The Telephone Card Saga Continues
In many parts of the world, walking around a big city with a laptop on your shoulder, or even using it in public, can be hazardous. Much to this nation's credit, most parts of most Japanese cities have a reputation for being safe and relatively crime free. This, combined with an ever growing number of public telephones with built-in data/ISDN ports, makes portable computing in Japan an experience that the on-the-road business person can find both liberating and exhilarating.Some readers have complained that they cannot jack-in their laptops to some public phones to do a quick e-mail dump or to make an overseas call. I've been inconvenienced myself on some occasions, so I decided to ask NTT about the why and wherefore of the situation.
Unfortunately, in recent years there has been a growing incidence of public telephone-related crime in this country. No, I don't mean all the yakuza-managed call-girl services that use phone booths for advertising space. There has been a lot of theft from phone booths: pay phones being used to place expensive overseas calls with forged prepaid telephone cards or "counterfeit" coins.
NTT has not been sitting idly by while all this thievery is happening. In the seedier parts of Japan's big cities, they have deactivated the international phone card/JPY100 coin capability on many (if not most) of the super-high-tech ISDN "gray phones." You can easily spot these "half-phones" by the graphic representations on their doors of JPY100 coins and telephone cards with red slashes through them.
There is a misconception among much of the general public that all the "half-phones" will not accept telephone cards or JPY100 coins at all. Not true. NTT says, and I have verified, that only the international calling capability has been deactivated in most of these phones. You can still make domestic calls (from most of them) with cards and coins, so for those of us using a notebook computer to dial into a local system, there should be no problem. If you really need to get in touch with someone overseas from a deactivated pay phone, call KDD with a credit card, and have them place the call for you.
I did a field study of the situation myself in the "bad" parts of Shibuya and Shinjuku (I was there for legitimate research only!), and found that in some parts, the modem phones don't work with anything except JPY10 coins. NTT claims this was a case of phones just being out of order, but I have my doubts. Perhaps the fact that most of these half-phones are located in areas not considered very safe (by Tokyo standards) may have something to do with it. It's almost as if the stickers on the door are a warning from the authorities to stay away.
Another question several people have asked, but I was not able to confirm from NTT, is whether or not the coins of a certain country that happen to be almost exactly the same size and weight as Japanese JPY100 coins will work in pay phones. (I won't say which country and what coin, just to avoid giving impressionable minds any ideas.) This would explain a lot. I was told by one source that, if this were true (and I'm not saying it is), getting caught doing it would be a very, very illegal act: far worse than getting caught using a bogus telephone card.
Connecting at Dante's other "Circle of Hell"
I heard from a very busy business executive who, after writing up dozens of e-mail messages on the Narita Express, was unable to find a phone with a modem jack at Narita Airport before boarding his plane for the long flight home. Bummer!
Actually, this does not sound surprising, since almost nothing at Narita makes any sense. I have learned, however, that the best place to upload or download e-mail at the airport is at the bank of gray telephones next to the stairs as you walk up into Terminal 1 from the exit of Narita Airport Station. I'm not sure about Terminal 2, since I almost never use it, but I understand the situation is much better there. (A sign pointing the way to modem-friendly phones would be a nice idea. Anyone listening?)
By the end of March 1997, NTT says it will have 758 public telephones installed throughout Narita, including 362 with ISDN/analog jacks. Another 90 of the older models will be replaced with the computer-friendly models by the end of March 1998. And all of the ISDN models are said to work with telephone cards.
The best solution? Your cellular, modem-friendly telephone. Don't leave home without it!
Thomas Caldwell is a Tokyo-based writer and radio journalist. Visit his homepage at http://www2.gol.com/users/caldwell, or e-mail him at caldwell@gol.com.
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