Calling in Japan / Arcade question I'm going to visit Osaka during Christmas time to visit some friends. Because I won't have mobile internet I was wondering if I can just buy a simcard so I can call in Japan. My phone is sim-free. Also, anybody got some tips on what top visit in Osaka ? I can travel by train Edit: Also, are there any arcades worth visiting in Osaka? I've never been to one
Well you can always register a voip account to voipbuster and make calls when you sit on a store with free wifi!
I don't think they use SIM cards in Japan, do they? Does that mean they use CDMA instead of GSM? Surely there must be one of those pre-paid cards for tourists available over there? You buy a certain amount's worth of credit (e.g. 5,000 Yen) then call a freephone number to make the calls. Or there's Skype, I guess - if you can get wi-fi!
They use SIM. Exact same as everyone else. You think the iPhones here are not the standard China sweat shop ones? Are you fucking high? Then terrorists could use them, and destroy the perfect "wa" (harmony) of Japan. Can't have that. Prepaid sim cards = devil. You *can* rent a really, really shitty phone (at the aiport only) and pay a ludicrous amount of money for outgoing calls. Wifi... in Japan? LOL... why would you need Wifi when everyone and their mom has unlimited data? Nope, don't need Wifi. :-/ Okay ,the last one is a slight exaggeration but for the most part, Japan is not known for a lot of Wifi hot spots. Your best bet (as stated in post #2) is to get one of those pocket pussy Wifi things and use data. They are not so expensive, and are very easy for foreigners to get if you think in advance. Just sign up and they'll send it w/ a return voucher to your hotel or wherever you're staying. For the record, the lack of prepaid sims is due to harsh laws... not stupid business practices, even though there are plenty of those here, too.
You can get prepaid sims from outside Japan but the calling charges are going to be about 70cents a minute (Japan) with texts cost about 50cents each both in and outside of Japan. You also get charged incoming calls plus anyone calling you will be charage an international call rate... If you have an unlocked iphone or a GSM 3G phone then you can rent a sim from Softbank at the airport, but you are looking at 110 yen a day plus a 315 yen contract fee. Calls are 110 yen a minute local and between 300 to 400 yen a minute for most of Europe, USA and Canada. Incoming calls are free though and text messages are 15 yen local and 150 yen international. Hire an iphone? 210 yen a day with 315 contract fee with same call charges, data charges are 0.32 yen (yes Y0.32 but charges rounded up) and capped at Y1550 a day. use it all week and you are looking at over Y12,000. However when used with wifi, it is a good emergency phone for local contact. Still there is Wifi, Osaka has a free limited wifi service. It resets every 30 minutes though and in certain areas you are limited to 15 minute slot 4 times a day, still it's free and widely available. http://www.osaka-info.jp/en/wifi/ In Tokyo? You can get 14 days free wifi from NTT east (using their Flets brand) by downloading a program to your iphone or andriod phone and visiting a shop to pick up a password card. There are a lot of wifi hot spots and although you aren't going to be able to stream video, it'll be enough for email, google maps, etc. It's meant to be a trial but it will continue until next year at least. http://flets.com/freewifi/spot.html http://flets.com/freewifi/use.html Although I have a Nintendo 3DS and I found enough unlocked wifi spots to check things. I also used a android phone with a wifi sniffer program that alerted me when unlocked wifi hotspots were around.
There is also the b-mobile visitor SIM which can be ordered online. For about 4000 JPY you either get 1GB with no download speed restriction or unlimited data for 14 days at 300 kbps. Might be worth checking out: http://www.bmobile.ne.jp/english/product.html
That's a recent development, though - even 10 years ago, all the Japanese phones were gratuitously incompatible with the rest of the world. DoCoMo had MOVA - which used a system called PDC; it was a TDMA system like GSM or the US IS-136 TDMA, but utterly incompatible with either of them. KDDI/Au (and J-Phone, I think) were running CMDA - IS-95C - based on the Qualcomm style CDMA systems used in the US, but with various local changes that made it incompatible in both directions. You also had PHS - which used the same air interface as all the other zonephone systems, but had different management and backhaul signalling - so that was also incompatible. The first Japanese phones I ever saw with SIM cards were the early DoCoMo FOMA handsets - but they might as well have not had them because the MTSO enforced a match between the ICCID of the SIM card and the IMEI of the phone, so you couldn't actually swap them between handsets - which suggests that someone had entirely missed the point of a removable SIM. On top of this, those early FOMA phones used W-CDMA (like UMTS), but they also used different bands, different backhaul signalling and even a different chipping rate on the channel (so not even the silicon was compatible...) - rendering them, again, utterly incompatible with anything else on the planet. Thinking about it, it was pretty much exactly 10 years ago - DoCoMo upgraded their network to support standard 2100MHz UMTS phones in about 2004, which was the first time that you could get a non-Japanese handset and get it roaming on a Japanese network.
