Thomas L. Friedman

Japan's teens gain thumb dexterity but lose interpersonal skills

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

New York Times

Saturday, September 23, 2000

Tokyo -- Beware, America, especially you parents of teenagers. If you come to Japan, you can glimpse the future. It's all thumbs.

Japan is being swept these days by a craze known as DoCoMo. A DoCoMo is a small, colorful, palm-held cell phone, with a tiny screen that provides both voice connections and wireless Internet access. It seems lately that everyone here -- from Japanese housewives to bureaucrats to teenagers -- is buying one to surf the Net, gossip, swap e-mail and photos, listen to music, tell fortunes, play games, make dates or sell stocks.

Fortune magazine just reported that the number of DoCoMo phones in Japan is growing by 50,000 a day -- in many urban families, each member has one -- and said that it looked ready to become "the biggest consumer phenomenon to emerge from Japan since Sony's Walkman." Indeed, so many DoCoMos are being sold, and Japanese youth are running up such big phone bills with DoCoMo parent NTT, that Nissan recently ran an ad pointing out to Japanese youths that for the same money they are spending each month using their DoCoMos, they could cover the monthly payments on a new car.

But DoCoMo is not just a raging Japanese urban fad; it's a glimpse at America's future. Japan is a year or two ahead of America in the deployment of wireless Internet-surfing phones. So DoCoMo Japan is giving us our first real glimpse of what the age of the "Evernet" will look like in a developed society. The Evernet age is what comes after the Internet age. The Evernet age is when you will be able to be online everywhere all the time, not just from your PC. It's a mixed picture, at best.

If you want to know how it looks, ride the Tokyo subway. I sat next to a Japanese schoolgirl on the Hibya line who held her DoCoMo in the palm of her hand, gripping it with four fingers, and then with her free thumb pecked out messages using the numeric/letter keys and special symbols, such as a beating heart, which means, "I can't wait." Her thumb moved around the keyboard with the lightning dexterity of Midori playing a violin concerto. "We call it thumb culture," said Yumiko Hayashi, my translator. "It's really frightening sometimes being on the subway and watching all these people talking on cell phones with their thumbs."