Our Japanese cell phones

Once Yasuko (the secretary in Jim's lab who has been SO helpful) managed to open a bank account for us, we were all set to get cell phones. There are three cell phone companies here: AU, Docomo and SoftBank. After going to all three both by ourselves and with Yasuko and having lots of difficulties communicating across languages about the complicated plans, minutes, features, etc, we decided to go with AU because it seemed the cheapest and, most importantly, there was a guy working there who spoke English!

We arrived in the evening and our guy knew we were waiting for him—poor thing. After about an hour of filling out our paperwork, deciding on a plan, etc, we had phones! Perhaps the most amusing--or horribly depressing-- part was that we couldn't fill out the application. Bless his heart, (I'm Southern so I say that a lot) after realizing that we didn't even know how to write our names in Hiragana, our salesperson offered to fill out the application for us. Talk about loss of independence and self-sufficiency! (I really felt like an African who can't read or speak English, having to get someone to read and translate a medicine bottle.) Even worse, is having to sign a paper when you have no clue what it says. It is a very humbling feeling and you are completely at the mercy of your translator. Thank goodness the Japanese—as a huge generalization—are very honest! I think I mentioned in an earlier post that our salesperson wasn't sure how to write our last name in Hiragana because it doesn't really translate into the syllabary. Bless his heart again, he had to call a couple of people to get their advice and finally had to make something up. He apologized but said that he needed to represent our name in Hiragana so other employees could read it. How funny that our name can't be represented exactly. Talk about being lost in translation!

He gave us the only phone models that could be set to English (we got the last two in stock!) and he then set them to English for us, since we'd have no way to decipher how to do it. After all this, we still didn't know his name, so we had to ask. (Yes, he was wearing a name tag, but it was written in Kanji only!) It turns out our helper is a law student at the University and he is originally from China. (So Japanese wasn't his native language either, though he obviously was pretty fluent.) His name was Son and he said we could go back and ask for him for help if we needed it. So kind.

Now that we have our phones we are able to call each other for free (yay for family plans!), which is the main reason we got them. We have also used them to call our new friends when meeting, which has already been very useful. The per month cost of our phones is actually less than it would be in the US. However, once we add in the fee for early termination of a contract (we had no choice but to get a two year contract) it is about the same cost as in the US. Our phones are much fancier though. We can watch Japanese TV, take decent photos, and send email on our phones. I know that they many more fancy things, but unfortunately most of these things are in Japanese, so we probably won't be able to take full advantage of these gadgets. Ah, yet another inanimate object that's smarter than we are!