w00kie’s ramblings

Coming back from work I found a lonely shoe left in the middle of the sidewalk in front of a pachinko outside my train station. Girls walking by would shout out 「ええっ！気持ち悪い！」

• Junichiro Koizumi - 小泉 純一郎 - 2001 to 2006 - grandfather was Minister of Posts and Telecommunications
• Shinzo Abe - 安倍 晋三 - 2006 to 2007 - grandfather was Prime Minister
• Yasuo Fukuda - 福田 康夫 ,- 2007 to 2008 - father was Prime Minister
• Taro Aso - 麻生 太郎 - soon to be sworn in - grandfather was Prime Minister, father in law was Prime Minister

Can you see a pattern here?

My good friend Jon, who is clearly superhuman, was until 3 weeks ago working at Valeo on the desk in front of me. He is now between jobs taking a sabbatical and, since he can't stay idle too long, has started a great journey from Saitama to Hokkaido... on a bicycle.

He will be twittering his trip all along the way via his iPhone. I'll be following him all the way from my desk.

I'm getting reports from my friends with iPhones here in Japan, since I still haven't gone crazy and taken one as a second phone. Some features have been completely borked by Softbank:

• There's no + for international calls. Apparently, Softbank's network does not support the + (country code) (your number) that is industry standard on all modern phones. Instead, they customize their keitais, which are manufactured to Softbank's specs by the nicely compliant Japanese manufacturers, to replace the plus sign with a special prefix: 010.
• The mail address @i.softbank.jp is not "push-compatible". This means you have to initiate a mail check to see if there is mail waiting, unlike @me.com mail which pushes the mails straight to your phone through the network without actual polling on your part.
  Softbank has implemented a sort of fake notification which must be a background process continually polling the server for new mails, showing the butt-ugly greyed-out fullscreen popup whenever you receive a message. Of course, there is no chime nor vibration hinting to a new event while the phone is in your pocket, making that mail address basically useless...

I hope Softbank gets its act together before I need to change phones. Sadly, even after knowing all these caveats, I still want one...

If you're planning on buying an iPhone (it's a little too late now since they're already out of stock everywhere in Kanto) and you're a foreigner, there's a couple of things you need to be aware of before you head out to the Softbank shop:

1. Bring your Gaikokujin Torokusho (Alien Card) + Passport. It seems they now require the passport too.
2. Check your visa expiration date, the following rules apply:

From Softbank's website
本人確認書類を「外国人登録証明書＋外国パスポート」にてお申込される場合、以下項目をご注意ください。

1. 在留期限が90日未満の場合は回線契約ができません。
2. 在留期限が申込日より15ヵ月以内の場合、割賦購入（あっせん）契約による受付はできません。（店頭一括払いのみの受付となります）
3. 在留期限が申込日より15ヵ月超、27ヵ月以内の場合、割賦購入（あっせん）契約による支払回数は12回払いもしくは一括払いのみの受付となります。
4. 在留期限が申込日より27ヵ月を超える場合、支払い回数に関係なく割賦購入（あっせん)が可能です。

Which translates to:

1. If you're on a 90 days tourist visa, no soup (or iPhone) for you!
2. If you have less than 15 months left on your visa, you wont be able to make a contract, but they'll sell the phone to you without a plan for ￥80.000
3. Between 15 and 27 months left on your visa, you can either pay it cash for ￥80.000 or negociate take a 12 months contract (instead of the normal 24) possibly at the discounted ￥20.000 price-tag, but whether the discount applies or not is not clear in the document
4. Over 27 months and you're clear, you can buy the phone like any native

With my 3 years visa expiring in 27 months and 24 days, I might hurry my purchase plans...

Note: the maximum length visa you can have (apart from being a permanent resident) is 3 years, so you'd better work on your timing or you might have to wait a very long time to get a phone

Update: as John points out in the comments, if you have a Japanese health insurance card or driver's licence accompanied by a utility bill to your name, then this should suffice and Softbank's people should not ask you for anything else. That'll help quite a bit.

So people have been lined up in front of the flagship Softbank shop in Omotesando since Monday, all reservations that were taken in the first days after announcement have been canceled and now my friend Jon tells me that he called the main Softbank shop in Kumagaya, Saitama-ken and they are having a raffle for what will probably be 5 measly units on Friday.

If you want to get an iPhone here in Japan, you'd better start tossing a lot of ５円 coins at the local shinto shrine to buff up on luck and scour the raffles every weekend arount the countryside as we all did 2 years ago during the darkest times of Wii hunting.

Note: the photo is one of mine at Meiji shrine for New Year, that's the image that comes to mind when I think about a crowd in Japan...

Update: Jon won the lottery and got his iPhone, only problem is Softbank's servers are on their knees and they couldn't activate his phone. It's that crazy...

Last Saturday morning I was leaving a party at 5 A.M. in Shibuya and decided it would be nice to come back home to Shiki with the new Tokyo Metro Fukutoshin line which was opening the very day and interfaces with my usual Tobu Tojo line for an almost direct trip to and from Shibuya (I just have to hop from one side of the platform to another at Wakoushi) in a breeze.

So my girlfriend and I arrived at 5:30 after being guided by cops that were all over the station for the opening and got there to climb in the first train to arrive at Shibuya station and reversing for the journey back to Saitama.

Ruiko said:
Do not under-estimate the Japanese Otaku...

Remembering this saying by a good friend of mine, I wasn't surprised when that first train came in Shibuya station packed full of weirdos with backpacks and cameras (the classic Otaku costume). They came out of the train clapping and cheering, taking photos of each other in front of the driving cabin and macroing on every little details of the new train and station.

After the flow ebbed, we climbed on the train and were followed by a dozen of guys who must've missed the very first train. Losers... One of them was recording the trip and announcements with a microphone, bobbing his head to each of the stations' distinctive music as if to music from heaven... One of them had long pommeled hair and wore a flowery dress...

I didn't take any photos of them as my girlfriend was afraid I would get shanked by one of the weirdos like what happened in Akihabara 2 weeks ago, but I do have some photos of the brand new piece of station in Shibuya.

I missed the Keynote because I'm sick like a dog (went rafting/canyoning this weekend in a 7ºC mountain river) and couldn't bear to stay up until 3 A.M., but today I'm telling my boss I'm taking a day off on July 11th.

Update: link to the official Softbank press release.

やった！

「iPhone」について
2008年6月4日 - ソフトバンクモバイル株式会社

この度、ソフトバンクモバイル株式会社は、今年中に日本国内において「iPhone」を発売することにつきまして、アップル社と契約を締結したことを発表いたします。

SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple® to bring the iPhone™ to Japan later this year.

Why am I so happy? Because my corporate phone is a Softbank, so I should legally be able to change my crappy Sharp phone whose battery cannot hold more than 10min of conversation anymore for a snazzy 3G iPhone and still have my company pay for it. :)

Found this video on Digg, looks like Yoyogi Park. This guy is a million times more impressive than all those stupid jugglers and beanbag fanatics you find in such parks.

Yes, there's only one crowd I despise more than beanbaggers, it's the drum players. That's probably the main reason why I never hang out at Yoyogi Park...