Japan’s Mobile-Phone Users Receive Lessons in Etiquette

About 1 million portable phones are on Japan’s streets, and it sometimes seems that there’s no escaping them. So the Japanese, masters of etiquette as well as technology, are now coming up with portable-phone manners.

“Use of portable telephones at your seat may be a disturbance to other passengers, so please use the vestibule even if it is inconvenient,” runs the message that greets riders aboard Japan’s super-efficient, super-fast bullet trains.

At restaurants in Tokyo’s plush Imperial Hotel, diners are firmly asked to leave their tables to conduct urgent phone business.

The requests might seem calculated to irk portable phoners, who can pay from $700 to $1,500 upfront and $100 a month for the privilege of being able to talk on the phone wherever and whenever they want.

But in a country where people are bombarded from infancy with lessons about not annoying others, the new etiquette standard seems to have caught on quickly.

“At the beginning I think maybe there were customers who wanted to show, ‘Hey, I’ve got a cordless phone,”’ said Yoshio Owaki, a manager at the Imperial Hotel. “But now customers have come to understand manners.”

“The messages on the bullet trains have been a good education for Japanese,” he said.

Mobile telephones in Japan have more than tripled in the last two years to 1.44 million units--about one for every 100 Japanese, the Posts and Telecommunications Ministry estimates.