Getting a Cellphone

The laws in Japan were changed recently (I think in 2006-7) requiring all aliens (not Japanese citizens) to verify their identity, your certificate of alien registration (gaijin card).

The DoCoMo (the largest cellphone service provider) website says you may also enact a contract using the following:

• Japanese Health Insurance Certificate
• +
• Utility receipt
• or
• Certificate of Residence
• or
• Certification of Information Recorded on Foreign Resident Registration File
• +
• Credit Card

None of that is true, I can assure you from experience. If you are an alien trying to get a cellphone contract in Japan, wait until you get your "gaijin card." We tried several times to get a contract enacted and brought everything, including paystubs, certificate of hanko registration, and our visas from the Ministry of Justice. Just wait until the gaijin card is available.

The contract took about an hour to complete (someone was on the phone with us while we reviewed the terms, translating) and they even charged the phones and switched the menus to English for us. We told ourselves before we moved to Okinawa that we would treat ourselves for working so hard last year and get a really cool cellphone. That means we could have saved a good amount of money by just taking an older phone, but we ruminated for several weeks and comparison shopped, and we decided in the end to get the P905i:


If you look carefully you'll see that it does a number of things.
We can start by commenting on its high-def screen.

This is particularly nice because we can watch tv with the phones (and so save a few hundred dollars instead of buying one)

And we also save money by not having to buy a digital camera or a video camera (the HP camera that we've had for a couple of years now is just as good as this one!)

But I think what really sold me was that I can use the phone in the U.S., Australia, Europe, South America, and most of Asia. I can send and receive email overseas (it does cost a it more), and I can make video conference calls on my freaking phone!

We can record tv with it, we can pay for stuff with it (the phone's like a debit card), we can surf the web and download music and movies (it uses Windows Media Player), it's got GPS applications, it's got video games....every day we learn something new about this phone. It's like a new hobby. The manual is, like, 600 pages and available in English as a pdf (which you can review on your cellphone).