Teenagers and Mobile Phones
Paging devices used in the late 1980s to early 1990s predate mobile phones and paved the way for the popularity of the phones among teenagers. Pagers could only display numbers and were intended to alert the owner that he or she had received a call from a certain phone number, but teens quickly began using numeric messages to communicate many things, including greetings and everyday emotions. Most were based on various ways numbers could be read in Japanese. Examples are
- 4-6-4-9 – yo-ro-shi-ku ("hello," "best regards")
- 3-3-4-1 – sa-mi-shi-i ("I feel lonely")
- 8-8-9-1-9 – ha-ya-ku-i-ku ("hurry up, let's go")
With the rapidly falling prices of cell phones in the mid 1990s, young people began experimenting with the short message service that the mobile phone companies started offering. When the i-mode service became available, the mobile phone culture began flourishing in earnest as this service offered an E-mail application. Magazines and television regularly make specials focusing on the current trend of how mobile phones are used by young people.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Mobile Phone Culture
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