JapanNewbie

There are people making these questions all the time, especially if they’ve been to US and Europe or Japan.

The main thing to distinguish is the network which provides the services and the terminals, which are the phones that the subscribers use.

The network is an array of equipment that uses directional or omni antennas to cover a specific area. As Japan and Europe have a greater population density than US, is much less expensive to cover the same area and provide a good level of service.
The caveat is that the more people in an area, the more equipment you need to carry the generated traffic so to avoid busy tones, congestions, low call quality etc and maximize profits, since a call made is some cents into the operator’s stash. The good thing is that even tough installing more equipment in such areas is more expensive, it gives a better chance of investment return to the operator since there is a much higher probability that people will make calls there at any time to say, a desert location. So, more or less, that is why companies favor big centers to install telecomm equipment than suburbs (and you know that US has a lot of suburbs with low population density).

The other side of the story is the terminals – the cellphones. This is pretty much dependent on demand and culture. Since Japanese are on average more tech wise, they want cooler gadgets. Since there is a good network to serve them, there will be always cool phones to use in them. So, chicken-egg and a bit of cultural background do the trick.

Hope that was easy to understand, I tried to simplify it but don’t know if I succeeded.

There’s also a bit of politics involved. When cell phone use first started to become a mainstream reality, Japan and most European countries declared the air government property, in a sense, allowing themselves the right and authority to regulate it, set standards, etc. The US didn’t do this, which is why there was a patchwork of different incompatible systems in the US until quite recently. This is also why the US saw internationally-capable cell phones much later than Europe or Japan.

There’s a consumer choice element as well. For years, the emphasis in the US was on making phones smaller and smaller (the US still has smaller phones, on average, than Japan, where the phones have actually started to bigger over the past couple of years), whereas the emphasis in Japan was on packing more features onto the phones.

I’ve heard the theory that Japan’s excellent public transportation system comes into play as well. Since a Japanese person spends so much time riding the train/subway/bus, it makes sense that they would want more features on their phones, so they’d have more options of what to do to fill that time (and ignore the signs forbidding cell phone use).

Meanwhile, commutes in the US typically involve cars. There isn’t that down time where you can focus on something else; you have to pay attention to the road. So when does the US worker have time to play with a billion gadgets on her phone?

I’m thinking if there was demand for it, the technical problems would be overcome.