These are some phones we found in Akihabara. They don’t look too special from the outside. What the picture doesn’t show is that they’re all 3G, they all have high-speed, unrestricted web browsing, the vast majority have live videochat, many of them get full TV reception, and the total cost of the phone and service is significantly cheaper than in the US and Europe. Oh, and they’re prettier. Many have coated LCDs on the front that work like two-way mirrors: when the LCD is off, the surface appears solid and metallic, but “magically” illuminates when the LCD turns on.

The US gets a lot of its consumer technology from the US. Brands such as Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Toyota, Honda are all imports. Even American brands such as Apple contain numerous Japanese components. So why not phones? DoCoMo and Softbank, two of the most popular Japanese cellular providers, have never released a phone in North America. What’s going on?

The short answer is that business is going on. Essentially, US carriers are obligated to protect their investors. Naturally, their investors are non-Japanese phone producers, such as LG and Samsung (from Korea), Nokia (Finland), Ericsson (Sweden), and Apple and Motorola (USA). These manufacturers create phones which are unable to run on Japan’s more sophisticated cellular networks. (My phone, a top-of-the-line 3G CDMA phone, was too primitive to work at all in Japan. When I asked a guy in a tech store for help, he asked me if it was vintage.) If the American providers did upgrade their networks, Japanese companies would immediately flood in to fill the new markets. Of course, the phone manufacturers will have none of that, and use their investment muscle to prevent the service providers to upgrade.

Phones aside, there’s actually quite a bit of technology in Japan that hasn’t made its way to the US. Even familiar companies such as Sony, Hitachi, Sharp, Nintendo and Panasonic seem to backstab their loyal American customers by releasing their freshest technology in Japan months before they release it elsewhere.

This camcorder records in full HD directly to a Blu-Ray disk (which are criminally cheap in Japan). This model has been out for a month or two in Japan, and is just coming out in the US. Nintendo’s DS Lite was released March 2, 2006 in Japan, and wasn’t released until June 11th in the US.

We had a nice man drive us around Kaga, and his Toyota (which he claimed was fairly old) had a 3D, layered GPS with fully virtual instruments. Oh, and it got TV reception.

All the TVs made are high definition, and every one seems to be LCD or Plasma. No CRTs remain. Every TV station in Tokyo was broadcast in high-definition, even the news, even cartoons, even commercials.

Again, business is the culprit. Japanese consumer-electronics manufacturers think that American consumers either won’t be interested in these technologies or won’t know how to use them (or both). Thus, the demand is too low to distribute.

This may seem obvious, but it was nice to finally get an answer on why Japan’s technology always seems to be ahead of ours. I always assumed market forces drive he latest and greatest products, but sadly, “greatest” does not always mean “most profitable.” A technically adept culture demands technically sophisticated products, and less technically adept cultures do not.

That said, electronics are everywhere in Japan. I didn’t see a single poster for a movie in all of Tokyo, but I saw plenty of ads for video games.

Metal Gear Solid 4 had large banner ads on half of the subways and trains I rode in. The sort of advertising that would be reserved for a large-budget movie in the US. And the ad shown above is prime advertising real-estate in Akihabara’s main cross-street. I can only imagine how much the advertising space cost. The truth is, videogames make as much net profit in Japan as movies do in the United States. Although Americans certainly love their videogames, games have never had a wide enough market to merit such advertising.

This is Big Camera. It’s a seven-floor shrine to electronics. Our Best Buys are huge, but they’d take up only one floor of one of these buildings. And Big Cameras are all over.

Electronics are often mixed with fashion, too. These are some Swarovski-crystal-jeweled “designer” earphones.

Magazines, newspapers, business cards and even billboards contain square barcodes. If you take a picture of the barcode with a phone, the phone can decode the information into a URL so you can visit the product’s site on the Internet.

So, there’s a sum-up on technology in Japan. Next time, I’ll be talking about the influence of Western languages on Japanese language and culture.