Daisuke Okabe

Intimate Connections: Contextualizing Japanese youth and mobile messaging

Ever since NTT Docomo launched its i-mode mobile Internet service in 1999, international attention has been trained on Japan as a hothouse for incubating the future of the wireless revolution. In particular, international technology communities have noted and often celebrated handset design by Japanese electronic manufacturers, third generation infrastructures, video and camera phones, and mobile entertainment. A focus on ever-new advanced technical functionality, however, can often lose sight of the social, historical, and cultural context through which contemporary Japanese mobile media is structured and has evolved. As Harper (2003, 187) has argued, “mobile society is not rendering our society into some new form, it is rather, enabling the same social patterns that have been in existence for some time to evolve in small but socially significant ways.” In this chapter, we analyze messaging practices of Japanese youth as an outcome of existing historical, social, and cultural factors rather than as something driven forward by the inherent logic of new technology.