan at 
this time made it possible for the mobile phone to assume the specific historical-discursive form 
of the keitai denwa.
This chapter argues that three primary attributes contributed to the conditions of 
possibility of the keitai denwa. The first is the configuration of the domestic telecommunications 
industry itself through the second half of the 20 century to the 1990s. Japan did not escape the 
global push towards the deregulation and privatization of state-owned enterprises that began to 
gain momentum in the 1970s, and the transformation of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph from 
state-owned telecommunications monopoly to private corporation nominally opened the 
country’s telecommunications market to both domestic competition from other service providers 
and to foreign interactions in terms of investment, standard-setting, and licensing. The resulting 
political-economic environment enabled the growth of Japan’s commercial telecommunications 
industry and allowed for the emergence of competing carriers that made up the mobile phone 
market.
The second attribute comprises the overall cultural attitudes and relationships towards 
technology that characterize post-war Japan, as prime components of the country’s post-war 
55
national identity, and the global narratives which portrayed Japan’s complete recovery from its 
wartime devastation as an “economic miracle” (and as part of a larger—and very paternalistic-
sounding “Asian miracle”). State-led attempts to rebuild Japan’s industrial economy following 
the Allied Occupation and the close partnerships between academic research, corporate R&D, 
and state policy all worked together to shape discourses of and attitudes toward technology as a 
significant aspect of national identity.
Finally, the last attribute looks at the state of information and computing technologies in 
Japan in the last decades of the 20 century. The development and use of mainframe and personal 
computers in Japan occurred along a different trajectory than that of the US, which saw the IBM-
compatible personal computer (and to a lesser extent, the Apple II and then the Macintosh line) 
as the dominant model in consumer computing. The Japanese computing industry, and cultural 
attitudes towards computers, were shaped by different forces than those which were present in 
the United States and the personal computer acquired different meanings and expectations as to 
how it would function and what its uses would be. As in the experience of the United States, 
there was also robust experimentation in the realm of portable computing that sought to 
transplant certain features and functionality of the desktop computer into a mobile (or at least 
portable) form. Japan’s experience of the Internet is also marked by a different historical 
timeline, standards, and diffusions of technology than the American experience as described in 
e.g. Abbate79 and which is often assumed to be universal.
These three attributes were instrumental in creating the expectations for how information 
and communications technologies were experienced and what they could do in late 20 century 
Japan. The political-economic structures of the telecommunications industry, cultural attitudes 
towards computing and high technology, and the localized affordances of personal computers 
79. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
56
and the experience of the Internet all created a social and technological landscape that made it 
possible for the keitai denwa to emerge as it did in the 1990s.
 “Asia as Method” in Computing Histories 
In analyzing these three areas, this chapter will draw from Yoshimi Takeuchi’s concept of 
“Asia as method,” particularly in the second and third sections as a means of centering the 
Japanese experience of information and communications technologies as a methodological 
(epistemological) approach. Takeuchi’s concept addresses the experience of modernity and 
modernization in Asian nations, and the tendency to conceptualize them in terms of comparisons 
with “the West.”80 An example is the introduction of various foreign technologies during the 
Meiji Period (1868–1912) which is marked by, among other things, increasing trends towards 
‘Westernization’ following the opening of Japan to foreign trade after several hundred years of 
relative isolation. Speaking of the importation of various industrial technologies during this time,
Takeuchi writes that “Japan’s incorporation of western technology was such that it viewed this 
latter as a mere finished product; hence it utterly failed to grasp the scientific spirit that produces 
this technology.”81 While the assertion that it is necessary to understand the “scientific spirit” 
behind a particular technology is problematic, it is also important to acknowledge the differences
in histories of technology and how they affect cultural attitudes. Much of the early history of 
Japanese computing, for example, revolved around the adaptation of hardware and software 
designed entirely around the Roman alphabet to the Japanese language, but to frame this in terms
of Japanese industries having to ‘catch up’ to Western developments implies the problematic 
assertion that the techno-social conditions of ‘the West’ represent a normative path of modernity, 
and the problematic rejection of alternative paths to modernity. Chen, reflecting on the legacy of 
80. Yoshimi Takeuchi, “Asia as Method,” in What Is Modernity?: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans. 
Richard Calichman (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 156.
81. Takeuchi, 162.
57
Takeuchi’s “Asia as method,” more explicitly points out that the perception of “modernization” 
of Asian nations in the late 19 centuries was characterized exclusively by comparison to the 
United States or Europe as the standards of modernity.82
The point of “Asia as method” is that “we must not always compare Japan’s case with 
that of the advanced nations of the West, as had traditionally been done.”83 Takeuchi refers to the 
writings of John Dewey on Japan and China after his visits to both countries; while Dewey was 
initially impressed by the extent of Japan’s apparent modernization and repulsed by the extent to 
which China appeared to be lagging behind, he gradually changed his opinion on both and noted 
that external appearances were not reflective of the internal structures and stability that were the 
actual signifiers of European-style modernity. Dewey’s writing warned that if Japan’s modernity 
remained only at the surface level, “Japan would almost certainly come to ruin,” which Takeuchi 
takes to have come to pass through Japan’s ultimate defeat in World War II.84 Less directly, 
Takeuchi also refers to the Indian poet Tagore’s admonition that Japan, in pursuit of Western-
style modernity, should not attempt to imitate the militarism and colonial adventurism of Western
nations, a warning that went unheeded in Japan’s colonial advances on the Asian mainland in the 
decade preceding the war.
While the concept of “Asia as method” at first glance would seem mostly relevant in 
studies of global histories or politics, it has also been taken up by some practitioners of science 
and technology studies (STS) as a way of de-centering Western theories of science and 
technology. Takeuchi’s “Asia as method” above proposes new understandings of political and 
historical modernity through the acknowledgment of the agency of Asian nations, instead of 
82. Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1960 ‘Asia as Method’ Lecture,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 
13, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 319, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2012.662937.
83. Takeuchi, “Asia as Method,” 156.
84. Takeuchi, 154.
58
through a framework that privileges the Euro-American experiences of modernity. Of more 
direct relation to this dissertation project, “Asia as method” through the lens of STS allows for a 
genealogy of mobile media that doesn’t take Western—or more specifically, Anglo-centric—
notions of technological progress for granted as a natural, normal starting point.
Warwick Anderson states that this perspective in STS allows for “an Asia that is good to 
think with, and think from, rather than a fixed, hegemonic geographical region or essential 
civilizational entity—Asia as method, not Asia as self-evident cultural value.”85 This means that, 
rather than a wholesale rejection of Western-oriented STS, “Asia as method” in STS allows 
acknowledgment of the multiplicity of ways of understanding technological history and its 
relation to society, especially within a framework that does not take for granted technological 
progress as simply received wisdom from the West. Lin and Law note that concepts of “Asia,” 
“Japan,” or “Japanese technology” are knowledge spaces produced through Western modes and 
practices of knowing that emerge from the assemblage of institutions (modes of production, 
knowledge producers and audiences, systems of circulation) and representations of the world 
(through various social theories)86 In viewing “Japanese technology” through the frameworks of 
“developing nations” or “technological latecomers” etc., normative knowledge spaces are 
produced which exclude the possibilities of descents, emergences, of thinking media-
genealogically about “Japanese technology.” The diffusion view of technological innovation 
assumes no essential differences in culture and frames a linear development of technoscience as 
“simultaneously socially and economically essential and empirically visible. The West becomes 
85. Warwick Anderson, “Asia as Method in Science and Technology Studies,” East Asian Science, 
Technology and Society 6, no. 4 (November 1, 2012): 448, https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-
1572849.
86. Wen-yuan Lin and John Law, “We Have Never Been Latecomers!? Making Knowledge Spaces for 
East Asian Technosocial Practices,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 9, no. 2 (June 1, 
2015): 119–20, https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-2883872.
59
the desirable model and forerunner. It sets the standard that the non-West should shape itself 
into.”87 “Asia as method” pushes back against this standard, and the remainder of this chapter 
examines the development of localized information and communications technologies in spite of 
the overwhelming influence of the English language in the production and distribution of ICTs in
the late 20 century. In focusing on the conditions of possibility within in Japan that produced the 
keitai denwa, this chapter will “[highlight] the specificity and importance of local mechanisms, 
and therefore the fact that explanations also belong to a locality,”88 or in other words, show that 
the conditions that produced the keitai denwa are almost entirely rooted in domestic Japanese 
developments, despite the Anglocentric assumptions that underlie any histories of contemporary 
information and communications technologies.
 From State Monopoly to Open Infrastructures: The 20 Century Telecommunications Industry 
One of the most direct factors which produced the conditions of possibility that allowed 
the keitai denwa to emerge and flourish in a particular moment in Japanese history is the state of 
the telecommunications industry in the late 20 century. NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service is 
arguably the turning point where the mobile phone began to be imagined as a content distribution
platform instead of exclusively a two-way communication device, so it is important to see how 
the industry structure and state regulations facilitated the entry of a telecommunications carrier 
into markets for content delivery.
Telecommunications in Japan began as a state-owned monopoly in the Meiji period 
(1868–-1912), initially managed under the Ministry of Industry which operated from 1870 to 
1885 and was involved in the adoption of a number of foreign technologies at the time, including
87. Lin and Law, 120.
88. Lin and Law, 121.
60
the installation of the first national telegraph network.89 The Ministry of Communications was 
formed in 1885 and took over the management of telecommunications, among other affairs, from
the Ministry of Industry, but telephone service was not introduced until 1889 and until the early 
20 century calling was limited to local areas, in contrast with the telegraph’s national 
infrastructure.90 Yang notes the vital role that telecommunication infrastructure played in Japan’s 
imperial expansion of the 1920s and 1930s, allowing for the coordination of both military action 
in and administrative control of the vast territories in Asia that Japan had invaded in the prelude 
to the Second World War.91 Following the defeat of the Empire of Japan in 1945, much of the 
domestic infrastructure had been destroyed during the war, and administration of 
telecommunications passed through a number of transient stages during the Allied occupation.92
In 1952 the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (NTTPC) was created 
as a state-owned monopoly overseeing domestic communications.93 There was a post-war 
rationale to this decision that ran beyond the simple continuity of state ownership of 
telecommunications services from the pre-war period. Rebuilding the national infrastructure was 
considered an essential project, and the deployment of POTS 94 was thought of as a universal 
requirement for citizens in rural areas as well as urban ones.95 While in the United States, 
89. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the 
Twenty-First Century (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 73.
90. Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-
1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2010), 28–9.
91. Yang, 8.
92. Sumiko Asai, “Changes in the Interface and Industry Structure,” in Japanese Telecommunications: 
Market and Policy in Transition, ed. Ruth Taplin and Masako Wakui (New York: Routledge, 2006), 
19.
93. Yoshiro Takano, “Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Privatization Study: Experience of Japan and 
Lessons for Developing Countries,” World Bank Discussion Papers (Washington, DC: The World 
Bank, 1992), 1.
94. Colloquially, “plain old telephone service.”
95. Asai, “Interface and Industry Structure,” 20.
61
telephone service was provided by a private monopoly under Bell System, state ownership in 
Japan was justified by the fears that private companies would lack the overall resources to build 
out service to the extent required, and service to rural areas would have been neglected or under-
developed because they weren’t seen as profitable.96 While domestic telephone service was 
provided under the state-owned NTTPC, international communications services such as long-
distance calling were managed by Kokusai Denshin Denwa (KDD), a private entity established 
in 1953.97
Beginning in the later 1970s, a number of factors led to calls for the privatization of 
NTTPC. Following years of constant annual growth, Japan’s economy began to decline in 1973 
and 1974 (with the 1973 oil crisis playing a factor), and the government began investigating 
possibilities for reducing public deficits. Proponents of NTTPC’s privatization argued it would 
allow the company to better meet the changing needs of users as well as increase the company’s 
efficiency through the reduction of personnel costs, reduction in bureaucratic overhead, etc.—in 
other words, the same general arguments used whenever the case is made for the privatization of 
public or state-owned organizations. However, one important point is that with the development 
and proliferation of semiconductor technology in the 1970s, the cost of entry into the industry 
was significantly lower. One of the strongest arguments in favor of telecommunications services 
as state-owned monopolies were that only the government could provide the funding and 
resources to deploy service at the intended scale, but the greater availability and affordability of 
specialized components significantly weakened that argument.98
96. Asai, 20.
97. Takano, “NTT Privatization Study,” 3.
98. Takano, 5.
62
Another factor was the broader, global trend into the 1980s of general deregulation of 
public or state-owned industries as part of the “globalization of finance, corporate governance, 
and trade.”99 The spread of advanced information and communications technologies facilitated 
the global transformation and interconnection of areas that were previously bounded by national 
borders, but with the unanticipated result of increasing international pressure on nations or 
industries that did not eagerly join the world system. NTTPC worked closely with domestic 
hardware manufacturers NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Oki Electric in the development of 
networking hardware, creating a substantial public/private partnership that nonetheless posed 
problems in the new global order, as well as initially laying the foundation for competition 
within Japan’s telecommunications industry. NTTPC’s partnership with these manufacturers 
resulted in significant research and development, but the domestic focus meant the infrastructure 
and hardware was incompatible with international products. This in turn produced trade 
imbalances, higher prices for interconnection with or adapting technologies to the Japanese 
infrastructure, and ultimately the accusations of Japanese ‘unfairness’ that animated many of the 
discourses on Japanese high-technology businesses as discussed earlier in the chapter.100 Funk 
uses the term gaiatsu (外圧, outside or foreign pressure) to describe the international pressure on 
Japanese firms to globalize (which implied the deregulation or privatization of state-owned 
enterprises to facilitate greater flexibility), but notes that this gaiatsu was also used by Japanese 
politicians as a means to “strengthen domestic agendas.”101 Engaging with international markets 
and technologies was necessary to further competition within Japan’s domestic markets, and 
99. Jeffrey L Funk, “The Mobile Phone Industry: A Microcosm of Deregulation, Globalization, and 
Technological Change in the Japanese Economy,” in Japanese Telecommunications: Market and 
Policy in Transition, ed. Ruth Taplin and Masako Wakui (New York: Routledge, 2006), 65.
100. Asai, “Interface and Industry Structure,” 20–21.
101. Funk, “The Mobile Phone Industry: A Microcosm of Deregulation, Globalization, and Technological
Change in the Japanese Economy,” 65.
63
deregulation necessary to sever the state’s role in managing telecommunications services and 
infrastructure and guarantee the presumably necessary flexibility and agility that a more lassaiz 
faire approach would ostensibly provide.
In April 1985, the NTT Public Corporation was privatized and became the NTT 
Corporation through the 1984 Act on Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (colloquially,
the “NTT Corporation Law”). The NTT Corporation Law mandated the dissolution of the NTT 
Public Corporation and the formation of the Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, 
which was ostensibly a joint-stock company that managed the shares of the two regional NTT 
divisions, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation (NTT East) and Nippon Telegraph 
and Telephone West Corporation (NTT West).102 In practice, this didn’t actually result in 
significant changes to the actual size and scale of the company itself. While privatization and 
deregulation had been under discussion for some time, separate factors ultimately came together 
to produce the sustained and necessary pressure for privatization. New service subscription rates 
dropped, reflecting the completion of much of the post-war reconstruction of infrastructure and 
the availability of service to the majority of the nation. At the same time, there was increasing 
evidence that many subscribers were looking for a greater range in service types and costs. As 
discussed above, the semiconductor revolution provided increasing sophistication and 
availability of new communications technologies and significantly lower costs, all of which 
made the previous rationale for a “natural monopoly” of the state less compelling. And the 
general global trends, also mentioned above, towards the privatization and deregulation of public
services grew stronger under the growing neoliberal ideology that demanded smaller 
102. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, “Act on Nippon Telegraph and Telephone 
Corporation,” Pub. L. No. 85, 37 (1984), https://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/en/laws/view/3768
art. 1 sec. 1.
64
government.103 During this time period in Japan, the previously state-owned Japan Railways was 
privatized and split into the three separate companies of JR East, JR West, and JR Hokkaido. In 
the ICT sector, state-owned British Telecom was also privatized at this time.104
The Telecommunications Business Act of 1984 was enacted with the purpose of 
“ensuring the proper and reasonable operation of telecommunications services and promoting 
fair competition in consideration of the public nature of telecommunications business, thereby 
ensuring the sound development of telecommunications and making the lives of the people more 
convenient, and improving public welfare.”105 It included a number of provisions requiring 
telecommunications companies to accept interconnection requests from other companies (as long
as they were using compatible interfaces) and prohibited opaque, unfair, or inconsistent pricing 
for these services 106 More importantly, the Telecommunications Business Act changed the 
structure of Japan’s telecommunications industry from monopolies on domestic (NTT) and 
international (KDD) operations, and instead established categories of Type I and Type II for 
carriers. Type I carriers would install and own networks and other infrastructure, and Type II 
carriers would not operate their own networks but instead lease the infrastructure from Type I 
carriers and provide their own ‘value-added’ services across the networks.107 The Act on Nippon 
Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (the “NTT Law”) was enacted concurrently with the 
Telecommunications Business Act and further spelled out NTT’s new responsibilities and 
103. Asai, “Interface and Industry Structure,” 21.
104. In the case of America, the previous Bell Telephone empire under AT&T was forcibly broken up into
smaller regional Bells in 1982, but this was the result of state-mandated antitrust action. The 
American telephone system, in contrast, had never been a public service or good, and always operated
under private ownership, and a de-facto monopoly until the Bell breakup.
105. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, “Telecommunications Business Act,” Pub. L. No. 
86, 343 (1984), https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/joho_tsusin/eng/Resources/laws/TBL/TBL-
index.html, ch. 1 art. 1.
106. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, ch.2 sec.3.
107. Takano, “NTT Privatization Study,” 14.
65
obligations in the new telecommunications landscape, and to somewhat dilute its power as the 
former incumbent monopoly. Article 3 of the NTT Law states that the new NTT Corporation
must endeavor to contribute to the innovative advancement and development of 
telecommunications in Japan by promoting research on telecommunications technologies 
and disseminating the results of research given the fact that telecommunications will play
a vital role in social and economic progress in future years, and thereby to promote the 
public welfare.108
In other words, NTT was—and still is—mandated to continue an active research and 
development program and make the results available for use by potential competitors, under the 
rationale that it is more important that these advances benefit the general public rather than allow
an individual corporation to gain a competitive advantage. Other provisions of the NTT Law 
aimed at fostering greater competition included changing the schedule of tariffs and fees for 
interconnection to networks owned by Type I carriers. Tariffs were required to be set on the basis
of actual operating costs, clearly described, and could not discriminate against carriers.109 These 
new regulatory changes allowed for the emergence of new common carriers (NCCs) which could
provide cheaper services in the areas of long-distance or cellular service than NTT can, given the
additional regulatory burdens on NTT from the NTT Law and the Business Act.110 Some of the 
NCCs that emerged in this time period include Daini Denden Inc. (DDI) and Japan Telecom, 
both of which would eventually play significant roles in the development of mobile media in 
Japan. While there have been further changes in its corporate structure as well as amendments to 
the legislation governing telecommunications businesses in the intervening years, the 
privatization of NTT and subsequent state intervention in forcing NTT to open its infrastructure 
108. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Act on Nippon Telegraph and Telephone 
Corporation, art. 3.
109. Takano, “NTT Privatization Study,” 23.
110. Takano, 57.
66
to competing services helped form the initial telecommunications landscape that enabled the 
emergence of the keitai denwa.
 The Role of Science and Technology in Japanese Public Life 
While the shape of the Japanese telecommunications industry certainly provides an economic, 
regulatory, and infrastructural base for the development of mobile media, it is also necessary to 
attend to the superstructural aspects of media technology use and adoption—namely, how high 
technology is represented in everyday life. But rather than something that springs fully formed 
into the public consciousness, attitudes towards technology are also the result of numerous 
interlocking processes and experiences that collectively shape how technology is perceived, what
role it occupies in everyday life, and who it is ostensibly for. Attitudes are shaped through media 
representations, of course, but state policies and initiatives concerning science and technology 
also play a role, especially in the ways in which science and technology tie into expressions or 
ideals of citizenship and national identity.
As discussed previously, the experience of science and technology is strongly connected 
to concepts of the appearance of ‘modernity’, at least from a Western perspective, and the 
Japanese experience is no different. The history of borrowing and importing foreign 
technologies, usually with a military imperative, had been an important aspect of government 
policy since the 19 century, where a strong, outward facing military was considered critical to 
national security.111 During the Meiji Restoration of the late 19 century when Japan undertook a 
rapid ‘Western-style’ modernization, the slogan “rich nation, strong army” came into vogue, and 
science and technology were largely seen as means to a military end. This time period saw the 
construction of factories for the purposes of creating weapons and other wartime material, and 
111. Morris Low, Shigeru Nakayama, and Hitoshi Yoshioka, Science, Technology and Society in 
Contemporary Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.
67
foreign engineers were hired to supervise the operations of the factories. Technology transfers 
often played roles in these agreements, echoing Takeuchi’s previous comments about the practice
of importing developed technologies without much understanding of the “spirit” in which they 
were developed.112
Low writes that “the form and content of science and technology are governed by class 
relations and power hierarchies in society, and…projects which are promoted by the government 
tend to serve the interests of the dominant groups in society,” which illustrates the significant 
difference between the state approaches towards science and technology before World War II 
(military growth and modernization, national material self-sufficiency through colonial 
expansion) and after (economic recovery following the Occupation).113 The Occupation 
government placed significant restrictions on scientific research to ensure that there were no 
continuing projects with military applications; certain fields such as nuclear or aeronautical 
engineering were forbidden entirely.114 University departments which specialized in these fields 
were able to pivot to related fields with more explicitly civilian applications such as applied 
physics or automotive and railway engineering, which forecast the success of Japanese industries
in these fields later in the 20 century.115
Scientific research in the post-war era was characterized by the distinction between basic 
research (fundamental research being conducted in academic or state-funded labs, with results 
published in scientific journals) and applied research (industrial applications and commercial 
products building off of basic research in private or corporate labs).116 But the dominant interests 
112. Low, Nakayama, and Yoshioka, 2.
113. Low, Nakayama, and Yoshioka, 3.
114. Nakayama, Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan, 89.
115. Nakayama, 90.
116. Low, Nakayama, and Yoshioka, Science, Technology and Society in Contemporary Japan, 5.
68
in society mentioned by Low above were more oriented towards economic growth, and as a 
result trends favored the privatized, applied research. Basic research was seen as less important, 
which produced a feedback loop of reduced funding for basic research in universities, leading to 
greater marginalization through diminished perception of its importance, and so on.117 Basic 
research in universities faced other forms of political opposition as well. Leftist student groups in
the 1960s and ’70s were strongly opposed to what was seen as capitalist encroachment on 
academic freedom or to the possible eventual use of academic research in military applications.118
Concern about Japanese war crimes and wartime abuses of scientific knowledge, such as those of
the infamous Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army which conducted chemical and biological 
experiments on prisoners—mostly Chinese—in Manchukuo, also contributed to a general 
reluctance towards scientific research that was connected to public or state funding.119
As public attitudes towards the role that science and technology would play in post-war 
society were being established from a political and economic standpoint, there was also an 
ongoing ideological formation that connected national identity with the economic orientation 
towards high technology sectors. Shun’ya Yoshimi states that, in contrast with the later techno-
Orientalist discourses discussed earlier in this chapter, internally-driven techno-nationalistic 
discourses which connect the success of Japanese industries with innate features of Japanese 
identity have existed since the 1960s.120 Yoshimi argues that “the popular image of electric 
appliances is one of the most important symbols for confirming Japanese technological 
117. Low, Nakayama, and Yoshioka, 19–20.
118. Nakayama, Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan, 78.
119. Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transformation of Japan, 156.
120. Shunya Yoshimi, “‘Made in Japan’: The Cultural Politics of ‘home Electrification’ in Postwar 
Japan,” Media, Culture & Society 21, no. 2 (March 1999): 151, 
https://doi.org/10.1177/016344399021002002.
69
capabilities and economic success in the postwar period,”121 and over the course of the second 
half of the 20 century these symbols shift from being an integral part of the construction of a new
post-war national identity to playing an equally important role in the representation of ‘Japan’ 
internationally. In the 1950s, home electrification and the appliances that it enabled were seen as 
symbols of modernity, largely through their connotations of the ‘West’ in which technology is 
somewhat synonymous with modernity. Yoshimi refers to the sanshu no jingi (三種の神器), or 
“three sacred treasures,” which have traditionally referred to the Japanese imperial regalia 
comprised of a sacred sword, mirror, and jewel/bead, but which took on new colloquial meaning 
in the 1950s as the washing machine, refrigerator, and the black and white television.122 
Possession of the original “three sacred treasures” served as a means of authenticating the rule of
the Emperor, and ownership of the new “three sacred treasures” of home electrification in the 
1950s indicate, first, the middle-class economic status necessary to afford those appliances, but 
also served to authenticate the households who possessed them as “modern families.”123
Yoshimi also notes the role that advertising played in shaping the image of these 
consumer technologies. In the 1950s, the use and ownership of electronic goods signified 
“modernity” created through an “American way of life” that was brought about by the ownership
and use of modern electrical appliances. In the 1960s, discourses emerged in advertising that 
sought to portray Japanese products as globally competitive, with many advertisements making 
the claim that somehow “Japanese culture” was responsible for the production of such highly-
regarded products. Yoshimi offers the example of advertisements for Matsushita televisions that 
claim that traditional Japanese craftsmanship is responsible for the high quality of their images 
121. Yoshimi, 152.
122. Yoshimi, 155.
123. Yoshimi, 156.
70
and design, even as the advertisements note the technology was initially American in origin.124 
What is interesting about these discourses—Yoshimi refers to them as “image politics”—is that 
they make claims to the global recognition for the quality and craftsmanship of Japanese 
electronic goods even before Japan had actually earned that reputation in the 1970s and 1980s. 
However, this politics of representation was so strongly established in the domestic milieu—the 
construction of a national identity that includes a cultural tendency towards the production of 
high-quality goods—that it easily spread in the global popular consciousness in the later part of 
the 20 century as Japanese products became increasingly available worldwide, and “more and 
more people became eager to explain the origin of Japanese technological ability with inherent 
qualities of Japanese culture.”125 DuGay et al. also observe this phenomenon in their classic study
of the Sony Walkman, arguing that despite the popular narratives of the Walkman as the product 
of “Japanese design” (complete with Orientalist references to the aesthetics of traditional 
tableware and the compact size as essentially ‘Japanese’ properties), Sony’s previously 
successful transistor radios borrowed heavily from American radio designs, and its 35mm 
cameras were similarly indebted to the designs of those manufactured by the German corporation
Leica.126 The narratives of ‘traditional culture’ that supposedly permeate Japanese consumer 
goods are just as much the result of ideologies that have worked to shape both Japanese self-
identity and Japan’s global representation in the post-war decades.
Attitudes towards science and technology in everyday life are the result of numerous 
factors: historical processes, state policies, industry objectives, and even advertising culture. 
Despite the simplified portrayal of Japanese industry as simply borrowing foreign technologies 
124. Yoshimi, 162.
125. Yoshimi, 163.
126. Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 64–66.
71
with no regard for the “spirit” of their development, as Dewey claimed, the shaping of both 
Japanese attitudes towards technology and the assemblage known as ‘Japanese technology’ are 
hardly the result of simple, linear processes of appropriation. The presence of discourses such as 
‘Japanese technology’, ‘Japanese design’, or ‘traditional Japanese culture’ are all the result of 
social processes that in turn shape the meaning of artifacts produced within these intersecting 
strata.
 Localizations and Adaptations in Information and Communications Technologies 
Since the ‘opening’ of Japan to trade with the ‘Western’ world in the mid-1800s, Japanese
industry has been accused of simply importing and then imitating many new technologies. 
Historians of science and technology in that era can likely offer a much more nuanced view of 
those particular claims, but we only need to look at the development of information and 
communications technologies in Japan in the second half of the 20 century as an example that the
adoption of foreign technologies is often marked by much more active processes of adaptation 
and localization, rather than simply passive reception of technologies from the ‘advanced’ West.
With most of the research and development of computing in the post-war era taking place
in American corporate laboratories or in initiatives funded by the military, the English language 
was of course the de facto language used in development and in interfaces, with the Roman 
alphabet-based QWERTY keyboard a primary means of input. For English-speaking users, using
the QWERTY keyboard as a means of interfacing with computers was hardly a new 
development, as that same keyboard was previously present on manual and then electric 
typewriters, so any difficulty in adapting to this input method would likely come from the 
novelty of interacting with the computer itself. For users whose native alphabets use entirely 
different letters, or who use writing systems with entirely different scripts, the problem is much 
72
greater, in that the representation of text within early computers was incapable of displaying 
characters beyond those used in [American] English, in an example of what Mark McLelland 
calls the “hidden and persistent biases in early computer communication.”127 The 7-bit ASCII 
(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) encoding developed in the 1960s was a 
7-bit code, which could store 128 characters in total. The first 32 character spaces featured non-
printing control characters such as space, page up, enter, etc., and the remaining 96 spaces were 
used by letters (upper and lowercase), numbers 0–9, and basic English punctuation marks. ASCII
was later extended to 8 bits which offered an additional 128 characters that supported many 
additional accented letters, such as occur in languages such as Spanish or German.128 This left 
computers from the 1960s onward entirely incapable of displaying text in Chinese, Japanese, or 
Korean (CJK), with their thousands of individual logograms. The Japanese language itself is 
comprised of two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, each with 47 separate characters, as well as
kanji, a Chinese-derived script with over 2000 characters designated for everyday use.
This initial incompatibility had a number of practical and ideological effects. The 
language barrier embedded into computing devices was difficult enough, but most Japanese users
had not previously had the experience of using a keyboard even on a typewriter, owing again to 
the thousands of individual logograms in daily written use in the Japanese language. The 
electronic word processor (wāpuro), a device that falls somewhere between a typewriter and a 
full computer running word processing software, was the first device that experimented with a 
means of inputting Japanese text using a QWERTY keyboard. Users were required to type the 
127. Mark McLelland, “Early Challenges to Multilingualism on the Internet: The Case of Han Character-
Based Scripts,” Internet Histories 1, no. 1–2 (January 2, 2017): 120, 
https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2017.1280889.
128. McLelland, 120.
73
phonetic sounds of the characters using Roman letters, then select the correct character129 with a 
dedicated conversion key.130 Shigeru Nakayama describes the electronic word processor as a 
“double revolution;” whereas many users in America were somewhat familiar with the typewriter
before the introduction to the computer and had become adapted to moving from printed writing 
to typed writing before experiencing the “revolution” of electronic communication, Japanese 
users would have experienced a much more jarring leap straight from printed writing and 
communication to electronic means, without the intermediate step of typewritten 
communication.131 While wāpuro conversion enabled the use of QWERTY keyboards to input 
Japanese text—albeit in a relatively cumbersome manner—this still required some amount of 
English learning to identify the romanized equivalents of Japanese sounds. Nakayama points out 
that training on the QWERTY keyboard often doesn’t happen until high school, which introduces
a delay in familiarization with computing devices compared to users in countries with writing 
systems based on the Roman alphabet.132
This linguistic hurdle to the adoption of computing technologies made local uptake of 
largely imported information and computing technologies difficult enough, but it also posed a 
significant barrier for the international communication practices enabled by the Internet. 
Nakayama describes the QWERTY keyboard as a “bottleneck for Japanese seeking to access the 
Internet,”133, while Toru Nishigaki asks in 1998 if “ordinary Japanese can become active 
129. There are a significant number of homophones in the Japanese language—for example, hiragana む, 
katakana ム, and kanji 無 and 夢 can all be pronounced “mu”—requiring the user to cycle through a 
number of options to select the appropriate character for the intended word or phrase.
130. Mark McLelland, “Early Computer Networks in Japan, 1984-1994,” in The Routledge Companion to
Global Internet Histories, ed. Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland (New York, NY: Routledge, 
2017), 173.
131. Shigeru Nakayama, “From PC to Mobile Internet—Overcoming the Digital Divide in Japan,” Asian 
Journal of Social Science 30, no. 2 (2002): 240.
132. Nakayama, 240.
133. Nakayama, 241.
74
participants” in the “global electronic community” promised by the Internet, given the significant
barriers to access and technical literacy.134 Nishigaki in particular is concerned with the political 
implications of a supposedly ‘global’ network being dominated by a single language. It is not 
simply that the Internet requires some degree of English fluency to participate in global 
communication, but on a more fundamental level “information technologies cannot be discussed 
independently from the power that dictates the mode of communication. Compiling a dictionary, 
for instance, is simultaneously an exercise of power as well as a cultural action, in that it sets the 
rules on the standard use of each word or phrase.”135 Nishigaki writes than this dynamic is not 
entirely new or unique to information technologies, as similar dynamics have played out in the 
introduction of previous mass media technologies such as radio and television.
Even though the introduction of information and computing technologies in Japan came 
through imported American technologies and standards, this does not mean that the Japanese 
experience of ICTs has been wholly oriented around the passive use of received technologies. 
The development of Japanese input methods for QWERTY keyboards is one example of the 
active processes of adaptation at work; a more significant one is the Fifth-Generation Computer 
Systems Project. Launched in 1982, the project was managed by the Institute for New 
Generation Computer Technology, a research group under the Ministry of International Trade 
and Industry (MITI), and was comprised of researchers and administrators from top Japanese 
universities such as the University of Tokyo and Keio University, as well as from private 
research laboratories at companies like Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, 
Oki, Sharp, and NTT.136 One of the primary aims of the FGCSP was to develop natural language 
interfaces for information processing, but it is also notable for its goal of using Japanese as a 
134. Toru Nishigaki, “A Global Electronic Community: From the Fifth-Generation Computer to the 
Internet,” Social Science Japan Journal 1, no. 2 (1998): 218.
135. Nishigaki, 227.
75
native interface language—in other words, to develop a localized interface outside of the 
Anglophone paradigm that dominated the computing world up to that point.137 But even within 
these attempts at developing a natively-Japanese computer interface, the primacy of English as 
the language of computing is difficult to escape. Natural language interfaces in AI research draw 
from Noam Chomsky’s theory of a “universal grammar” that underlies all human languages, but 
attempts at constructing a “universal language” for AI interfaces still build off of English rules in
establishing their so-called ‘universal’ concepts.138 According to Nishigaki, the FGCSP was a 
failure in that it did not achieve all of its stated goals of producing an intelligent, natural 
language interface for information processing (though many of the results produced by the 
project have since gone on to have applications in the development of parallel computing), but it 
remains notable as a project conducted at such a massive level of private and public partnership 
with the intent to develop a computing platform that used Japanese as a primary input and 
programming interface, rather than make attempts to adapt Japanese to more limited English-
language systems.
Perhaps another sign of the Anglocentrism that permeates computing technology is the 
assumption that the QWERTY keyboard—or a keyboard-like peripheral—is the most necessary 
or efficient means of interfacing with computers in the first place. Nakayama laments that 
Japanese industry has been “strong in developing the non-keyboard area of the IT revolution: 
namely audio-visual media, cartoons, video cassette recorders, fax machines, console games, etc.
[, but] they have been weak in the development of software that relies on the use of 
136. Hiroyuki Odagiri, Yoshiaki Nakamura, and Minoru Shibuya, “Research Consortia as a Vehicle for 
Basic Research: The Case of a Fifth Generation Computer Project in Japan,” Research Policy 26, no. 
2 (May 1, 1997): 191–207, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(97)00008-5.
137. Nishigaki, “A Global Electronic Community,” 220.
138. Nishigaki, 224.
76
keyboards.”139 The mobile phone fits among the other examples of “the non-keyboard area of the
IT revolution” that are the strengths of Japanese manufacturing, but it also offers a new way of 
thinking about interfacing with ICTs beyond the use of the standard keyboard. In the early 1990s,
the pokeberu (“pocket bell,” or pager) became popular in youth culture, and allowed users to 
send numeric messages from landline telephones to pager users, where the numerals could either 
be converted into Japanese characters to spell out short messages (fig. 2.1), or used on their own 
as an early form of online slang.140,141
Figure 2.1: Pager with numerals-to-Japanese conversion chart. 
Source unknown.
The first keitai denwa service was launched in 1992 by NTT DoCoMo, using the 
Personal Digital Cellular (PDC) standard as a successor to its less-popular car phone service. The
competing PHS (Personal Handyphone System) standard was introduced in 1995.142 Despite the 
significantly reduced 10-key keypad present in most mobile phones, they became popular for 
short message and email communication, with Nakayama remarking that young people used the 
phones more for sending and receiving emails than for traditional voice calling. Nakayama 
139. Nakayama, “From PC to Mobile Internet—Overcoming the Digital Divide in Japan,” 240.
140. Nakayama, 240.
141. Nakayama uses the example of the number 39; the numbers 3 and 9 are pronounced san and kyū 
respectively and together make sankyū, or the Japanese pronunciation of English “thank you.” 
Another example is the number 3476, with the individual numbers pronounced san yon nana roku and
read as sayonara (obviously with a little adaptation).
142. Nakayama, “From PC to Mobile Internet—Overcoming the Digital Divide in Japan,” 241–2.
77
recounts a story of Bill Gates visiting Japan (it is unclear whether this was witnessed by 
Nakayama himself; no sources are provided) and being asked his opinion on the future of mobile
phones. Gates was dismissive of the small screen size and said that “the future of the Internet 
rested with the PC.”143 As with the keyboard, the assumption is that a traditional personal 
computer is necessary for optimal use of the Internet, which results in technologies that don’t fit 
within that computing paradigm to be overlooked, and thus excluded entirely from histories of 
the Internet. NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service was developed with the pager and mobile phone-
savvy youth subcultures in mind, and attempted to adapt the experience of the Internet to the 
mobile phone and the users that were already familiar with it.144 In this way, the Internet became 
popularized in Japan not through the imported, ‘Western’ approach to the Internet through the 
keyboard-driven use of the PC, but through an arguably more limited or compromised 
experience—in terms of input method, screen size, and data throughput—that was nonetheless 
significantly more popular with users who had developed their own localized practices and 
subcultures around the technology.
 Conclusion 
This chapter provided a broad overview of the techno-social conditions in Japan in the 
second half of the 20 century that produced the conditions of possibility that allowed the keitai 
denwa to emerge with its particular characteristics. The telecommunications industry in Japan 
developed after the war as a state-owned monopoly with the goal of providing universal 
telephone service to the nation, and was then privatized and forced to open its infrastructure to 
competition once that initial goal had been met and technological advances made the rationale 
for monopoly ownership less compelling. Post-war attitudes towards the role of science and 
143. Nakayama, 243.
144. Nakayama, 243.
78
technology in everyday life placed little emphasis on the basic research conducted by universities
and were wary of the role that academic science had played in the militarization of Japan in the 
first half of the 20 century. At the same time, state policy under the Ministry of International 
Trade and Industry emphasized electronic and advanced industrial manufacturing as industries in
which Japan could be globally competitive, which placed greater emphasis on the applied 
research being conducted in corporate research laboratories. On a more domestic level, home 
appliances began to be seen as signifiers of a Western-style modernity, producing cultural 
associations between domestic technologies and ‘modern living’.
Japan’s economic growth in the industrial and consumer goods sectors gave rise to 
complicated global networks of discourse that produced an image of ‘Japan’. The Japan of 
advanced manufacturing and electronics industries was a vengeful titan intent on toppling 
American dominance in a number of industries, while the Japan of high technology consumer 
goods transformed “Made in Japan” into a global signifier of quality (and later, conspicuous 
consumer cool). All of these discourses sought their origins in some essential aspect of Japanese 
culture which naturally predisposed the nation to success in these areas; produced domestically 
and repeated internationally, these discourses were both techno-nationalistic and techno-
Orientalist at the same time.
Much of Japan’s history with computing revolved around attempts at adapting English-
language interfaces and hardware to the Japanese language, requiring significant compromises or
modifications, especially for those users who were not familiar with English. The Fifth-
Generation Computer Systems Project represented an attempt at developing high-performance 
computing interfaces that weren’t limited by the languages used by either the developers or the 
end users; the project was ultimately unsuccessful in its goals, but does serve to illustrate how 
79
deeply the English language—even in its assumptions of the universality of linguistic constructs
—has become embedded in the field of computing. The introduction of the keitai denwa and its 
uptake as a fashion accessory for youth culture begins to challenge the dominant American 
assumption that the personal computing platform is inseparable from the experience of the 
Internet.
To reiterate a point from the beginning of the chapter, I don’t wish to argue in any way 
that these conditions were exclusively responsible for the emergence of the keitai, that they are 
exclusively Japanese, or that I have come anywhere close to exhaustively discussing them. 
However, these conditions all contributed to the creation of a structural framework that made it 
possible for the keitai denwa to emerge. These conditions also had a significant effect on how 
this technological artifact was presented (by carriers and manufacturers) and received (by 
consumers and the technology industry), which will be illustrated in greater detail in Chapter 4.
The following chapter will begin by discussing the intentional use of the term keitai over 
“mobile phone” for this dissertation, and the term’s function as a discursive formation that 
delineates the keitai from other mobile communications media. The chapter will also provide a 
methodological discussion on the selection and analysis of documents for historical research, as 
well as an introduction of the actual sources used. Chapter 4 will proceed with an analysis of 
print media from 1997–2007 to show the changing representation of the keitai through this 
period, and the discourses that emerged around the meaning of mobile media in this time.
80
Chapter 3.
Formations: Defining “Keitai” and the Analysis of Documents
 Introduction 
Lisa Gitelman points out the inherent “slipperiness” of media as historical subjects 
because “media…of any generation tend to become naturalized; they start to seem inevitable and
then transparent, or transparent and then inevitable.”145 In other words, the novelty of emergent 
media forms, and the effects, ruptures, and negotiations facilitated by their emergence, is often 
obscured by the weight of history that quickly makes the strange, familiar. To study historical 
media today is in some sense to study a settled question, to attend not to the historical processes 
which produced that media form or the relations it initially bore to contemporary media but to a 
sort of immaculately-conceived object which has always-already existed in the particular form 
that is chosen for study. This is not true exclusively for media being studied in a historical 
context, either. Even as we live through changes that media undergo, we tend to acclimatize 
ourselves to ones that become familiar through necessity (workplace information and 
communications technologies) or social convention (technologies of social mediation) and 
despite an initial period of temporal novelty, they eventually “[disappear] from our sense of what
is remarkable,”146 as Richard Ling writes about the mobile phone’s growing ubiquity in the late 
2000s and early 2010s.
The mobile phone—particularly the smartphone—enjoys this status of naturalized 
invisibility today; Adam Greenfield writes that “we use it so often that we don’t see it clearly; it 
appeared in our lives so suddenly and totally that the scale and force of the changes it has 
145. Gitelman, “Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital, Or, The Case of Sheet Music and the 
Problem of Piano Rolls,” 199.
146. Ling, Taken for Grantedness, vii.
81
occasioned have largely receded from conscious awareness.”147 Yet this naturalized invisibility, 
this “taken-for-grantedness” is the present result of processes of negotiation that have been in 
progress for over two decades at this point. The following chapter draws from contemporary 
representations of the keitai denwa in this period (1997–2007) to show the changing status of the 
keitai as it transformed from a business appliance to an everyday artifact of 
mediation/communication which is capable of disappearing from our conscious awareness or 
being taken for granted. Parallel to this popularization is also the slow convergence of various 
mobile media technologies into the feature phone as it assumes more and more features that 
previously belonged to other mobile media technologies, to the point that the feature phone of 
2007 has largely supplanted many other individual devices.
This is not, of course, to suggest that these other forms of mobile media—handheld 
computers, personal digital assistants, even mobile phones that utilized the PHS standard—
disappeared entirely at some discrete point in time, but rather that they were appearing with less 
frequency and with less momentum behind them by the end of this decade. At the same time, the 
specific affordances of the keitai denwa begin to be seen as necessary and important aspects of 
the concept of ‘mobile media’ as a whole, with the result that other information and 
communications technologies that are still ‘portable’ are no longer considered ‘mobile’. For 
example, the laptop is no longer considered ‘mobile’ media, in contrast to the period of 
indeterminacy in the 1980s when designations like ‘mobile’, ‘portable’, and other terms were 
used fairly interchangeably to describe a number of different formal characteristics.148
These next two chapters will show that the form and meaning of mobile media, as 
represented by the keitai denwa, was hardly a settled affair in the years leading up to the 
147. Greenfield, “Smartphone: The Networking of the Self,” 19.
148. Alper, “Portables, Luggables, and Transportables.”
82
emergence of the modern smartphone. The period preceding that time (and even past, to a lesser 
extent) was marked by a significant amount of negotiation of what mobile media could do and 
for whom, and this is reflected in the design of mobile handsets, the services offered, and most 
importantly, how mobile media technologies were represented to the public. In this chapter, I 
first define the term keitai denwa as a discursive formation that represents not only a specific 
technological artifact—as the term has been used in the preceding two chapters—but as a set of 
statements referring to a combination of a particular category of technical device/artifact (and its 
attendant infrastructural underpinnings), cultural imaginaries, and user practices and 
expectations. Next, I will present a theoretical and methodological justification for the 
documentary sources used in this analysis, including a discussion of the limitations that were 
encountered during the research and writing of this dissertation. Finally, in Chapter 4 I will 
discuss the selected contemporary media in terms of how it contributes to the discursive 
formation of keitai denwa and the negotiation of the concept of ‘mobile media’ in this time 
period.
 Keitai  as Discursive Formation 
Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English dictionary defines the word “keitai” (携帯) as 
“carrying on one’s person” (in adjective form) or to “carry [bring, take] something with one; 
have something [on, about with] one; have something [on, about] one’s person.”149 “Denwa” (電
話) is simply “a telephone, a phone.”150 The full phrase “keitai denwa” (携帯電話) then is literally
a phone that one carries on their person, brings with them, etc. This definition is similar to the 
use of “mobile phone” in English. In the latter part of the period covered in this dissertation, the 
149. Watanabe Toshio, Edmund R. Skrzypczak, and Paul Snowden. Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English 
Dictionary. 5th ed. (2003), s.v. “keitai.”
150. Watanabe Toshio, Edmund R. Skrzypczak, and Paul Snowden. Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English 
Dictionary. 5th ed. (2003), s.v. “denwa.”
83
phrase “keitai denwa” (and the use of kanji to write it: 携帯電話) gradually disappears from 
common use in favor of the shorter “keitai,” which in the written Japanese undergoes a 
transformation from the kanji logograph 携帯 to the katakana syllabary, where it is represented as
ケータイ with the pronunciation unchanged and implying a more casual or colloquial usage. 
While less common in American English, this is analogous to the shortening of ‘mobile phone’ to
just ‘mobile’ in British English.151
In this dissertation, I have intentionally chosen the consistent use of the terms “keitai 
denwa”/“keitai” to describe this object of study rather than rely on English translations of the 
phrase, despite the fact that—as illustrated above—there are no problems in directly translating 
the term into familiar English. Instead, my use of the transliterated “keitai” is partially inspired 
by Misa Matsuda’s argument for the use of “keitai” over English equivalents in the sociological 
study of mobile phones in Japan:
We chose to use this colloquial term to make clear our position on cellular phones and 
PHS: they are not “new technologies/media introduced from the outside” but rather 
“technologies/media that come to be embedded in society.” To study keitai rather than the
cellular phone, mobile phone, or mobile communications media means examining these 
devices as they are embedded within a particular society we call Japan, and by extension 
to examine Japan as a society with keitai.152
Matsuda notes, as I have in previous chapters, that the usage of this particular term does not and 
should not imply that the social phenomena which the keitai is embedded in are at all unique to 
Japan. However, to study “the mobile phone in Japan” is to study both “the mobile phone” and 
“the mobile phone as a social artifact used in Japan.” This was much of the focus of the previous 
chapter, which provided notes towards an understanding of the social conditions, with regards to 
151. OED Online, s.v. “mobile,” accessed May 23rd, 2023, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/120487?
result=4&rskey=8CsIsn&
152. Misa Matsuda, “Discourses of Keitai in Japan,” in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in
Japanese Life, ed. Mizuko Itō, Misa Matsuda, and Daisuke Okabe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 
2006), 20.
84
communications technologies, into which the mobile phone emerged in Japan. In connection 
with Matsuda’s argument, I also intentionally use “keitai” in following Chapter 2’s 
methodological framework of “Asia as method”—studying the keitai denwa as an artifact 
produced, used, and made sense of in a Japanese context, rather than situating it as either a 
foreign-produced artifact which was adopted by Japanese users, or as some sort of an affect-less 
‘global’ phenomenon that may be studied in Japan the same as anywhere else.153
“Words and Things”
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault offers several hypotheses concerning 
the relationship between statements and the objects they purport to define. One hypothesis that 
Foucault explores and then subsequently rejects is that “statements different in form, and 
dispersed in time, form a group if they refer to one and the same object.”154 In Foucault’s 
example, statements within the field of psychopathology are used to define the object called 
“madness.” In a similar way, it would be possible to collect statements from the period of this 
dissertation that are used to define the object of the “keitai denwa”—statements dealing with the 
‘phone’ that is “mobile/portable/carried on one’s person” as defined above. However, Foucault 
rejects this preliminary hypothesis because it implies defining an object by somehow looking 
into the object itself (defining “madness” by “interrogating the being of madness itself,”155) and 
assuming all statements about “madness” are referring to the same thing and not, as Foucault 
finds, different objects constituted within the fields of medicine, the law, policing, etc.
153. The implication here, that all media and communication technologies are used, conceptualized, and 
carry the same meanings regardless of where they are found, often obscures and normalizes what are 
frequently American origins of cultural artifacts or technologies (see for example Ch. 2’s discussion 
of Japanese adaptations of the personal computer, which assumed English as the primary user 
interface language), and the dangers of universalizing a technology so clearly rooted in an 
Anglophone paradigm.
154. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language (New York, NY: 
Vintage, 1982), 35.
155. Foucault, 35.
85
As an alternative hypothesis, Foucault offers that perhaps the unity of discourses on an object 
should not be dependent on the existence of that object itself, but instead on the rules that define 
and shape the object, and that separate the object from others like it, and which allow for the 
object to emerge separately from other objects in particular contexts.156 This attention to the rules
that govern the emergence of an object, define how it is separated and dispersed from other 
objects (and the divisions within its own definition) are eventually articulated as a “discursive 
formation:”
Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such a system of 
dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, 
one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, 
transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a 
discursive formation…The conditions to which the elements of this division (objects, 
mode of statement, concepts, thematic choices) are subjected we shall call the rules of 
formation. The rules of formation are conditions of existence (but also of coexistence, 
maintenance, modification, and disappearance) in a given discursive division. 157
This dissertation treats the keitai denwa and, to a lesser extent, ‘mobile media’ as discursive 
formations—concepts and objects defined in some way by statements that differentiate them 
from other concepts and objects. Chapter 1 discussed the construction of the concept of ‘mobile 
media’ and how certain mobile media technologies became excluded from that concept despite 
their inherent properties of mobility. This chapter further discusses the discursive formation of 
the keitai denwa and the statements that function as rules of formation that describe it, but also 
the ways in which the object of these statements has shifted, changed, and narrowed over the 
dissertation’s time period.
PHS and the Keitai Denwa
This chapter has already identified one of these discursive divisions in Matsuda’s 
argument above for using “keitai denwa” instead of ‘mobile phone’, which sets the Japanese 
156. Foucault, 36.
157. Foucault, 41–2.
86
experience of the mobile phone aside from those which may occur in the rest of the world (no 
matter how similar these particular experiences may be on their own.) Another division, which 
will be used in this chapter, is that between mobile phones using the PHS (Personal Handy-
phone System) wireless standard, and the keitai denwa as discrete technologies. While Matsuda 
makes no distinction between the two and explicitly states that her use of the term “keitai” 
encompasses both PHS and PDC (unless there is a technical reason to refer to PHS separately),158
this dissertation intentionally considers PHS-based phones as a separate technological artifact 
from the keitai denwa. There are a number of historical and methodological reasons for this. 
While PHS and keitai handsets looked and functioned in similar ways, the underlying 
infrastructures and functionalities were radically different.
PHS service started in Japan in 1995 and had more than 7 million subscribers by 1997.159 
The PHS system was essentially an extension of existing ISDN technologies, which allowed 
PHS phones to function in the home as a cordless telephone, in the context of private branch 
exchange (PBX) extensions within a business setting, and in ‘walkie-talkie’ mode with direct 
connection between two specific handsets.160. PHS handsets could also function as data terminals
with a potential 32 kbps (kilobits per second) throughput (64 kbps with later revisions to 
standards in 1997).161 As will be shown later in the next chapter in the analysis of some of the 
magazine advertisements in the late 1990s, the use of PHS handsets as wireless modems for 
laptop computers was a feature that was strongly emphasized. Since it essentially made use of 
158. Matsuda, “Discourses of Keitai in Japan,” 20–1.
159. Personal Handyphone System Guidebook, 4th ed. (Tokyo, Japan: PHS MoU Group, 2008), 8, 
https://www.xgpforum.com/new_XGP/doc/White%20Paper/PHSGuidebook_4th.pdf.
160. Personal Handyphone System Guidebook, 13–4.
161. Personal Handyphone System Guidebook, 30.
87
existing phone networks, costs of PHS service were also significantly lower than competing 
keitai services.162
Despite its head start on PDC-based keitai data services and lower cost, PHS had a 
number of detrimental aspects that served to shepherd users to the competing keitai standard 
instead. Because of the shorter range of PHS cell stations, coverage could be inconsistent in 
comparison to the longer broadcast range of cellular phone antennas. The PHS MoU Group 
admits that an early “lack of methodology about area construction” in initial development of 
PHS infrastructure contributed to the perception of poor or inconsistent service quality.163 In 
addition, the early handoff between base stations when a user was traveling could not function at 
high speeds, meaning that PHS phones were generally unusable in cars or on trains.
From a technical standpoint, the PHS represents a very different mobile media 
technology than the keitai, but it also clearly operates as a separate discursive formation, despite 
Matsuda’s conflation of the two. This separation also seems to be borne out in representations of 
the PHS in Japanese media. In the magazines analyzed in Chapter 4, advertisements for PHS 
handsets and services appear frequently in 1997–1999, but become less common in the following
years as the advertising focus shifts mainly to the PDC/3G services provided by DoCoMo, 
KDD/KDDI, J-Phone, etc. The PHS standard continued for a surprisingly long time; despite the 
success of its i-mode service, NTT DoCoMo actually offered PHS services through early 2008,164
and the remaining PHS carrier, Softbank Mobile (which provided PHS service under its Y!
162. Kenji Kohiyama, “A Decade in the Development of Mobile Communications in Japan (1993-2002),”
in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, ed. Mizuko Itō, Misa Matsuda, 
and Daisuke Okabe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 65.
163. Personal Handyphone System Guidebook, 8.
164. “DoCoMo to Exit PHS Following Drop in Subscribers,” Press Release, CommsUpdate, January 7, 
2008, https://www.commsupdate.com/articles/2008/01/07/docomo-to-exit-phs-following-drop-in-
subscribers/.
88
Mobile brand), ended general services in mid-2020.165. In an illustrated 25-year history of the 
PHS standard following the final end of services in January 2021, Y!Mobile characterized the 
competition between PHS and keitai as similar to the sengoku jidai (戦国時代), or Japan’s 
“warring states era/period” of the 15–17 centuries that is historically characterized by frequent 
civil wars (fig. 3.1).166
Figure 3.1: Yahoo! Mobile, “PHS 
vs. keitai, plunging into civil war 
[of the warring states period]!” 
2021, accessed August 20, 2023, 
https://www.ymobile.jp/sp/goodbye
phs.
From a standpoint of media genealogy, PHS poses a fascinating question of what if. 
Similar to the format wars between the VHS and Betamax standards, or the LaserDisc and DVD 
optical media, separating PHS from the keitai denwa offers a potential inquiry into an alternative 
media history. Given the PHS’s early shortcomings, which were corrected to some extent later in 
its lifespan, how might the meaning of mobile media—at least, in the sense that the term still 
points to the mobile phone—be different today? Of course, any answer to that question would be 
purely speculative, but simply exploring the aspects of taken-for-granted everyday life that 
165. “SoftBank Announces PHS Switch-off in July 2020,” Press Release, CommsUpdate, April 20, 2018, 
https://www.commsupdate.com/articles/2018/04/20/softbank-announces-phs-switch-off-in-july-2020/.
166. “PHS 25-nen shi (PHS25 年史),” Y!mobile, accessed April 11, 2023, 
https://www.ymobile.jp/sp/goodbyephs.
89
would change significantly if the technological infrastructure of PHS had emerged as the popular
standard would be a fruitful avenue for future media genealogy research. As it stands, the PHS is 
one of those parallel emergences that are generally forgotten or unremembered in linear histories 
of media technologies, mainly because it was much easier to represent a clear, unbroken lineage 
between the cellular infrastructures supporting the keitai denwa and the smartphones of today. It 
is also through these distinctions and differences that the PHS comprises a separate discursive 
formation from the keitai denwa itself.
 Analysis of Documents 
This chapter takes as its main objects of analysis a variety of documents—mainly 
magazines, but also some newspapers and promotional flyers or catalogs. These all fall under the
larger descriptive category of “documentary sources” as described by John Scott, who defines a 
document as “in its most general sense…a written text.”167 This definition is not limited to 
specific media forms or formats (or type of publication, whether they are digital or analog), and 
Scott perhaps inadvertently stands McLuhan on his head in arguing that documents “may be 
regarded as physically embodied texts, where the containment of the text is the primary purpose 
of the physical medium.” In addition to providing a working definition of “documents,” Scott 
also provides four important criteria for the evaluation of documents: authenticity, credibility, 
representativeness, and meaning.168 Authenticity is perhaps the most straightforward of these, 
asking whether sources are what they claim to be and have not been fabricated or 
misrepresented. Credibility asks whether a source, having been determined to be authentic, is 
accurate in the information it conveys and does not contain either unintentional errors or 
knowing distortions (as in the case of parody, for example). Representativeness asks to what 
167. John Scott, A Matter of Record: Documentary Sources in Social Research (Cambridge, UK: Polity 
Press, 1990), 12.
168. Scott, 6.
90
extent a particular source can claim to represent common trends or practices—a general purpose 
magazine or daily newspaper, for example, will likely be a more accurate reflection of everyday 
practices among the general public than a specialized magazine or newsletter aimed at a group of
hobbyists. And finally, meaning is the determination of to what extent a source can be accurately 
interpreted—is the scholar able to understand its general context, the ideas or practices that it 
illustrates or points to in the way it is designed?169
The sources used in the following chapter are various issues from the magazines Shūkan 
Asahi, Shūkan ASCII, Dime, and Nikkei Trendy; the ‘mooks’ i-mode Best and i-mode Jōhō Site 
1200; and the newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun. Specifically, the chapter will look predominately at 
advertising for keitai denwa carriers, services, and devices within these sources, which will be 
explained in more detail below.
The Shūkan Asahi was a weekly news magazine published by Asahi Shinbun 
Publications, the parent company of the Asahi Shinbun, one of Japan’s five major newspapers. 
Shūkan Asahi began publication in 1922 and announced in January of 2023 that it would be 
ending its print publication in may of that year, with the company focusing more on digital 
publications.170 The magazine covered a variety of national topics, including politics, cultural 
criticism, and even featured short fiction and non-fiction, in many ways similar to the New 
Yorker. The entire print run of the Shūkan Asahi was available for 1997 to 2007, and issues from 
February, March, November, and December were selected for the chapter.
Shūkan ASCII is a weekly magazine published by Kadokawa ASCII Research 
Laboratories, Inc. that covers general topics related to consumer computing and other 
information technologies. It has been in publication since 1997, when it evolved from a previous 
169. Scott, 6–8.
170. “Japanese Weekly News Magazine with 100-Year History to Shut Down,” The Japan Times, January
19, 2023, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/01/19/national/shukan-asahi-ends/.
91
publication called EYE・COM, which also covered consumer technologies from the late 1970s 
such as Japanese personal computers, game systems, and hardware word processors.171 Two 
issues of Shūkan ASCII were available for analysis: July 12, 2005 and March 20, 2007.
Dime is a monthly magazine targeted at businesspeople that covers general topics related 
to technology and business innovations, etc.172 It is published by Shōgakukan, a publishing house
founded in 1922 that publishes a wide range of print material including magazines, children’s 
books, manga, fiction and nonfiction, etc.173 The June 19, 1997 issue of Dime was analyzed for 
Chapter 4.
Nikkei Trendy is a monthly magazine described on its cover as an “trendy informational 
magazine that stimulates personal lifestyles” (koujin seikatsu wo shigekisuru ryūkō jōhōshi, 個人
生活を刺激する流行情報誌), and as the description suggests, covers contemporary popular 
trends with a focus on consumer goods and electronics. It was published by Nikkei Home 
Publishing Company, which has since merged with Nikkei Business Publications (Nikkei BP), 
both subsidiaries under the Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, a major publisher of print media including 
the Nihon Keizai Shinbun (“Japan Economic Newspaper”).174 The March 2004 issue of Nikkei 
Trendy was reviewed for the chapter.
I-mode Best and i-mode Jōhō Site 1200 are examples of mooks, a common print 
publication in Japan that “physically resembles a magazine in content and format, but are 
171. “EYE・COM soukangou = Shukan ASCII no moto mo koukai na no da!! (EYE・COM 創刊号=週刊
アスキーの元も公開なのだっ!!),” 週刊アスキー, August 30, 2017, 
https://weekly.ascii.jp/elem/000/001/539/1539536/.
172. “DIME | Zasshi (雑誌),” 小学館, accessed June 8, 2023, 
https://www.shogakukan.co.jp/magazines/series/087000.
173. “Enkaku・Rekishi | Kaishajouhou (沿革・歴史 | 会社情報),” Shōgakukan, accessed June 8, 2023, 
https://www.shogakukan.co.jp/company/history.
174. “Nikkei no ayumi (日経のあゆみ),” Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, accessed June 8, 2023, 
http://www.nikkei.co.jp/nikkeiinfo/corporate/history/.
92
designed to stay on the shelves much longer than an issue of a weekly or monthly magazine, 
somewhat like a book.”175 Mooks are typically focused on a single topic, but tend towards deep 
coverage suitable for enthusiasts of the topic. i-Mode Best was published by Bestsellers Co. Ltd.,
a print publisher covering a broad range of topics including “entertainment, culture, social 
science, practical guides, essays, sports, and subcultures.”176 Incorporated in 1986, Bestsellers 
Co. previously published a number of magazines in the areas of men’s entertainment, fashion, 
general topics/information, and specialty topics (such as keitai denwa information) but currently 
appears to have ceased publication of print magazines in favor of BEST TiMES, an online news 
and entertainment portal. i-mode Jōhō Site 1200 was published by SoftBank Publishing 
(presently SB Creative), the publishing arm of multinational investment company SoftBank 
Group.177 SoftBank was initially established in the 1980s as a software publisher before 
expanding into a wide range of technology-related magazine publishing as well as investing into 
various technology ventures, including acquiring cellular providers J-Phone and Vodaphone 
Japan in a series of acquisitions and mergers.178 The present SoftBank Corp. is one of Japan’s 
three major mobile service providers (along with NTT DoCoMo and KDDI/au).
The Yomiuri Shinbun is one of Japan’s main daily newspapers and one of the largest 
newspapers in the world, with a weekly circulation of over 7 million as of August 2022.179 The 
175. Juro Osawa, “Meet Japan’s ‘Brand Mooks’: Half-Magazine, Half-Book, All Hit,” Wall Street 
Journal, October 20, 2010, sec. Japan Real Time, 
https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2010/10/20/meet-japans-brand-mooks-half-magazine-half-book-
all-hit/.
176. “Company Overview (会社概要),” Bestsellers Co., Ltd., accessed June 8, 2023, 
https://www.bestsellers.co.jp/company.
177. “Corporate History,” SB Creative Corp., accessed June 8, 2023, 
https://www.softbankcr.co.jp/en/info/history/.
178. “History,” SoftBank, accessed June 8, 2023, 
https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/aboutus/profile/history/.
179. “Yomiuri Shinbun 2022-23 Media Data (読売新聞 2022 ー 23 メディアデータ)” (Yomiuri Shinbun 
Company, August 2022), https://adv.yomiuri.co.jp/mediadata/files/mediadata2022-23.pdf.
93
University of Oregon Library holdings contain collected volumes of all issues from 1958 to 
1996, one year before the period covered in this dissertation. Two collected volumes covering 
February and March 1999 were obtained through inter-library loan. This time period covers the 
launch of the i-mode content platform, a significant event in the history of the keitai denwa.
These sources were selected for the wide range of intended audiences that they would 
serve, from general audiences looking for a broad range of news coverage and who may not be 
specifically interested in technology news (Yomiuri Shinbun, Shūkan Asahi); readers with a broad
interest in information and communications technologies (Shūkan ASCII, Nikkei Trendy); and 
readers looking for in-depth coverage of keitai denwa features and uses through mooks (i-mode 
Best, i-mode Jōhō Site 1200), even if those specific mooks only cover one particular content 
platform. The publications all fulfill Scott’s criteria for authenticity and credibility, as they are all
published by major, mainstream publishing companies that are generally known to provide 
accurate coverage of their subjects. The range of publications was selected to ensure that they 
were representative of the print media of this time period, as exclusively relying on, for example,
technology publications could provide a different perspective on the discourses of the period than
a daily newspaper for general readership.
Print Media and Cultural Formation
The chapter’s approach was somewhat informed by the work of two scholars within the 
field of game studies, both of whom analyze the role of print media—specifically, magazines—
in shaping material cultures, and both of whom draw from the work of Pinch and Bjiker in 
studying the trajectories of how new media become established. Writing about the emergence of 
video games in America in the late 1970s through late 1980s, Michael Z. Newman argues that 
like all new media forms, video games initially emerged into a period of “interpretive 
94
flexibility,” where the meanings of this new media were under negotiation until “a process of 
closure establishes a clearer identity, making some uses dominant while others become more 
marginal or are cast aside.”180 Newman also draws from Bolter and Grusin’s concept of 
remediation (see Ch. 1) to argue that early video games called back to existing media 
technologies in their form and ways of functioning, which offered early users one way of making
sense of the new technologies, but that print media—magazines dedicated to coverage of video 
games—were instrumental in the formation and representation of cultural meanings of video 
games, including who they were for and how they were meant to be played.
Graeme Kirkpatrick looks at the formation of ‘gaming culture’ in the context of computer
games in the United Kingdom, and takes a similar approach and rationale to Newman. Like 
Newman, Kirkpatrick takes a social-constructivist approach to the formation of new media, and 
provides a similar argument that the early years of the computer in the UK—which included 
games among their many potential uses—comprised a similar period of indeterminacy where the 
questions of what computers could be used for, by whom, and in what ways were similarly 
unsettled.181 Magazines dedicated to computers—and to computer games—not only represented 
potential uses (and audiences) to the general British public, but were also instrumental in 
developing standards of evaluation—of the quality of hardware and software in whether they 
fulfilled their stated purposes, and to what extent.182
Although from different geographical areas and addressing slightly different time periods,
both of these scholars are engaged in mapping an early stage of the larger discursive formation 
180. Michael Z. Newman, Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT 
Press, 2017), 2.
181. Graeme Kirkpatrick, The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Gaming Magazines, 1981-1995 
(Palgrave Pivot, 2015), 12.
182. Kirkpatrick, 13–4.
95
that has become ‘video games’ and ‘gaming culture’. The magazines that they focus on are not 
only engaged in the work of settling these periods of indeterminacy of a new medium, but they 
also statements of dispersion, as Foucault describes, that serve to set ‘video games’ or ‘computer 
games’ apart from other forms of games and play, other uses of the computer, that separate their 
particular cultures from other cultures of computer or general technology enthusiasts.
Media Representation and Advertising
Print media are significant for Newman and Kirkpatrick—and in the context of this 
dissertation—because of their role in establishing the meaning of these new media. DuGay et 
al. write that “partly, we give things meaning by the way we represent them, and the principal 
means of representation in culture is language.”183 Here, “language” is not simply speech or text, 
but “any system of representation—photography, painting, speech, writing, imaging through 
technology, drawing—which allows us to use signs and symbols to represent or re-present 
whatever exists in the world in terms of a meaningful concept, image, or idea.”184 Chapter 4 
focuses primarily on advertising because of the ways it communicates meaning through its 
representation of both signifying practices (how can/should this technology be used?) and 
aspirational identities in the ads themselves. Advertising’s primary focus is to create demand for 
goods and services that eventually lead to sales (or the production of audiences/the audience 
commodity, in some arguments185), but it is also a “cultural practice because, in order to sell, it 
must first appeal; and in order to appeal, it must engage with the meanings which the product has
accumulated and it must try to construct an identification between us—the consumers—and 
183. Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 7.
184. Du Gay et al., 7.
185. Dallas Smythe, “On the Audience Commodity and Its Work,” in Media and Cultural Studies: 
Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell 
Publishing, 2009), 230–55.
96
those meanings.”186 Advertising is the main focus of the textual materials in the chapter because, 
despite the distortions or exaggerations frequently used as rhetorical devices in the construction 
of advertising images, it also creates suggestions as to how we should be using the keitai denwa, 
and the lifestyle we should clearly aspire to in order to become “the ‘sort of person who buys and
uses this kind of thing’.”187
Limitations
The following chapter was meant to have a very different form when the dissertation was 
initially proposed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. I had intended to secure research funding 
through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program or a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship 
to enable me to travel to Japan to access a wide variety of documents in institutional archives I 
was familiar with, such as the National Diet Library and the Ōya Soichi Bunko, a private library 
dedicated to popular culture magazines. I intended to work with faculty in the University of 
Tokyo’s Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, where I previously earned my
master’s degree and where I would have access to the holdings of the University of Tokyo 
general library as well as the help of faculty who could potentially point me to other archives or 
repositories which could contribute to my research. The idea was to gain access to as wide a 
range of magazines, newspapers, and other publications addressing or connected to the keitai 
denwa in my chosen time period so as to present as broad a view as possible of the discourses of 
“keitai” as they existed.
The COVID-19 pandemic quickly made this plan infeasible, first on account of general 
travel prohibitions (and specifically, the Japanese government’s strict control of foreign citizens 
entering the country in the first two years of the pandemic) and then due to family 
186. Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 20.
187. Du Gay et al., 21.
97
considerations. I had to attempt to gather whatever materials I was able to, through the methods I
had at hand: local library holdings, inter-library loans, and personal acquisitions of materials. In 
many cases I was aware of the existence of potentially relevant periodicals or other publications 
but did not know exactly what the content was or where the keitai denwa may be featured in a 
particular issue; given the cost and delivery time of inter-library loan requests (as well as the 
uncertainty of whether a particular request would be fulfilled), it was necessary to be strategic in 
requesting only publications where I had a good chance of finding relevant information.
I was ultimately only able to obtain two collected volumes of the Yomiuri Shinbun which 
compiled all of the issues of the newspaper published in February and March 1999; a number of 
other requests for additional volumes were canceled for lack of availability at partner institutions.
I used a proxy shipping service to purchase a small number of individual magazine issues from 
the Yahoo! Japan Auctions online auction service; while this allowed access to some documents 
that I otherwise could not have obtained, the selection was limited to the issues that were put up 
for auction at that exact time. General online searches yielded an inconsistent number/amount of 
other sources, most specifically at the Internet Archive, which included a large number of 
scanned manuals for individual phone models and a number of television commercials recorded 
and uploaded by individual users (though without much included metadata as to when the 
commercials aired beyond the year such as the channel, the time slot, etc.).
The amount and variety of documentary sources that were accessible during the writing 
of the chapter were not ideal in terms of providing a thorough, chronological coverage of the 
time period in question through multiple sources. For example, only having access to one or two 
issues of most of the magazines does not paint a complete portrait of their coverage over the 
entire period. However, the discourses present in the available materials do paint a fairly 
98
consistent picture of the genealogical transformations of mobile media during this time, and 
given that they meet with Scott’s criteria for evaluating documentary sources discussed above, it 
is unlikely that a larger and broader selection of sources would suggest a significantly different 
story. The fact also remains that the documents analyzed here do represent actually-existing 
discourses from the time period, which on their own are worthy of analysis from a genealogical 
perspective as they still leave one record of the transformations, emergences, ruptures, and 
remediations that characterized this period.
 Conclusion 
The purpose of this chapter was to introduce the methodological approaches for the 
following chapter’s analysis of documents. First, I discussed the intentional use of the terms 
“keitai” or “keitai denwa” instead of the English equivalent ‘mobile phone’ as a means of calling 
attention to the specific Japanese context of this phenomena. In referring to the Japanese term, I 
am not implying that the experience of mobile media is somehow unique or exclusive to Japan, 
but rather that the social and structural contexts (the latter described in part in the previous 
chapter) of Japan frame the experience in Japan differently than it would be in the United States,
etc. The term “keitai” was also explored as a discursive formation, a set of statements used to 
delineate the keitai from the similar PHS technology, which is different enough in its function 
and usage to necessitate being treated as a separate phenomenon.
I then discussed the materials used in Chapter 4 to illustrate the changing representations 
of keitai through the dissertation’s selected period. John Scott’s criteria for evaluating documents
were used to argue for the authenticity, credibility, representativeness, and meaning of the 
documents used. The chapter also drew from the work of two games scholars, Graeme 
Kirkpatrick and Michael Z. Newman, who argue for the role that print media (specifically, 
99
magazines) play in the development of communities, and more importantly in contributing to the
processes of negotiation by which the meanings of media are established. As advertisements 
comprise the majority of the material addressed in the following chapter, the commentary from 
DuGay et al. on advertising’s role in engaging with meaning and communicating aspirational 
values through representation was useful as an interpretive tool.
The following chapter will analyze a selection of print media from 1997–2007 to identify 
the changing discourses and representation of the keitai denwa through this time. Comprising 
largely of advertisements, the material is divided into four distinct periods where the discourses 
of keitai reflect the changing meaning and expectations of mobile media technologies. 1997 and 
1998 show significant experimentation with the form factors that mobile media can take, and 
PHS devices are strongly represented during this time period. NTT DoCoMo is also engaged in a
long-running advertising campaign that emphasizes the role its communications infrastructures 
play in supporting the logistics of everyday life. 1999–2001 is marked most prominently by the 
release of DoCoMo’s i-mode service, and while there were still some experiments in different 
form factors or broader functionality, the keitai’s shape and general expectations seemed to have 
solidified in this time. Print media during this period offered in-depth information on keitai 
features and i-mode websites geared towards non-technical users who nonetheless were 
interested in exploring this new technology. 2002 through 2004 encompass the release of 3G 
mobile service, but aside from this significant technical upgrade there is little of note in terms of 
major developments in keitai forms or expected uses; most of the promoted features seem to be 
small, incremental upgrades on specific carriers or models. DoCoMo launches a new 
advertisement campaign during these years which will carry on at least through the end of this 
dissertation period; the campaign focuses on the role that keitai (DoCoMo’s handsets and 
100
service, in particular) play in bringing together multiple generations of the same family who 
seemed to have difficulty connecting before their keitai use gave them something in common. 
And finally, 2005–2007 show the keitai as a relatively established technology, with significant 
small feature variations to appeal to a wide variety of consumers, campaigns promoting proper 
etiquette when using keitai in public, and simplified handset designs for older users who may 
want the convenience and connectivity of a keitai denwa but are not interested in the myriad 
other affordances. In this period we also see the emergence of a few early smartphones 
represented in the selected media. Taken as a whole, this period shows a progression from 
relatively unsettled early years when a variety of potential expectations and practices were still 
promoted, to the later period where the negotiations as to the meaning of keitai in Japanese 
society had been largely settled.
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Chapter 4.
Emergence: Discourses of Keitai, 1997–2007
 Analysis (Discourses of Keitai) 
1997–1998: Competing Standards and Ideas of “Mobile Media”
The 1990s were filled with a diversity of mobile media technologies, all of which had 
different approaches to the concept of ‘mobility’. U.S. Robotics released the first model in its 
Palm Pilot (initially, just called “Pilot”) series of personal digital assistants (PDA) in 1996, a 
device that promised to remediate a number of analog office technologies including the 
calculator, calendar, and the beloved Rolodex. Its mobile form factor—and the much-touted 
feature of being able read and compose emails on the device and sync them with one’s computer 
when they returned to the office—was part of the growing emphasis on mobile technologies 
extending both the physical and temporal range of ‘the office’, as discussed by Kakihara and 
Sørensen in their exploration of the mobility of labor with new information and communications 
technologies.188
This period, represented through the documentary source material, is characterized by a 
significant diversity of mobile media form factors. Of particular note are the prominent 
advertisements for convergent phones with PDA-like features such as large LCD screens with 
touch or pen input. The Toshiba Genio (fig. 4.1) offered a number of business applications in its 
PDA form factor, including e-mail, an address book, a calendar, and note taking function 
(including handwritten notes). In addition, it PHS connectivity allowed users to make phone 
calls, send faxes, and even browse the Internet wirelessly (with a service plan from a dial-up 
provider.) The Panasonic Pinocchio (fig. 4.2) advertises similar functionality, also pointing out 
188. Kakihara and Sørensen, “Mobility.”
102
that the device can be used in a multitasking manner, allowing users to check their schedule or 
take notes while in the middle of a phone call.
Figure 4.1: Toshiba Genio Figure 4.2: Panasonic Pinocchio 
(advertisement), Dime, June 19, 1997, (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, 
60. Feb. 28, 1997, 11.
Both of these ads emphasize the intended business uses of these devices, but the 
Pinocchio in particular is presented as “really, the office that can fit in your pocket.” Both 
devices are not described explicitly as mobile phones, but as “personal communicators” or 
“pocket communicators” that include mobile phone (PHS denwa) functionality among their other
features. These two devices offer an excellent example of mobile media that was not yet 
subordinated to the form and functionality of the mobile phone.
The form factors of the actual keitai and PHS handsets at the time were barely 
indistinguishable from the handset to a cordless home phone system—they tended to a familiar 
bar shape, with a three or four-line LCD display and a familiar 12-key dial pad (figs. 4.3,4.4).
103
Figure 4.3: Toshiba, “Toshiba no Keitai” Figure 4.4: Feature of various PHS 
(advertisement), Dime, June 19, 1997, handset models, Dime, June 19. 1997, 
28. 107.
Especially in 1997, the mobile phones (and PHS models in particular) emphasized the feature 
that would allow them to be used for data transmission when attached to a computer. While many
of the bar-style phones would simply connect to a laptop with a special cable, some designs 
integrated a PCMCIA/PC-Card (a popular standard for attaching peripherals to laptop 
computers) connector with the phone itself, as can be seen on the rightmost model in fig. 4.4. A 
sponsored advertisement for Toshiba’s Data Carrots PHS almost emphasizes its data transmission
features (sending faxes, networking, Internet browsing) more than its traditional phone 
functionality (fig. 4.5).
The Kyocera DataScope DS-320 PHS handset (fig. 4.6) takes the kitchen-sink approach 
to many of the above features and functionalities—it provides PDA-like information 
management functionality, mobile email, a physical keypad, a PCMCIA card interface for use as 
a laptop modem, and PHS phone functionality. Again, the actual phone aspect is listed as just 
104
one of the device’s many features, and the advertising copy emphasizes the mobile mail viewer 
most prominently with a photograph of a couple in a rowboat, presumably on a date, though the 
man is clearly preoccupied with the DataScope in his hands as the woman does the rowing. 
“Mail, anywhere” reads the top caption, while the bottom states, “Your easy mail viewer.”
As an interesting example of the diversity of mobile media in 1997, this year represents 
the only time that the pager would be featured in any prominent fashion (with the exception of a 
single advertisement in the Yomiuri Shinbun in 1999). A combination pager/PDA device is 
featured on the cover of the June 19 issue of Dime (fig. 4.7) and is given a brief overview of its 
features in the magazine’s shopping section. A two-page spread from NTT DoCoMo (fig. 4.8) 
also advertises a pager with the ability to receive short news clips and email, with the 
advertisement showing a businessman in various amusement park-like rides, with the captions 
“Even though I look like this, I’m still getting news/receiving email.”
Figure 4.5: Toshiba Data Carrots PHS handset overview. Dime, June 19, 1997, 66–7.
105
Figure 4.6: Kyocera, “Dokodemo mēru,” (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, December 5, 
1997, 104–5.
Figure 4.7: Cover of Dime, June 19, 
1997.
106
Figure 4.8: NTT DoCoMo, “Kou mietemo, denshi mēru jushinshiteiru” (advertisement), Dime,
June 19, 1997, 88–9.
Advertisements for NTT and NTT DoCoMo services appear in almost every issue of 
Shūkan Asahi used in this dissertation, and the location and format of their advertisements says 
something about the company’s prominence—or, if nothing else, its advertising budget. The 
majority of Shūkan Asahi’s pages are printed in black and white, on newsprint-like paper, with 
the exception of a few pages immediately adjacent to the front and back covers, and a 4 or 6 page
spread at the center of the magazine which are in full-color, on glossy thick stock. While some of
the color pages at the beginning of an issue are sometimes devoted to travel articles which 
feature color photography, most of the external pages are for advertising high-value products or 
services: luxury watches cars, cigarettes, domestic whisky, or Japan Airlines. The center color 
section and back pages are also for advertising, though for less ‘flashy’ products such as various 
medicines, book releases, and real estate or home renovation services. NTT and NTT DoCoMo 
ads are always two pages and in full color, and were generally in the central color spread on most
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Shūkan Asahi issues through 2001, after which they would sometimes appear in the color pages 
at the front of the issue, but never at the back. Few other ICT companies ran full-color ads in the 
Shūkan Asahi, and none of them did two page spreads with the frequency of NTT.
With the exception of the pager featured in fig. 4.8, most NTT advertisements in the 
initial years didn’t so much advertise products or services as they contributed to producing 
narratives about NTT and its role in Japanese society. Two early advertisements in Shūkan Asahi 
in 1997 focused on the company’s role as facilitator of the new information age, with all of the 
utopian enthusiasm that surrounded discourses about the Internet in the late 1990s. One 
advertisement proclaims that “the network becomes a gigantic library” (fig. 4.9) and describes 
how the new digital revolution represents the same sort of paradigm shift as the emergence of 
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press (facilitated, of course, by NTT’s communications 
infrastructure).
Another advertisement (fig. 4.10) draws on Marshall McLuhan’s oft-cited metaphor of 
the global village that was frequently deployed in the early years of the Internet. Here, the 
advertisement speaks in broad strokes about NTT’s collaboration with companies in Silicon 
Valley and with Stanford University on broad research initiatives centered around the emerging 
potential of global communications. The ad functions less as a means of promoting a product or 
service than it does to frame NTT’s role in the new information age. And while McLuhan 
enjoyed some small amount of popular celebrity in the 1960s, it’s somewhat impressive that one 
of his metaphors would be deployed in a popular news magazine in Japan in the 1990s—clearly 
with the assumption that the concept of the “global village” might be familiar to some readers.
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Figure 4.9: NTT, “The network becomes a gigantic library” (advertisement), Shūkan 
Asahi, February 14, 1997, 80–1.
Figure 4.10: NTT, “Global village” (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 21, 1997, 26–
7.
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Beyond the early months of 1997, there was a shift in the focus of NTT advertisements: 
while NTT ads continued to appear in nearly each weekly issue of Shūkan Asahi, ads for the 
larger NTT corporation (as shown above), were replaced with ads promoting the DoCoMo 
mobile division instead. The DoCoMo ads relied on less dramatic and grandiose imagery than 
the Gutenberg revolution or the global village, but they also eschewed the promotion of 
consumer products or services in favor of showing the many vital roles that DoCoMo services 
and infrastructure can play in society. One advertisement discusses the use of DoCoMo satellite 
phone services in relaying data used by scientists in monitoring volcanic and earthquake activity 
to predict future eruptions (fig. 4.11). Another features the role of DoCoMo satellite phone 
networks in transmitting video and other data to ornithologists studying albatross colonies in 
remote locations (fig. 4.12). The aim of the advertisements is clear: NTT DoCoMo infrastructure 
is vital to research in the natural sciences.
Figure 4.11: NTT DoCoMo satellite phone network used in volcano monitoring 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, December 05, 1997, 144–5.
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Figure 4.12: NTT DoCoMo, “Satellite phones solve the mystery? The little-known 
ecology of the albatross,” Shūkan Asahi, March 06, 1998, 122–3.
Through the mid-2000s, many DoCoMo advertisements also offered more technical 
announcements of the applied research being conducted by DoCoMo into mobile technologies. 
Figure 4.13 announces DoCoMo’s research into the “next [third] generation keitai denwa” with 
details on the development of wide-band CDMA cellular networks. This development is 
characterized by the question of what sort of functionality users might want from their phones 
(beyond voice calls), with various multimedia applications being a driving force behind the 
development of new video transmission codecs and other features. Another advertisement 
focuses specifically on the MPEG-4 video codec and its use in delivering smooth video 
transmissions over data networks (fig. 4.14)—a technical topic one would expect to find in a 
more specialized hobbyist magazine instead of a general-audience weekly publication.
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Figure 4.13: NTT DoCoMo next-generation cellphone development (advertisement), 
Shūkan Asahi, March 07, 1997, 102–3.
Figure 4.14: NTT DoCoMo’s work with the MPEG-4 video codec (advertisement), 
Shūkan Asahi, December 19, 1997, 146–7.
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NTT played a significant role in facilitating the communications infrastructure for the 
1998 Winter Olympic Games, hosted in Japan’s Nagano prefecture. A February 1998 DoCoMo 
ad describes DoCoMo’s role in providing network services both for internal organizational 
communications as well as assisting both domestic and international news media in their news 
broadcasts (fig. 4.15). In the following issue, a NTT ad shows the “world’s smallest wristwatch 
PHS” unit as a device that looks like something “seen in a science-fiction movie watched as a 
child” but in reality is being used to support communications during the Olympic games. It’s 
unclear whether this device is available to the general consumer public, but the advertisement 
goes into significant detail about the technical specifications for this particular device, including 
the use of long-life lithium-ion batteries and the engineering of the internal antenna (fig. 4.16). 
Both advertisements contribute to the narrative of NTT’s services as part of the invisible 
infrastructure that makes all of the hi-tech aspects of everyday life possible.
Figure 4.15: NTT DoCoMo facilitating network logistics for the 1998 Nagano Olympics
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 06, 1998, 146–7.
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Figure 4.16: Wristwatch-style PHS phone from NTT (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, 
February 13, 1998, 132–3.
Of particular note in this time period is the emergence of a discourse that contributes to 
the general cultural understanding of how the keitai denwa is to be used in public. Beginning at 
least with the Kyocera DataScope advertisement in the December 5, 1997 issue of Shūkan Asahi 
(fig. ), an icon of a stylized heart circling a mobile phone handset appears in every successive 
advertisement for specific mobile phones and services, along with the short phrase “bring/carry 
[keitai] your manners with you” (“manā mo isshoni keitai shimashō,” fig. 4.17). This campaign 
was and is part of the ongoing negotiation of the role of the keitai in public spaces that emerged 
in the mid-1990s, with the frequent annoyance of people taking calls in public (and on trains in 
particular) as well as the interruption of ringtones that announced incoming calls or messages.189 
Vibrating motors that signaled an incoming call or message allowed phones to be put into “silent 
189. Mizuko Itō and Daisuke Okabe, “Keitai in Public Transportation,” in Personal, Portable, 
Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, ed. Mizuko Itō, Misa Matsuda, and Daisuke Okabe 
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 212–3.
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mode” (in Japanese, manā mōdo or “manner mode”), combined with the rise of SMS and email 
messaging in the late 1990s and awareness campaigns instituted by train companies eventually 
led to a change in social norms that framed voice communication in public spaces as 
inconsiderate, while text-based communication was and continues to be generally acceptable.190
Figure 4.17: “Bring/carry your manners 
with you.”
1999–2001: i-mode Introduction and Popularization
Two notable changes occurred during these three years. First, despite its initial popularity 
(especially for its data transmission features as emphasized in above advertisements, which made
it popular among business users), PHS use declined significantly, while subscribers to various 
keitai services increased. A Yomiuri Shinbun article from February 6 cites a report from the 
Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications that stated the total number of subscribers to PHS and
keitai services increased by 667,000 by the end of January 1999, for a total of 45,645,000 
nationwide subscribers. However, the breakdown tells a slightly different story: while keitai 
services added an additional 790,000 subscribers for a nationwide total of 39,788,000 in January,
PHS subscriptions actually declined by 123,000, to a total of 5,857,000. The report states that 
this was the 16 consecutive month of decline among PHS subscribers.191 Another article in the 
Yomiuri a month later, on March 6th, cites a follow-up report from the MPT showing that the 
total number of nationwide keitai subscribers had surpassed 40 million. PHS subscriptions 
190. Itō and Okabe, 207.
191. “Keitai・PHS fukyūritsu 36% (携帯・PHS 普及率 36％),” Yomiuri Shinbun, February 6, 1999, 
Yomiuri Shinbun Shukusatsuban.
115
continued to decline for a 17 consecutive month to 5,783,000 subscribers, down from the peak of
7,680,000 in September, 1997.192
The second, and potentially more notable change, came with the release of NTT 
DoCoMo’s i-mode content platform. Launching in February 1999, i-mode allowed users to 
subscribe to various types of content, such as news and weather reports; purchase tickets to 
events or pay bills; play games; and communicate with other users through e-mail services, all in
a way that was heavily curated to appeal to the average user who was likely not an experienced 
technophile. While existing phones offered the ability to browse the Internet—in the form in 
which it existed in the late 1990s—i-mode phones offered a more consciously-designed version 
of the Internet and its potential services that appealed to non-technophiles and in some ways 
offered services beyond what was available on the Internet itself. DoCoMo invested a significant 
amount of resources not only into the development of the platform but into its publication, as 
indicated by a two-page spread in the Yomiuri Shinbun advertising the various services provided 
by i-mode and featuring television actress Hirosue Ryoko, who would feature regularly in 
DoCoMo’s i-mode advertising (fig. 4.18). The advertisement’s tag line—“hanasu keitai kara, 
tsukau keitai he. ‘i-mōdo’ honjitsu tōjō” (“from a phone for talking, to a phone for using. i-mode 
arrives today”)—emphasizes the intended aim of the i-mode platform to extend the functionality 
of the keitai beyond mere talking.
The two-page spread occupied by the i-mode advertisement is somewhat unusual in that 
most advertisement for mobile carriers or handsets in the Yomiuri only occupied a single full 
page or a half-page, and advertisements for services or plans certainly did not take that amount 
of space in the paper. Following the i-mode announcement only two pages later, an 
192. “‘Keitai’ kanyū 4000 man dai toppa (「携帯」加入 4000 万台突破),” Yomiuri Shinbun, March 6, 
1999, Yomiuri Shinbun Shukusatsuban.
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advertisement for the Fujitsu F501i Hyper handset (prominently displaying its compatibility with
i-mode services) is only a single full page, by comparison (fig. 4.19).
Figure 4.18: NTT DoCoMo, “Hanasu keitai kara, tsukau keitai he. ‘i-mōdo’ honjitsu tōjō” 
(advertisement), Yomiuri Shinbun, February 22, 1999, 20–1.
While in hindsight it is tempting to give greater prominence to i-mode advertisements and
news, given its role in the popularization of the keitai denwa, it is also important to note the 
continuing release and promotion of other mobile devices and services in this time before i-mode
and similar content platforms became the dominant model. At the same time of the i-mode 
launch, an article in the “Multimedia” section of the Yomiuri Shinbun covered the Tegacky, a 
mobile device developed by Toshiba that was billed as a “telephone that does not make calls.” 
More specifically, PHS carrier DDI Pocket observed that the exchange of mail messages was 
starting to account for close to half of the communications between users, and decided to launch 
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a device dedicated solely to the sending of messages.193 A little larger than a pager, Tegacky 
featured a LCD touch screen that allowed users to write messages by hand using a stylus and 
then send them to others. Despite the article’s report of moderately quick sales, it’s not hard to 
see how such a device would have a difficult time achieving popular adoption—the novel 
messaging system would of course be accessible only to other users of the same device, and its 
use of the PHS standard as subscribers continued to decline meant that the device would 
unfortunately hold limited future potential.
Figure 4.19: Fujitsu F501i Hyper i-
mode handset (advertisement), 
Yomiuri Shinbun, February 22, 1999, 
23.
An IDO and DDI Cellular advertisement in the Yomiuri a week earlier announced the 
carriers’ upcoming transition to the digital cdmaOne standard (fig. 4.20); while many carriers 
(including DoCoMo) offered both PHS and cellular services to take advantage of the established 
PHS user base while at the same time expanding into newer technologies, the waning popularity 
193. “Kigaru Ni Mēru ‘Moji Dake Denwa’ (気軽にメール「文字だけ電話」),” Yomiuri Shinbun, March 
31, 1999, sec. Multimedia, Yomiuri Shinbun Shukusatsuban.
118
of PHS was clear. Despite the decline in the number of subscribers, however, PHS still held an 
important role in the mobile ecosystem through its data transmission capabilities, which at this 
time had become an established component of PHS service. A DoCoMo advertisement in a 
February 1999 issue of Shūkan Asahi features the food company Kagome (known for its tomato 
and other fruit juices) and its adoption of the PHS system for its internal phone networks, 
allowing receptionists to route calls to employees even if they were physically not at their desks. 
In addition, employees making sales trips are able to use email and PHS data transmission to 
look up information for potential customers as though they were in the company office 
(fig. 4.21).
Figure 4.20: IDO and DDI Cellular 
announcement of upcoming cdmaOne service 
(advertisement), Yomiuri Shinbun, March 24, 
1999, 16.
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Figure 4.21: NTT DoCoMo ad featuring the food company Kagome, which used a PHS 
system for internal communications and to connect traveling sales representatives 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 05, 1999, 58–9.
Through 1999, advertisements indicate continuing experiments in both the form that 
mobile media could take, as well as the general functionality that a mobile phone could provide. 
A Panasonic advertisement in a March 1999 issue of the Yomiuri for the Digital Mova P207 
Hyper phone handset promotes the phone’s voice operation for dialing and other functionality 
using a picture of a stereotypical genie emerging from a lamp to say “Master, issue your 
command by voice instead of [using] buttons” (fig. 4.22).
Some manufacturers recognized that the features that were becoming associated 
with keitai and PHS handsets—most notably, email service—appealed to many customers who 
may not yet have or be interested in fully adopting the keitai technology. An advertisement for a 
Sony telephone/answering machine model attempts to bridge this gap by bringing email service 
to a more familiar domestic technology (fig. 4.23). The SPP-E777 series of answering machines 
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works in conjunction with a KDDI email service subscription (“Alpha Email”) to allow 
consumers to read and compose emails on the answering machine base station as well as the 
wireless handset. The advertisement notes the wide range of compatibility with other devices—
mail can be exchanged with both computers and keitai or PHS handsets—and allows connecting 
laptop computers for data transmission use as well. The domestic focus of this advertisement is 
clear from the ad composition: a woman relaxes on a couch with a glass of juice, holding the 
wireless handset. A vacuum cleaner, the only other part of the home featured, rests against the 
couch—she’s clearly taking a break from cleaning. The tagline reads, “Mama’s IT revolution 
begins with the telephone” (mama no IT kakumei wa, denwa kara hajimaru). The vacuum 
cleaner as well as the use of “mama” (sometimes a form of address to one’s mother, but also as a 
generic synonym for a housewife) leave no question as to the intended audience for this 
particular device and service.
Figure 4.22: Panasonic, “Goshujin-
sama, botan no kawari ni boisu de go-
meirei wo” (advertisement), Yomiuri 
Shinbun, March 9, 1999, 36.
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Figure 4.23: KDDI, Sony SPP-E777 answering machine unit with KDDI α-Email 
service (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, December 29, 2000, 18–9.
A two-page spread in the Yomiuri advertising a variety of devices from electronics 
manufacturer Sharp (fig. 4.24) is possibly the best illustration of the diversity of mobile and 
semi-mobile devices at the time, and plurality of usage expectations that influenced the 
development of different form factors and features. A lineup of people in different roles or 
professions (a young boy in soccer club, a school-aged girl, parents, older people, a white-collar 
worker, a chef) are all shown holding placards stating what they want to use email services for, 
and on what kind of devices: “I want to be able to get in touch with my mom by [e]mail!”, “I 
want to send photos and mail!”, “I want to read mail and receive faxes on the same device!” The 
bottom of the advertisement features a wide range of devices in response to each of these needs, 
from keitai, to a cordless home phone with a large screen featuring all-in-one email, Internet, and
fax viewing, to entries in Sharp’s Zaurus line of PDAs. The ad’s tagline, “Email culture for each 
person” (“hitori hitori ni ‘mēru bunka’ wo”) and the focus on a range of different devices (even if
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some of them have a significant overlap in their features) stands in contrast to the convergent 
trajectory that the keitai would begin to take with the collapse of many of these individual 
features into a relatively standardized form factor and usage practices.
Figure 4.24: Sharp, “Email culture for each person,” (advertisement), Yomiuri Shinbun, 
February 21, 1999, 20–1.
This turning point around the millennium also marks the last time that PDAs appear in 
advertising promotions. The convergence of PDA and PHS handsets in devices featured in 1997 
and 1998 was almost absent in the materials reviewed covering 1999–2001; non-phone devices 
were generally standalone PDAs with no built-in wireless connectivity features, such as the 
various Sharp Zaurus models in Figure and the Palm OS-based Handspring Visor, which 
appeared in a single ad in the Shūkan Asahi and is notable for being one of the few mobile 
devices in any of these documents that was not made in Japan (fig. 4.25). PDAs will occasionally
appear in device reviews in specialist magazines, but for the general audiences of publications 
like Shūkan Asahi, the keitai has become the primary form of mobile media promoted in those 
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issues. The shift is likely due to the growing set of features provided by keitai handsets: 
PDA/phone hybrids emphasized their mobile office features such as email access and storage of 
contacts, both of which had become standard features in keitai services. While the ability to 
access the Internet that most PHS-based PDA handsets promoted seems at first to be a major 
feature, given the development of the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s—and especially 
its adoption within Japan—the promise of Internet access may have been less of an essential 
feature, especially with the release of i-mode and other mobile-specific content platforms in 
1999. Fax remained an essential business communication tool—and continued to be so, even 
beyond the 2000s—but it’s possible the actual ability to send faxes on the go wasn’t an essential 
feature of the mobile office.
Figure 4.25: Handspring Visor 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, 
March 9, 2001, 96.
While i-mode received significant promotion in the Yomiuri at the time of its release, it is 
interesting to note that the coverage in the Shūkan Asahi generally did not focus on the i-mode 
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service at all. DoCoMo advertisements continued to emphasize the role that NTT played in the 
development and management of public services and infrastructure, including the use of 
DoCoMo networks to allow first responders to transmit disaster images back to the dispatch 
offices (fig. 4.26)and facilitating emergency communications services following earthquakes or 
other natural disasters (fig. 4.27). While many of DoCoMo’s advertisements contribute to its 
image of helping to support and manage vital social communications infrastructures, a smaller 
number of advertisements also feature the role its technologies and services play in the support 
of business logistics. As with the previous ad detailing the Kagome company’s integration of 
PHS technology in its offices, another DoCoMo ad features the fried croquette chain Korochan 
and the company’s use of the i-mode service to coordinate ingredient orders from wholesalers 
and collect sales and other data more efficiently from individual shops (fig. 4.28).
Figure 4.26: NTT DoCoMo, uploading images of a disaster scene to the fire department
dispatch office (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 9, 2001, 94–5.
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Figure 4.27: NTT DoCoMo, mobile communications base station established in 
Yamanashi Prefecture (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 23, 2001, 18–9.
Figure 4.28: NTT DoCoMo, Korochan company’s use of i-mode in business 
operations (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, December 14, 2001, 18–9.
126
Though general consumer magazines focusing on popular trends and technology such as 
Dime had been covering keitai models and features for some time, the growing popularity of 
keitai denwa in general and the i-mode service in particular spurred the publication of magazines
and mooks specifically dedicated to this growing techno-social phenomena. I-mode Jōhō Saito 
1200 (i-mode Information Site 1200) is one example of this genre, a mook aimed at a general 
and non-technical audience that provides reviews and information about specific phone models 
and features and, as the title implies, capsule reviews of 1200 i-mode websites categorized by 
different topics such as local area information, shopping, entertainment, etc. Part of Softbank 
Publishing’s Keitai Best series, which covers keitai in general, i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200 is 
specifically concerned with i-mode compatible devices from DoCoMo and services on the i-
mode platform. I-mode spokesmodel Hirosue Ryoko is featured prominently on the cover of 
vol. 3 (fig. 4.29) and in the handset review/buying guide feature at the start of the magazine, 
implying a connection between the magazine and NTT DoCoMo’s services for which Hirosue 
regularly features in i-mode ads (fig. 4.30).
Figure 4.29: Cover, i-mode Jōhō 
Saito 1200, vol. 3, January 2001.
127
Figure 4.30: “i-mode keitai buying guide”, i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200, vol. 3, January 2001, 12–3.
Despite the deep focus on this technological device, the publication is aimed at general 
audiences, rather than enthusiasts who may already be familiar with the in-depth operation of 
keitai and other mobile devices. The buying guide at the start of the issue explains the differences
between different model tiers, and the reviews of the individual handsets offer detailed 
descriptions of the handset’s physical affordances such as the various keypad buttons as well as 
walkthroughs of basic operations such as adding contact information entries to the address book 
(fig. 4.31). Reviews of phone handsets also highlight manufacturer-specific features, such as the 
scrolling jog dial and Memory Stick add-on slot in the Sony SO502iWM Hyper (fig. 4.32).
The reviews for the titular 1200 websites take the form of small capsule reviews 
organized into categories such as i-mode/keitai specific information, shopping, travel, meetups, 
etc. The reviews provide short write-ups of the sites and include the URL, an image of the site’s 
homepage, and a number of icons indicating the various content or features offered by the site 
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(see fig. 4.33). Similar to the World Wide Web or Internet ‘yellow pages’ books and CD 
collections that appeared in the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s, these reviews 
were useful in guiding users to web content in an era where deep web search such as that 
provided by Google was still in its infancy, and most of the resources for discovering websites 
were directories such as Yahoo.
Figure 4.31: Feature overview and walkthrough of the NEC N502it handset, i-mode Jōhō 
Saito 1200, vol. 3, January 2001, 20–1.
129
Figure 4.32: Model-specific features of the Sony SO502iWM, i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200, vol. 3, 
January 2001, 14–5.
Figure 4.33: A selection of websites offering information on specific activities or resources 
within a city or region, i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200, vol. 3, January 2001, 68–9.
130
2002–2004: Standardization and Convergence
From 1997 through 2001, the keitai denwa underwent a progression from a largely 
business-oriented device—either replicating traditional office affordances for the worker on the 
go, or used as a data interface for a laptop computer to enable email communications, connection
to company servers, etc.—to a general-purpose consumer device with considerable appeal to the 
general user, as indicated in magazines such as i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200. From 2002–2004, the 
transition was significantly less dramatic: the keitai was already becoming established as a 
popular technology, and the print sources from this time period reflects this in their focus on 
either reinforcing the popular (and pedestrian) nature of the keitai, or restating its role as a part of
vital contemporary technological infrastructure.
Of particular note is the changing nature of NTT DoCoMo’s advertising campaigns in the
Shūkan Asahi. While nearly every issue surveyed from 1997-2001 featured a prominent 
DoCoMo advertisement highlighting the company’s role in essential technological 
infrastructures, this campaign would fade out in early 2002 as DoCoMo’s approach changed. The
focus of DoCoMo advertisements in early 2002 also shifts from the emphasis on technological 
infrastructure—and technical details that may be somewhat beyond the knowledge or interest of 
the average reader—to showcasing new technologies that are more relevant to the individual. 
One advertisement promotes DoCoMo’s new FOMA (Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access) 
third-generation mobile service by highlighting its capacity for streaming live video. Using as its 
example an international preschool, the ad notes that the preschool has been streaming live 
footage of the classroom setting for parents to check on their children, but the service was 
initially only offered in a format that was only accessible from a desktop computer, which many 
of the parents did not own. By taking advantage of DoCoMo servers that process streamed video 
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into a format and resolution accessible through FOMA handsets, the preschool is now able to 
ensure that parents are able to participate in classroom observations using only their keitai (“Are 
you being a good child?,” fig. 4.34).
The higher bandwidth of the FOMA service is also emphasized in an advertisement for 
computer-guided tours of Tokyo’s Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, which rely on GPS systems
—and of course, the mobile data connection provided by a DoCoMo PCMCIA modem card 
(fig. 4.35). The 384 kbps data speeds that FOMA offers are significant upgrades from the 32 and 
64 kbps connectivity that was a major selling point of PHS handsets and mobile interfaces just a 
few years earlier.
Figure 4.34: NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA service allows the streaming of live video. Shūkan 
Asahi, February 22, 2002, 18–9.
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Figure 4.35: NTT DoCoMo, wireless computer-guided tours in the Shinjuku Gyoen 
using the FOMA network, Shūkan Asahi, February 8, 2002, 18–9.
By 2003, DoCoMo advertisements in the Shūkan Asahi would change entirely from the 
technological focus on network features to more consumer-facing applications and partnerships 
with other companies. The “Mobile Report” campaign is presented in an advertorial style and 
‘reports’ on the ways that mobile technologies—specifically, i-mode services—are being used by
different companies or organizations. In contrast to the previous focus on communications 
infrastructure in the previous long-running advertising campaign, here the focus is more on the 
consumer or private individual, where i-mode can be used to purchase movie or other event 
tickets through the Pia ticketing service (fig. 4.36) or used to search for and then locate books 
within the holdings at the Academy Hills professional library in the Roppongi Hills complex 
(fig. 4.37). These advertisements simultaneously promote the partner organizations NTT’s is 
featuring, as well as serve to advertise potentially new and unused features of the i-mode 
platform itself to consumers who may not yet be familiar with them. The shift in emphasis from 
133
the underlying infrastructure of everyday life to the individual experience of everyday life 
arguably presents a shift in NTT’s advertising focus, from what its services can do for society to 
what its services can do for the individual. This focus will continue in future DoCoMo 
advertisements, while the ones highlighting the industrial or public applications of NTT 
technologies are largely absent.
By the end of 2004, NTT would begin a new advertising campaign for DoCoMo services,
under the tagline “家♥族” (ie rabu [love] zoku, or something like “home, love, family”)194. The 
advertisements focus on several generations of a family, connecting through the use of their 
(DoCoMo) keitai. Fig. 4.38 features Teruko, ranked 8 worldwide in master’s swimming, and her 
granddaughter Yu, who was on the 8 place nationally-ranked tennis team as a high schooler. 
They joke about being united in taking 8 in their respective pursuits, and the advertisement 
emphasizes how each thinks the other is “cool” and their shared dislike of losing. In a small area 
towards the bottom, the ad shows the keitai models used by Teruko and Yu, and below that a 
small picture of some color options for the FOMA らくらくホン (rakuraku hon, or “easy 
phone”), a model with simplified features and operation advertised to senior citizens for whom 
the features of standard keitai models are presumed to be too complex. The family story and 
connections are prominently featured; the DoCoMo keitai which facilitates these connections sits
in the background as invisible infrastructure.
194. There’s a bit of a pun present in this tagline. The kanji character 家 (ie) by itself means house or 
home, and 族 (zoku) is a tribe, family, or group (for example, it is used to denote groups of elements in
the periodic table as well). The word 家族 (kazoku), minus the heart icon, refers to one’s immediate 
family. Separating the two kanji with the heart icon creates a different meaning when the characters 
are read individually, yet the reader will obviously grasp the meaning of the compound of both 
characters as well.
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Figure 4.36: NTT DoCoMo, using an i-mode phone to purchase movie tickets through the Pia 
ticketing agency, Shūkan Asahi, December 5, 2003, 106–7.
Figure 4.37: NTT DoCoMo, searching for and locating books in the Academy Hills 
library through i-mode search services, Shūkan Asahi, February 6, 2004, 95–6.
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Figure 4.38: NTT DoCoMo’s “Ie♥Zoku” advertising campaign, Shūkan Asahi, 
December 24, 2004,2–3.
This advertisement campaign continues on at least through 2007, and continues the shift 
in NTT DoCoMo’s advertising approach. From the early years of this time period, DoCoMo (and
the parent NTT corporation as well) conspicuously called attention to the communications 
infrastructure it had developed, framing its research and development efforts in terms of 
technologies that may not have any direct appeal or relevance to the consumer, but facilitate or 
contribute to society in general (managing communications for the Olympic games, enabling 
scientific research of remote places, supporting disaster response teams, etc.). Following the 
launch of i-mode, the keitai began to be seen as more than just an extension of a household 
appliance or office equipment—this had certainly previously been true for early adopters and the 
technologically-savvy, but the accessibility and appeal of the i-mode platform turned the keitai 
into a desirable accessory even as the technological infrastructure that made it possible 
proceeded to dematerialize. But so to does the keitai itself in “Ie♥Zoku” campaign, with its focus
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on family connections. The keitai (or the DoCoMo service, in any case) is still present in the way
it facilitates these connections, but the exact model or features are hardly important—the 
handsets used by the subjects of the advertisement are almost too small for an unfamiliar reader 
to identify specific features, and there’s nothing in the advertisement that suggests particular 
usage practices.
If DoCoMo’s advertisements have the keitai itself fading into the background, the 
coverage in hobbyist magazines continues to emphasize a dizzying array of handset models and 
features. The specialist mook i-mode Best mirrors the approach of i-mode Jōhō Saito 1200 in 
presenting in-depth coverage of the features of individual models and their distinguishing 
characteristics. In contrast to the business-focused orientation of keitai promotion in previous 
years, these ads are entirely from the perspective of features that appeal to the consumer, and are 
in general largely disconnected from the core functionality of a mobile communications device. 
The review of NEC’s FOMA N900i handset emphasizes the different color options available; its 
reduced size compared to previous models and the curved shape the handset takes when opened; 
an external monochrome “sub-display” screen that can provide time and signal information at a 
glance or display information on incoming calls or messages; the use of a miniSD card for 
storing data; and the availability of the famous Dragon Quest role-playing game as a built-in 
application (fig. 4.39). Mitsubishi’s FOMA D900i handset is also available in two color 
variations and includes other features such as an external color screen; a front-facing camera 
built into the hinge of the phone, using a Fujinon brand lens from Fujifilm with a 1.92 megapixel
sensor;195 the use of Sony’s Memory Stick PRO Duo flash memory format for data storage; and 
the ability to connect the phone to a television to view photos and videos (fig. 4.40).
195. The inclusion of sensors and lenses from established camera manufacturers continues to be a 
premium feature advertised in smartphones today.
137
Figure 4.39: Feature review of the NEC FOMA N900i, i-mode Best, June 2004, 14–5.
Figure 4.40: The Mitsubishi FOMA D900i, i-mode Best, June 2004, 20–1.
138
While the emphasis on these features wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in the context 
of promotional materials produced by handset manufacturers, the mook also provides detailed 
comparisons among 900i-series handsets (and with each model’s predecessor in the 505iS series)
that feature physical dimensions, storage available for saved contacts and i-mode apps, available 
ringtone options, and more. The comparisons also make note of the main screen type and number
of colors along with any sub-screens, hardware features unique to a particular model, and any 
pre-installed applications such as games or TV remote control interfaces that use the phone’s 
infrared sensor (fig. 4.41). In addition to these general feature overviews, i-mode Best also 
provides detailed walkthroughs of the different functions of the reviewed phones, such as email 
operation. Figure 4.42 illustrates a comparison of the email capabilities such as the storage for 
sent and received messages, the number of folders for sorting messages, the possibilities for the 
use of emoji or colored text, etc., as well as the additional features unique to each particular 
handset.
The intended general audience is reinforced in the choice of human models used 
throughout the articles in i-mode Best. In these reviews, two young women in business suits are 
shown interacting with the different phone models and portrayed as giving commentary on the 
easy-to-use features. The simple black suits with white blouses or undershirts call to mind the 
“recruit suit,” the austere and monochromatic outfits worn by college students and recent 
graduates as they undertake shūshoku katsudō (“job hunting,” shūkatsu for short).196 Shūkatsu 
generally begins in the spring when the Japanese academic year ends, and is marked by 
companies holding massive recruitment fairs which (hopefully) will lead to individual interviews
for aspiring applicants later in the fall. The nondescript, standardized recruit suit is usually worn 
196. Satoko Nakagawa, “Suiting the Times: The History and Future of Japan’s Recruitment Fashion,” 
Mainichi Daily News, June 25, 2019, 
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20190625/p2a/00m/0fe/008000c.
139
for the shūkatsu process and potentially in the first few months of employment (after which point
the new employee is expected to transition to more standardized business attire). The use of 
models with the signifying details of early adulthood in i-mode Best reinforces the mook’s 
intended general audience: after moving beyond the exclusively business connotations of its 
early years the keitai enjoyed overwhelming popularity in youth demographics. That the models 
are presented female can also be read in the context of general stereotypes of technology and 
gender (especially in early 2000s Japan), where more enthusiast or advanced users would be 
presumed to be male. The audience targeted by i-mode Best is clearly the technology novice who
nonetheless is a heavy keitai user and is interested in in-depth information that enhances 
everyday use.
Figure 4.41: Comparisons among different models of 900i-series i-mode keitai, i-mode Best, 
June 2004, 24–5.
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Figure 4.42: Email features of 900i-series phones, i-mode Best, June 2004, 28–9.
Popular trends magazine Nikkei Trendy features similar comparative coverage of features,
though it is not limited simply to i-mode phones. In the April 2004 issue, a feature entitled “Dai 3
sedai ga shuyaku ni naru! Keitai denwa jitsuryoku tesuto” (“The third generation takes the 
leading role! Keitai denwa proficiency test”) explores the third-generation mobile technology 
offerings from Japan’s three major carriers: DoCoMo’s FOMA, KDDI/au’s 1x WIN, and 
Vodaphone’s Vodaphone Global Standard (VGS). In addition to providing comparisons between 
the three services with regards to data speeds, plan details, and mail message sizes, the magazine 
also details new features that are major selling points of third-generation phones, such as the 
accuracy of “naviwalk” GPS navigation tools (an early predecessor of today’s Google or Apple 
Maps) or how phones with high-grade cameras stack up against a contemporary FujiFilm 
Finepix F420 digital camera with regards to color saturation, performance in low-light settings, 
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and macro photography (fig. 4.43)197. An article titled “Shuryū no katachi ni aete hantai ‘tanin to 
chigau’ ‘tsukaiyasui’ wo jitsugen” (“Going against mainstream forms by being ‘different from 
others’ and ‘easy-to-use’”) shows—if it wasn’t already clear—the extent to which the keitai has 
become normalized as an everyday fashion accessory. The article shows off a number of 
handsets notable not so much for their functions or features, but for their unconventional designs 
(fig. 4.44). The Kyocera W11K sports a glossy finish in red, white, or black that was inspired by 
automotive detailing, and its angular, beveled edges certainly provide a different shape than most
clamshell-style phones (though the article’s mention of the feeling of a peeled potato run under 
water as an inspiration for the shape certainly does lose a bit of the trendy appeal). Sony’s 
A5404S features a two-tone design intended to evoke the “high-quality” designs of consumer 
electronics in the 1970s and the hinge is designed to let the phone sit open on a desktop for 
hands-free movie watching or other content viewing. The A1402S features detachable faceplates 
in a number of metallic colors and flashy prints to allow the user to customize their phone 
beyond a limited choice in body colors. And the Sanyo Infobar is a striking candy bar-style 
design with glossy body colors and beveled buttons that resemble tiles for a tactile feel.198 While 
these are just a handful of models on KDDI’s au service, the attention paid to the aesthetic 
qualities of these particular handsets, as a means of distinguishing them from the ‘mainstream’ 
models, further reinforces the keitai’s role as a consumable product, when the distinguishing 
characteristics of purely superficial design elements begin to become as important—or more so
—than the functional utility of the devices.
197. “Dai 3 sedai ga shuyaku ni naru! Keitai denwa jitsuryoku tesuto (第３世代が主役になる！携帯電話
実力テスト),” Nikkei Trendy (日経トレンディ), April 2004.
198. “Shuryū no katachi ni aete hantai ‘tanin to chigau’ ‘tsuka日iy経asトui’レ wンo デjitィsugen (主流の形にあえて反対「他人と違う」「使いやすい」を実現),” Nikkei Trendy ( ), April 2004.
142
Figure 4.43: Comparison of GPS navigation features and camera quality among selected 3G
keitai models, Nikkei Trendy, April 2004, 32–3.
Figure 4.44: Keitai sporting unconventional designs “outside of the mainstream,” Nikkei 
Trendy, April 2004, 228–9.
143
Lest it seem that the keitai has entirely lost its roots as a business tool, a DoCoMo 
advertisement for the FOMA F880iES handset series offers a reminder of its use in the business 
world. A suited executive sits at his desk in his office high above the city, barking a command 
into his phone: “Okay, let’s do it” (fig. 4.45). The FOMA F880iES handset offers the ability to 
record and send voicemail responses to text messages, allowing the busy executive to remain 
“effective in the fast-paced business scene.” One of the advertisement’s taglines offers a pointed 
rebuttal to the design-forward handsets featured previously, stating “Watashi no keitai wa, otona 
no FOMA desu” (“My keitai is an adult’s FOMA [phone]”), not-so-subtly implying a difference 
from users who prioritize aesthetic qualities over basic functionality. Interestingly, a small detail 
in the ad notes that this model is part of the FOMA Rakuraku Phone line of easy-to-use devices 
marketed towards older users who desire a phone with more basic features; perhaps the executive
isn’t as on the cutting edge of the “fast-paced business scene” as the ad initially implies.
Figure 4.45: NTT DoCoMo, “My keitai is an adult’s FOMA [phone]” (advertisement), 
Shūkan Asahi, December 31, 2004, 18–9.
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2005–2007: Public Manners, Late Majority, and Early Smartphones
The trends in advertising and magazine coverage in the previous period (2002–2004) 
showed a continuing transition from the unsettled diversity of mobile media in the late 1990s 
towards much more standardized forms and usage practices. By 2005, the role that the keitai 
played in public life was relatively established, and the representations that appear in print media
were less about convincing consumers about the potential of this technology and more about the 
promotion of minor differences that exemplify advertising for consumer goods in a capitalist 
society. An article in the magazine Shūkan ASCII titled “Omoshiro keitai 10” (“10 Interesting 
Keitai”) profiles unique handsets from DoCoMo, au, and Vodaphone, but the features discussed 
aren’t related to the basic operation and functionality discussed in the mooks in the previous 
section (fig. 4.46). Instead, the devices are noted for additional features such as the inclusion of a
“full web browser” (able to access regular Internet sites instead of sites written for the i-mode 
service), built-in TV tuner, waterproof case, 3.2 megapixel camera, ability to read Microsoft 
Office documents, and “osaifu keitai” (“mobile wallet”) contactless payment functionality.199 The
basic features of a keitai denwa—making phone calls, sending messages, storing contact 
information—have been rendered invisible because they are, at this point, so unremarkable.
Given the everyday popularity of the keitai, it is to be expected that widespread cultural 
practices accompany the ubiquity of the device, not all of them positive. The “keitai manners” 
icon that accompanies every keitai ad was mentioned previously, but a 2005 DoCoMo ad in the 
Shūkan Asahi addresses what seems to be a significant social issue: people taking calls because 
they feel an obligation to the caller. A businessman in a movie theater replies that he has a client 
on the phone as a staff member asks him to turn off the power during the screening. A flight 
199. Shima Tooru, “Omoshiro keitai 10 (おもしろケータイ 10),” Shūkan ASCII (週刊アスキー), July 12, 
2005.
145
attendant asks a woman on an airplane seat to turn off her phone, and the woman replies, “But, 
my boyfriend…” And another businessman sitting in the reserved seats of a train (ostensibly 
reserved for the elderly, pregnant women, or people with mobility issues; keitai are supposed to 
be turned off by the reserved seats) cuts off a train attendant making the same request with “Just 
a little longer…” (fig. 4.47). The advertisement’s tagline is, “We want to be able to say, ‘I’m 
sorry, I can’t answer the phone right now’ on your behalf,” and DoCoMo offers to do this 
through prerecorded messages that inform the caller that the recipient is in a location where they 
cannot answer their phone or were requested to turn the power off. The advertisement notes that 
“it’s not enough to say ‘remember your manners’” and that DoCoMo should help make it easier 
to follow social conventions—a technological solution to a social problem, and one that implies 
some amount of pro-social consideration on the part of the telecommunications company.
Figure 4.46: Unique keitai features such as 
customizable external LED display, “osaifu 
keitai,” and an early smartphone with touchscreen 
and WiFi. Shūkan ASCII, July 12, 2005, 49.
146
While the semi-public service announcement about manners appears to be a one-off 
advertisement, in other issues of Shūkan Asahi, DoCoMo continues its previous “Ie♥Zoku” 
advertisement campaign with ongoing stories of younger generations connecting with their 
grandparents through mobile media (figs. 4.48 and 4.49). Of note in this series of advertisements 
is that the grandparents use various models of DoCoMo’s Rakuraku Phone lineup, which 
provides a simplified and safer keitai experience. An advertisement for the “Rakuraku Phone 
Simple” (Rakuraku Hon Shinpuru) features caricatures of older users proclaiming the model’s 
appealing features, such as the large screen that makes it easier to prevent mis-dialing numbers, 
the ability to block all calls from numbers other than close friends, and a high volume range to 
better hear a conversation with one’s grandchildren (fig.  4.50). The promotion of these particular
models and services—both in the straightforward Rakuraku Phone Simple ad as well as in the 
“Ie♥Zoku” campaign—further emphasizes the role that keitai came to occupy in the past decade 
as a commonplace facilitator of interpersonal communications. From the perspective of diffusion
of innovations theory, the audiences for these ads would likely fall into the later part of the “late 
majority” category of adoption, if not the “laggards.”200 However, for this group—which 
generally would not be the target audience for advanced consumer electronics—to be the focus 
of such sustained advertising campaigns again reinforces the transformation of the keitai into an 
everyday appliance.
200. Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1983), 246–7.
147
Figure 4.47: NTT DoCoMo, public manners
campaign (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, 
December 20, 2005, 12.
Figure 4.48: NTT DoCoMo, “I thought of things I want to ask my grandfather.” 
(advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 18, 2005, 18–9.
148
Figure 4.49: NTT DoCoMo, “Here, there is unforgettable scenery, and unforgettable 
flavors” (advertisement), Shūkan Asahi, February 24, 2006, 22–3.
Figure 4.50: DoCoMo’s 
Rakuraku Phone Simple, Shūkan
Asahi, February 10, 2006, 4.
By the mid-2000s, the keitai had been refined to a relatively stable artifact: its primary 
uses (email messaging, phone calling to a lesser extent, accessing content provided by platform 
149
services) were well established along with their attendant cultural practices (necessitating 
advertisements and carrier features encouraging specific modes of public etiquette regarding the 
use of keitai, among other things). The mid-2000s on, the overall form factor and expectations 
for its use had generally solidified, and new innovations took the form of secondary features 
(GPS navigation, contactless payment systems, integrated television tuners, ‘full’ web browsers, 
etc.) that furthered the convergent properties of the keitai (fig. 4.51).
Figure 4.51: Keitai featuring full 
web browsers, GPS navigation, TV 
tuners, and more. Shūkan ASCII, 
March 20, 2007, 41.
Many of these new features are ones that we recognize today as integral to the features 
offered by smartphones. Even as these new features were being explored, the keitai generally 
maintained the same familiar form factor, that of the typical mobile phone handset in clamshell, 
slide, or candy-bar styles. During the later part of this dissertation’s period, however, there began
to emerge other device form factors referred to as “smartphones” and which generally focused 
more on affordances usually associated with the personal computer such as WiFi, ‘full’ web 
browsing, and synchronization with desktop office suites or other programs. Some of these 
150
features had already appeared individually in different keitai models, but the smartphone form 
attempted to combine them with a new user interface beyond the standard 10-key touchpad, 
either by integrating something like a miniaturized QWERTY keyboard, or, more successfully, a 
touch screen. Figure shows the Motorola M1000 as an early example of this, emphasizing the 
phone’s wireless LAN (WiFi) capabilities as well as the ability to synchronize emails with 
Microsoft Outlook, a mainstay of business communications. An advertisement for the EMOBILE
carrier in Shūkan ASCII (fig. 4.52) features the Sharp EM-ONE, an early iteration of what is 
more recognizably a smartphone, though the advertising copy still refers to it as a keitai, or more 
specifically, “the keitai’s new keitai” (“keitai no shin keitai”). The EM-ONE runs the Windows 
Mobile 5 operating system and takes advantage of EMOBILE’s new high-speed data network 
offering a bandwidth of up to 3.6 megabits per second for an online experience close to that of a 
desktop computer. It also features the ability to edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents, and to
view PowerPoint presentations.
While the keitai would remain largely dominant into the second decade of the 
millennium, it is interesting to see the emergence in this time period of experiments in 
affordances and form factors that we associate with the smartphone today. Through the period of 
this dissertation, there have been experiments in other form factors—the PHS/PDA hybrids in the
late 1990s, bold attempts to rethink mobile communication as with the Tegacky—but overall the 
cordless telephone-inspired form emerged as the dominant one through this time period. When 
the iPhone was released in the United States in 2007 (and Japan in 2008), it was just one of many
competing smartphone approaches that were attempting to unseat the dominant mobile form 
factor.
Spring lineup of 36 new keitai models featuring full web browsers, GPS navigation, OneSeg television 
tuners, and more. Shūkan ASCII, March 20, 2007, 41.
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Figure 4.52: EMobile’s Sharp EM-
ONE, one of the first modern 
smartphones on a Japanese carrier, 
Shūkan ASCII, March 20, 2007, 22.
 Conclusion 
The snapshots offered by the sources in this chapter provide a time-lapse look into the 
changing representations of the keitai denwa—along with its meaning and intended uses—over 
this time period. In the mid- to late-1990s, ‘mobile media’ is shown to be a relatively fluid 
concept that is generally united around some core features meant to extend the affordances of the
personal computer. In addition to their primary functionality as mobile phones, the ability of 
keitai and PHS handsets to be used for data transmission to send and receive email and faxes 
from a laptop computer featured prominently in early advertisements. In addition, convergent 
PDA devices like the Toshiba Genio or Panasonic Pinocchio offered features that could cut the 
laptop computer out of the equation entirely, with the ability to send and receive email, send 
faxes, store contact details and even browse the Internet. In either case, the intended user was 
clearly the mobile businessman who needed access to the affordances of the office on the go.
152
Around the turn of the millennium, the representation of keitai underwent several shifts 
with regards to what features were being promoted, who the intended user was, and what 
practices were meant to be associated with the technology. This time period shows the 
transformation from a business tool to a convergent consumer device that not only absorbed the 
functions of a number of other discrete devices—camera, portable music player, wired telephone
—but also democratized some of the previously ‘business-only’ features such as email, 
transforming them into broader tools for everyday communication. The keitai was a device 
engaged in processes of remediation at a number of different levels, though in a much more 
compressed fashion than the original formulation of the concept as a means to think through new
media. The objects of the keitai’s remediation in some cases were barely a decade old (digital 
cameras, portable music players), and to some extent it was even engaged in a sort of ‘double 
remediation’ through absorbing or supplanting previous digital technologies (the PDA, email) 
that themselves replaced more analog media technologies (the Rolodex, the notepad, inter-office 
memo systems). Through these transformations and remediations, the keitai denwa also 
established itself in this time period as a stable discursive formation, setting the device apart 
from not only the fading PHS technology, but also other discrete or convergent media 
technologies that it was slowly replacing.
The following chapter will focus on 2007, the concluding year of the period discussed in 
this dissertation, to address one of the dissertation’s core assertions that to understand and build 
theoretical approaches concerning the contemporary (as of 2023) smartphone, it is essential to 
understand the history of the keitai and its role in establishing the meaning of mobile media. The 
chapter will discuss the release of Apple’s iPhone smartphone in 2007; while the device today 
has been instrumental in establishing the present paradigm of ‘smartphone as mobile media’ 
153
along with handsets using Google’s Android operating system, at its release the iPhone was a 
polished if relatively limited device that lacked many of the features that contributed to the 
keitai’s popularity in Japan. The keitai denwa was present in a number of discourses in America 
that saw the mobile phones of Japan as significantly more advanced than the handsets and carrier
services available at the time in the U.S., and also as emblematic of the techno-orientalist 
discourses that framed Japan as a nation that was technologically advanced in even most 
common aspects of society. The emergence of the iPhone functioned as a moment of rupture in 
these discourses, when some (eventually all, many years later) of the most visible or intriguing 
features of the keitai denwa became available to American audiences.
154
Chapter 5.
Closure: From i-mode to iPhone
 Introduction 
At the 2007 MacWorld exposition on January 9th, 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs 
introduced “three revolutionary products” that Apple had been developing for several years: “a 
widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet 
communications device.” 201 After a few suspenseful moments as Jobs teased the three products, 
he revealed that they were not three separate devices, but one: the iPhone, Apple’s first 
smartphone. Before highlighting the features of this new product, Jobs proclaimed that “today, 
Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”
Jobs’ well-known showmanship clearly plays a part in these hyperbolic claims of a 
“revolutionary,” “breakthrough” device that will “reinvent” the phone, and it would be inaccurate
to say that those claims had no influence on the public perception of the iPhone and its legacy. 
But they were also part of a very intentional process of image-making: Goggin notes that “the 
iPhone does not present itself as an adaptation: Apple professes to be utterly changing the mobile
—at least in its promotional literature,” an idea borne out by the representation of the device as 
such a dramatic break from past mobile phones.202 Jobs spoke to the present state of mobile 
phones—particularly, the fragmented smartphone market—in the US during his presentation, 
with emphasis on the affordances that made most contemporary smartphone models “not so 
smart” and which the iPhone was prepared to solve through its radical new interface and 
201. MacWorld Keynote, 2007, 1, http://archive.org/details/MacWorld-Keynote:25–3:00.
202. Gerard Goggin, “Adapting the Mobile Phone: The IPhone and Its Consumption,” Continuum: 
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23, no. 2 (April 2009): 233, 
https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310802710546.
155
design.203 Everything about the iPhone’s debut emphasizes its dramatic break with the material 
nature and functionality of the mobile phones as they were experienced in the United States in 
2007.
The iPhone may be a strange note to conclude this dissertation on. While it would 
eventually would go on to become wildly popular in the United States, outselling phones running
Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system in 2009204 and moving on to a back-and-forth 
battle with Android handset manufacturers (usually Samsung) to claim the title of most handset 
units sold throughout the second decade,205 the iPhone did not actually launch in Japan until 
2008.206 And despite Steve Jobs’s claims of the inadequacy of existing mobile devices, this 
revolutionary, breakthrough smartphone—or indeed, any smartphone, period—would not attain 
the same popularity in Japan until 2012, four years after its release in the country.207
While this dissertation is primarily concerned with the years from 1997 to 2007, the 
trends of keitai and smartphone continue to lead us to the present day, in which the keitai is 
viewed in the United States as a “failure” (and often conflated with the arguably more dismal 
experience of the feature phone in the U.S.) and the smartphone has become the dominant 
203. MacWorld Keynote, 3:28–6:00.
204. Prince McLean, “Canalys: IPhone Outsold All Windows Mobile Phones in Q2 2009,” AppleInsider 
(blog), August 21, 2009, 
https://appleinsider.com/articles/09/08/21/canalys_iphone_outsold_all_windows_mobile_phones_in_
q2_2009.
205. “Gartner Says Worldwide Smartphone Sales Declined 5% in Fourth Quarter of 2020,” Press Release,
Gartner, February 22, 2021, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-02-22-4q20-
smartphone-market-share-release.
206. Takashi Takebayashi, “Softbank and Apple to Bring IPhone 3G to Japan on July 11,” Press Release, 
Apple, July 9, 2008, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2008/06/09Softbank-and-Apple-to-Bring-
iPhone-3G-to-Japan-on-July-11/.
207. Sarah Radwanick, “In Japan, Smartphones Surpass Feature Phones among Newly Acquired Devices 
for First Time Ever,” Press Release, Comscore, Inc., April 12, 2012, 
https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press-Releases/2012/4/1-in-5-Mobile-Phone-Users-in-Japan-
Now-Owns-a-Smartphone.
156
paradigm of ‘mobile media’. In reality, the smartphone and keitai managed to coexist for some 
number of years—in fact, DoCoMo announced in 2019 that it will discontinue i-mode, along 
with its 3G FOMA service, at the end of March 2026.208 And despite steadily decreasing numbers
with the release of 3G keitai services, Softbank’s Y!Mobile PHS service finally ended in January
of 2021.209
This chapter will conclude the dissertation by addressing the release of the iPhone in 
2007 and its relationship to the keitai. The use of the iPhone as an anchoring device for this 
dissertation is not meant to imply a direct technological continuity between the keitai and the 
iPhone, nor is it intended to be an analysis of ‘the success of the iPhone’. Instead, the iPhone 
represents a moment of closure—not immediate, and not inevitable or fore-ordained, but as a 
point of rupture and discontinuity in established discourses of mobile media.
 “A Revolutionary Mobile Phone” 
During his MacWorld keynote speech, Steve Jobs repeated the phrase “an iPod, a phone, 
and an internet communicator” to draw attention to the iPhone’s convergence of the three 
discrete technologies (arguably its most compelling feature in its first year before the launch of 
the App Store). But these phrases also function genealogically, calling back to the technologies 
from which the iPhone inherited its meaning. The reference to three familiar technologies—the 
ubiquitous phone, Apple’s successful iPod portable media player, and the less-distinct-but-still-
imaginable portable communication device (likely most familiar to consumers as a sort of 
Internet-enabled PDA)—helped to shape expectations as to the possible functionality of the 
device. It was not, practically-speaking, all that different from numerous other convergent, 
208. “FOMA oyobi i-mōdo no sabisu shūryō ni tsuite (「FOMA」および「i モード」のサービス終了に
ついて),” Press Release, NTT Docomo, October 29, 2019, 
https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/info/news_release/2019/10/29_00.html.
209. “PHS 25-nen shi (PHS25 年史).”
157
transitional smartphones on the market, but this framing as the end result of three distinct, 
historical lineages situated the device for the audience in a way that was immediately familiar. 
This remediation of these familiar technologies, in a single device that promised to transcend the 
current miseries of the mobile media experience in the United States, was certainly appealing.
And yet Kim writes of the iPhone’s launch in Japan in 2008 that “an inspirational reaction
that was able to be called an ‘iPhone boom’ never happened in Japan, because the iPhone was 
neither fresh nor ‘smarter’ than keitai they had been carrying around for more than a decade.”210 
Writing in 2017 about Japan’s eventual acceptance of the iPhone, Byford states that “there was 
no infrared port, the most common way to exchange contact details IRL at the time….The Safari 
browser was literally too good—it couldn’t load Japanese C-HTML mobile websites or services 
like NTT Docomo’s i-mode portal, which essentially amounted to a fork of the entire web. The 
camera couldn’t focus on QR codes, which were frequently used to launch said websites. There 
was no Felica NFC for mobile payments. There was no TV tuner.”211 In other words, the iPhone 
had no appealing features for those who had taken up the keitai at some point over the past 
decade. How then do we reconcile this strange situation, of the more advanced mobile media 
eventually fading into obscurity, while the more-hyped but initially less functional device went 
on to become a global smash hit?
One explanation that is occasionally offered for the ‘failure’ of Japanese phones to sweep 
the globe is the notion of “Galapagos syndrome.” The term first appeared in business 
publications in the late 1990s to describe the intensely local specialization of Japanese 
information and computing technologies (as a result of the specific adaptations that had to be 
210. Kyounghwa Yonnie Kim, “The Everydayness of Mobile Media in Japan,” in Routledge Handbook of
New Media in Asia, ed. Larissa Hjorth and Olivia Khoo (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 446.
211. Sam Byford, “How the IPhone Won over Japan and Gave the World Emoji,” The Verge (blog), June 
29, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/29/15892640/iphone-anniversary-japan-success-emoji-
history.
158
made to tailor the foreign-developed devices to Japanese users, as discussed in Chapter 2), in an 
allusion to the varieties of finches discovered by Charles Darwin in the Galapagos archipelago. 
The Japanese mobile phone industry was one specific target of this epithet, as early mobile 
phones were incompatible with most international wireless carriers, and the phones themselves 
featured specific services through domestic carriers which were not present in developing mobile
networks outside of Japan.212 Especially in the context of the burgeoning popularity of American-
developed smartphones, the Japanese mobile phone is often portrayed as a failure on account of 
the inability to expand to global markets.213 However, not only does this sort of dismissal 
presume that Japanese carriers were interested in expanding their reach globally in the first place,
it also minimizes the incredible domestic popularity of the keitai, ignoring the decade or so in 
which Japanese mobile technology was leaps and bounds ahead of mobile development in the 
rest of the world. In addition, framing of media in terms of success or failure on some arbitrary 
market is a rubric that is entirely irrelevant to the genealogical project of attending to the 
development of historical discourses and drawing out the descents and emergences that trouble 
the linear arrangements of history. While the keitai denwa did not overtake the iPhone on the 
global stage, it may be best to not frame the two artifacts as if they were in competition at all. 
The iPhone emerged in response to the state of mobile media in the United States, and successive
releases would adopt more expected affordances of mobile media whose relevance or usefulness 
were first negotiated in the keitai denwa.
212. Atsushi Akiike and Sotaro Katsumata, “What Was the Galapagos Ke-Tai?,” Annals of Business 
Administrative Science 17, no. 5 (October 15, 2018): 227–40, https://doi.org/10.7880/abas.0180912a.
213. Hiroko Tabuchi, “Why Japan’s Smartphones Haven’t Gone Global,” The New York Times, July 19, 
2009, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/technology/20cell.html.
159
 Limitations and Avenues for Future Scholarship 
No work of scholarship can—nor should—go without acknowledging the fundamentally 
incomplete quality that is part of the nature of any academic endeavor. This dissertation not only 
includes areas whose depth or scope were compromised by contingency (as described somewhat 
in Chapter 3, the more prominent example) but also threads—perhaps I could call them “lines of 
flight” in accordance with a more Deleuzian approach that would seem appropriate—that reach 
out (rhizomatically?) to future directions of research or connections to existing bodies of 
scholarship. The scope of this dissertation encompassed a variety of subjects across a number of 
disciplinary fields, all of which would be well-suited to further investigation, especially with 
greater access to primary sources. One of the largest challenges—and a point to note, in keeping 
with the orientation of “Asia as method,” is that very few of these areas are not studied at all; on 
the contrary, there are likely large bodies of existing works in Japanese on all of these areas. Any 
claims of “insufficiency” in terms of a scholarly oeuvre should be taken to refer to work in the 
English language.
As I discussed in Chapter 3, much of the intended scope of this dissertation was limited 
by access to materials, resulting in a project that was ultimately, in my opinion, compromised as 
to the potential depth of its investigation. While I believe the arguments put forth in this 
dissertation remain valid despite the relatively small amount of sources consulted—as 
contemporary sources, they represent actually-existing discourses regardless of the actual 
number—a greater number or variety would allow for greater claims as to the representativeness 
of the materials, as well as provide a much more complete picture of the variety of discourses 
that may have been circulating at the time.
160
Chapter 2’s focus on the conditions of possibility that produced the keitai denwa offers a 
number of areas for continued scholarship. The history of the post-war telecommunications 
industry in Japan was presented in a somewhat brief form by necessity, but a more 
comprehensive English-language history of state involvement, infrastructure development, and 
private telecommunications carriers would not only address one of many lacunae in English 
scholarship on Japanese media, but would also then make possible other avenues of research that
could build off of that information. Figure 5.1 shows the development of the Japan’s 
telecommunications industry since the founding of the Nihon Telephone and Telegraph Public 
Corporation up to the contemporary landscape dominated by the NTT, KDDI, and Softbank 
Groups (along with recent entry the Rakuten Group). As the density of the image shows, there is 
significant opportunity for the investigation of the various mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures;
the area of “political economy of Japanese telecommunications” would seem to be a wide-open 
field.
While there is an existing and thorough body of scholarship concerning science and 
technology in Japan, much of the English language work is largely focused on the postwar 
development years and the “economic miracle” up through the 1980s; there is little work in 
English covering the 1990s or later. The growing interest in de-centering the American 
experience in global Internet studies has led to a greater focus on the Internet experiences of 
other nations, particularly ones for whom the Latin alphabet is not the primary form of written 
communication. The history of the Internet in Japan, as with many other countries, is incredibly 
rich, with the initial development and deployment being done by academic researchers who 
initially wanted to connect the computer networks of different Japanese universities, and there is 
a significant amount of historical development that is absent in English narratives.
161
Figure 5.1: “Important changes in the domestic telecommunications industry.” Ministry of Internal 
Affairs and Communications (Sōmushō), accessed August 20, 2023, 
https://www.soumu.go.jp/johotsusintokei/whitepaper/ja/r01/html/nd231720.html.
The documentary sources used in Chapter 4 are of course another possibility of continued
research, as I have discussed before. Access to archives in Japan that would carry a larger 
number of magazines, mooks, newspapers, and even books published on the phenomena of the 
keitai denwa (or mobile media more broadly) would make for a more sophisticated analysis of 
discourses and popular trends. Much of this material is difficult and/or costly to obtain within the
United States, and as mentioned before, there is the significant problem of discovery—of being 
able to even know what materials are available—that is all but impossible to address from a 
distance. In addition to access to these materials themselves, a sustained research trip to Japan 
could open up the possibilities of a more qualitative, anthropological dimension to any continued
work through conducting interviews, etc.
162
NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode platform is a significant background component to a number of 
the discussions throughout this dissertation, but it has not been the focus of any of them. There is
a significant amount of scholarship on i-mode, in English, in the fields of business and 
management where it is frequently discussed in terms of its successful growth and innovation in 
the monetization of content. Several of the developers of i-mode have also produced business 
memoirs of their involvement with the project—Mari Matsunaga chronicled her role as a non-
technical person suddenly recruited to develop i-mode’s content strategy,214, and Takeshi Natsuno
has written two widely translated books on the business development of the i-mode 
ecosystem215,216—which may contribute to its popularity among business discourses. Mark 
Steinberg’s The Platform Economy ostensibly addresses, per the book’s subtitle, “how Japan 
transformed the consumer Internet,” but it instead is more focused on discourses of platform 
economics and the commodification of content. The i-mode platform bears many similarities to 
the French Minitel system, as explored most notably in Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll’s 
Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (a book that this dissertation owes a considerable debt of 
inspiration to). The corporate (or state, in the initial case of Minitel) ownership of the network 
infrastructure and emphasis on third-party content is a similar strategy employed by both Minitel 
and i-mode.217 A project focusing on i-mode from a platform studies perspective—and not 
business or management theory—would be a significant addition to the growing body of 
214. Mari Matsunaga, The birth of i-mode: an analogue account of the mobile internet (Singapore: 
Chuang Yi Publishing, 2001).
215. Takeshi Natsuno, I-Mode Strategy (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003).
216. Takeshi Natsuno, The I-Mode Wireless Ecosystem, 2004, https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:101:1-
2015020910551.
217. Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, Platform Studies 8 
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017).
163
literature on alternative networks that managed to achieve incredible popularity outside of what 
has been traditionally considered “the Internet.”
Finally, the period of time covered in this dissertation intentionally leaves space for 
further work on mobile media in the 21st century. As discussed in this chapter, the iPhone’s 
release, despite being framed as a moment of revolution against existing standards of mobile 
media, did not lead to its immediate success; the iPhone first needed to adopt the developments 
the keitai had pioneered in the previous decade. But this period of adaptation when the 
smartphone paradigm represented by the iPhone and Android devices grew closer in 
functionality to what made the keitai so successful offers a fascinating possibility for continuing 
research from a media genealogy standpoint, to see what sorts of further emergences and 
descents occurred in the intervening years, and how “mobile media” as a discursive formation 
has been further solidified.
 Conclusion:  “Historically Minor” Platforms 
Benjamin Nicoll writes of the term “historically minor” as “a heuristic device…to gain a more 
nuanced perspective on what normally passes as failed, forgotten, or marginal.”218 The keitai 
denwa, at least in Japan, is hardly failed or marginal, but it is easy for it to appear so in the period
of global dominance of the California-designed smartphones. However, the keitai was many 
things—it was a domestic adaptation of information and communications technologies that, in a 
rare example, was developed in Japan according to the needs and expectations of Japanese users,
and not a foreign technology that had to be adapted—language and all—to domestic uses (or, as 
was more likely, domestic uses would have had to adapt to the foreign technology). And as seen 
in the previous chapter, the keitai was a fluid discursive formation that changed specifically over 
the course of a decade, in terms of who was expected to use it and what it was expected to be 
218. Nicoll, Minor Platforms in Videogame History, 17–8.
164
used for. At the same time, discourses of keitai set it distinctly apart from other mobile media of 
the day, and its convergent affordances that have re-appeared in the smartphones that are now 
used globally. The various forms, technologies, and intended uses of the keitai denwa were all 
part of the process of negotiation of the meaning of mobile media, which has arguably reached a 
point of closure and relative stability. But as Foucault stated,repeated from Chapter 1, “we 
should avoid thinking of emergence as the final term of a historical development”219—a 
genealogical approach to media history recognizes that there is always the potential for future 
emergences, or to uncover descents in the most seemingly-unique new media artifacts.
This dissertation’s investigation of a period of the keitai denwa’s history joins with other, 
similar approaches that have been concerned with alternative histories of the Internet and 
information and communications technologies. Histories of the mobile phone in general are 
arguably inseperable from Internet histories, and in the case of the keitai denwa this is especially 
true since the 1999 release of the i-mode platform, which arguably did more to popularize the 
Internet in Japan than the personal computer. Through the 2010s, the prevailing histories of the 
Internet have been monolithic in nature, and largely focused on the American experience, which 
has the consequence of locating the Internet in specifically American historical terms. Janet 
Abbate’s Inventing the Internet was one of the earliest and most extensive works of Internet 
historiography, but its general focus on the American academic, government, and military 
collaboration that produced the ARPANET, NSFNET, and eventually the privatized Internet 
backbone resulted in a history that overlooked many of the international experiences of the 
Internet outside of collaboration on common standards.220 The 2010s saw an increase in attention 
to both alternative histories of the Internet (exemplefied by, but not exclusive to, the 2017 launch
219. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 83.
220. Abbate, Inventing the Internet.
165
of the Internet Histories journal) as well as attention to alternative network structures that served 
similar social and cultural functions.
Benjamin Peters’ How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet 
Internet asks the question: given comparable technology and ambition, how is it that a project 
like the ARPANET (and the subsequent Internet) failed to develop in the Soviet Union around 
the same time?221 The title and the central premise illustrate the primary tension among many 
alternative histories of the Internet in they way they continue to frame—either simply through 
their titles or to a more significant degree through their conceptual hook—these computer 
networks as failed, incomplete, or inconsequential attempts to compete with or produce the 
Internet we know today. “The Internet” itself remains presented in a normative fashion in 
relation to which all other networks are conceputally subordinate. Julian Mailland and Kevin 
Driscoll’s Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, one of the formal inspirations of this project, focuses 
on the French state-run Minitel network from its inception in 1982 through its closure in 2012, 
and despite the implications of the title—Minitel wholly separate from the Internet—does focus 
on the practices and cultural meanings of the Minitel network on its own terms.222 Driscoll’s 
more recent work The Modem Web: A Prehistory of Social Media operates similarly in its 
investigation of pre-Internet dial-up bulletin board services, yet also positions itself in relation to 
the contemporary Internet as a “prehistory” of social media.223 While these studies all offer 
fascinating and in-depth explorations of their individual subjects—regional networks (or 
attempts to build them) that fall outside of what has been previously demarcated as the capital-H 
221. Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet 
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016).
222. Mailland and Driscoll, Minitel.
223. Kevin Driscoll, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media (New Haven, CT: Yale University 
Press, 2022).
166
“History of the Internet”—the attempts to tie them in with this History invariably create the 
conditions for thinking of these networks as “failed” and dismissing them as such. In the 
inaugural issue of Internet Histories, Abbate calls for new ways of framing the topic of “the 
history of the Internet,” which raises the point of a better need to define just what the Internet is
—if it is to be exclusively characterized by its technical features, its social dimensions, its local 
experiences in the context of the global network, etc.224 In reference to the dominant conception 
of the Internet as tied in with American histories of information and communications 
technologies and military projects, Abbate both warns of the histories that are excluded from this 
view and argues for an approach to Internet historiography that treats the Internet as a less 
technologically-determined phenomenon:
Histories that focus on the dominant players, those with the resources to create expensive 
new technologies, run the risk of privileging their visions in a contemporary Internet 
system that has, and should take into account, a much broader scope and constituency. 
Definitions that locate the defining features of the Internet in situated social practices can 
help challenge the claim of hardware- and software-builders to speak for the Internet.225
The alternative Internet histories above all share a common feature of focusing on the 
social and cultural features of these networks—while the enabling technology itself is not 
disregarded entirely, it is also not the central focus as in the case of much of the dominant 
Internet history, which frequently takes the Great Man (and Great Technology) approach to 
historiography. All of these alternative networks share in Nicoll’s investigation of the 
“historically minor” in that they could be considered failures, dead-ends, or marginal within the 
épistémè of dominant Internet history. This dissertation’s focus on genealogy as method—as well
as these other works, whether they situate themselves within a genealogical framework or not—
all reject the zero-sum formation of winners and losers, especially given that many of these other
224. Janet Abbate, “What and Where Is the Internet? (Re)Defining Internet Histories,” Internet Histories 
1, no. 1–2 (March 28, 2017): 8–14.
225. Abbate, 6.
167
networks enjoyed significant success within their respective milieus and time periods. Driscoll 
and Paloque-Berges, without explicitly framing these approaches within a 
archaeological/genealogical methodology, still acknowledge Foucault’s influence in “the 
epistemological reflexivity of critical historiography [which] may reveal unacknowledged power 
relationships embedded in our knowledge of the Internet’s past. We should raise doubt about the 
prevalence and ubiquity of the Internet as a ‘winner’ by interrogating how we understand the 
process of technological diffusion and its narration.226
The keitai denwa, as a historically minor platform in the dominant narratives of Internet 
and media history, stands alongside these other examples of critical Internet historiography and 
contributes to the destabilization and rejection of the dominant, deterministic mode of American-
centered Internet history. This dissertation, in its focus on the keitai, provides one further way of 
understanding the proliferation of local and regional networks in the late 20 century that emerged
alongside the PC-based Internet, and contributes to the understanding of the specific social and 
cultural needs and expectaitions embedded within these networks. At the same time, as this 
narrative of the keitai denwa shows, these alternative histories often had the additional effect of 
creating larger expectations as to the meanings and uses of their respective media technologies, 
producing ripples that spread far beyond their limited geographical areas.
226. Kevin Driscoll and Camille Paloque-Berges, “Searching for Missing ‘Net Histories,’” Internet 
Histories 1, no. 1–2 (April 18, 2017): 2.
168
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