Japan is usually thought of/portrayed as a society on the cutting edge of technology. Hogwash, I tells ya, hogwash! Any high-tech points earned by the taxis with driver-controlled doors (that is, they open and close at the whim of the driver) are more than lost to the fact that most of my teachers have the blight known as Windows ME installed on their laptops. From a visibility-of-technology standpoint, Japan seems to be on par with America.

The only major exception is the ubiquitous keitai (cellular phone).

Everyone - and I do mean everyone - has one. I've seen six year-olds text-messaging and seventy year-olds chatting it up in the park (much to the chagrin of the unwatched ducks in the pond). Unlike America (at least in my limited experience with a cellphone there), in Japan phones are used almost entirely to text message. (Calling someone from a keitai can be quite expensive, often 40 yen (about 38 cents) a minute.) So everywhere you go, people are mesmerized by their phones. People walking. People driving. And my favorite, people biking.

After three months of semi-contented Luddism, I broke down and got one myself. And I must say, my social life has exploded. Last night I was walking home from the subway station - while texting a friend, of course! - and a random Japanese guy approached me. After a lovely five-minute chat in which he demonstrated considerable NBA knowledge (he knew Sam Perkins, good shit!), he wanted me to come to his house to "meet his wife". Er, yeah, I decided this was not the best idea, though he probably did have a wife and didn't want to violate me. He was placated by my willingness to exchange keitai e-mail addresses. That evening, I received the following message from him:

"hello.do you sleep now?i wanna to make foreign person.I wish to see you. P.S. I wanna to introduce girlfriend for you.See you!"

(To elaborate on the girlfriend bit, he said he could find me some "sex girlfriends" after the NBA discussion fizzled. As delightful as that sounds, I have a date with someone whom I believe to be a non-prostitute on Monday. Goooooooo monogamy!)

OK, maybe this isn't the sort of social-life explosion I was looking for, but it's a start, right?

sounds like an episode of welcome back kotter i saw the other night.

not surprised to hear he was more into sam perkins than, say, the virginal a.c. green. are nba games brodcast in japan? just games where yuta tabuse is playing?