Open Theme: Japanese Ketai Identity

 
As part of a larger inquiry, I've been talking to Japanese students about their keitai (cell phones). My curiosity in the supposedly mundane follows the anthropological tradition of investigating things people do in their everyday lives, and with keitai use estimated at a staggering 90% adoption rate in Japan (see Ito et al below), it certainly qualifies.

In the United States there is a strong association of material culture display and personal identity expression that dance around with voyeuristic intentions. Showing off one’s identity reaffirms it through the process of making it known to others. It’s not hard to imagine that in Japan, a country where who you know helps define who you are (see Bestor below), that the same is true, or even more so. On the contrary, this is not entirely so.

Although shopping bags from expensive stores, by comparison, are often used as a form of self-labeling like in the United States, keitai hold an interesting juxtaposition of private public space. Individuals I have talked to all consider their phones a private utility that holds no explicit intention for expressing meaning to other people. Most ornaments (often called keitai straps) or decorations have private histories for the owner, and possibly close friends, but are usually imperceptible to other individuals. One young lady, for instance, admitted she only kept one of her ornaments because it was expensive, while there was nothing remarkably telltale about it visually. Many individuals keep decorations that friends have gifted to them, while others select them based on personal choices such as a favorite color, or to bring luck.

Keitai have also been discussed in more depth by Mizuko Ito et. al in Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Also, Ted Bestor (Tsukiji) and Dorinne Kondo (Crafting Selves) both discuss personal identity and its relation to networks and community.