The iPhone is finally coming to Japan, and I’ll certainly be in line to get one when they become available next month. But how will the device really do here? I’d say that while there is a lot of interest by Japanese fans in the phone, it’s still unsure whether it will be a runaway success or not. First of all, Japanese consumers are extremely fickle — there’s a reason J-List does no business within Japan, and never will — and anyone doing business here needs to really be on the ball if they want to do well, especially if you’re selling a device that does things in a totally new way. Another problem comes from the syllabery nature of Japanese, which can express sounds like KA-KI-KU-KE-KO but not “k” by itself. It turns out that it’s quite easy to type Japanese using a standard numeric keypad by entering, say, 1992*44444 for arigato, and — I am not kidding, here — there are novelists who write their works exclusively with a numeric keypad on a phone because they can type faster that way. The new iPhone will have support for an on-screen kana-based method of text entering, but my guess is that it won’t feel the same to Japanese phone users, who are used to walking or riding bicycles while pecking away on their phones. Finally, there’s a slew of handy local features iPhone won’t support, like a payment system that lets you buy train tickets by touching a panel with your phone and a low-bandwidth TV system called Wanseg (from “one segment”). I’ve heard from many Japanese computer users that American companies like Apple and Microsoft regularly get little details wrong when producing products for the Japanese market, so I wonder what other small aspects of the iPhone will feel funny to users here. Still, considering the number of things you can do incredibly well on the thing — I use my American phone a few hours a day in Japan, where it’s not even usable as a phone — I’ve got a feeling Apple will do quite well.
