Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, and: The Landscape of Keitai: The Routinization of Technology ケータイのある風景― テクノロジーの日常化を考える (review)

Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda (eds.), Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005 Japanese Version: Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda (eds.), The Landscape of Keitai: The Routinization of Technology ケータイのある風景― テクノロジーの日常化を考える Kyoto: Kitaouji Shobo, 2006 Kae Ishii Received: 31 August 2008 /Accepted: 31 August 2008 /Published online: 8 May 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 It is astonishing to see how widespread and important Information and Communication Technology like the Internet and cellular phones (keitai, “something you carry with you”) have become in Japanese society. Japanese youth use keitai more than PCs, according research. Even elementary school students are using keitai to communicate with their friends and to protect themselves. Adults not only make calls via Internet or keitai but collect information, chat, shop, and read. They also use Internet und keitai to work at home while they are caring for children and doing housework. The possibilities of Information and Communication Technology are an unknown quantity. Since 1980, scholars of social history and cultural studies on technologies in Japan and in the West have studied the history of early mass communication— specifically the telegraph and telephone—in the context of today's Internet and cellular phones. The economic and business applications of Japan's communication infrastructure have aroused the interest of Japanese scholars. Since the 1990s, however, there has been increasing scholarly attention to social and cultural aspects of pagers and keitai in Japan. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian is a collection of scholarly essays, with a disciplinary base in social and cultural studies, examining the relationship between East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2009) 3:147–151 DOI 10.1007/s12280-009-9081-x K. Ishii (*) Department of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Shitennoji University, Osaka, Japan e-mail: kae@shitennoji.ac.jp keitai and the Japanese people. The book breaks new ground in two ways: First, although this is only the most recent instance in which Japanese scholars from the disciplines of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, and education have turned their attention to keitai, its Japanese version is easy for college students to access because of its reasonable price and its straightforward contents and layout. Second, this book was initially released in English with the intention of informing non-Japanese-speaking people of the development and diversity of keitai research in Japan (see p. i in English version). Most of the papers collected in this volume were initially presented in Japanese at a workshop sponsored by the DoCoMo House design cottage at Keio University (December 2002). These presentations were published in English in 2005. The DoCoMo House was founded by the Nippon Telegraph & Telephone DoCoMo to conduct research about keitai and provided the financial support for translation and editing of this book. The editors specify to reasons why it was specifically important to introduce the newest keitai research in Japan to English-speaking people. The first is that “almost all keitai matters transmitted from Japan to foreign countries are talked of in the context of a success story of business or of a kind of Japanese techno culture like anime (animation) and video games” (p. i in English version). Therefore, sociological and cultural studies of keitai have gained little notice because of linguistic and disciplinary barriers. Although a steady stream of English social science texts have been translated into Japanese, the reverse is rare (p. 4 in English version). That is why its impact is all the more important and why it is heartening that foreign journals like New Media and Society and Wired New noticed and reviewed the book. In 2006, this book appeared not only in its second edition but also in paperback. The Japanese version contains revised and new papers. This Japanese version has also entered its second edition, with an introduction by Nihon Keizai Shinbun (17.6.2007), one of Japan's most prestigious newspapers. In terms of structure and content, there are several differences between the English and Japanese versions. Between 2002 and 2006, not only Japanese society but also keitai technologies changed. In this book review, I will restrict myself principally to examining the Japanese version because, with the exception...