In Japan, teenage mobile phone culture makes real connections

It’s a sunny day in Harajuku, Tokyo’s trendy shopping district, and Saya Kato, a high school student, is waiting for a friend to accompany her into La Foret, one of the city’s citadels of fashion. Exquisitely attuned to the style of the moment, Kato is wearing a filmy vest over a T-shirt and shorts, sporting a straw fedora and carrying not one but two cellphones.

It’s a sunny day in Harajuku, Tokyo’s trendy shopping district, and Saya Kato, a high school student, is waiting for a friend to accompany her into La Foret, one of the city’s citadels of fashion. Exquisitely attuned to the style of the moment, Kato is wearing a filmy vest over a T-shirt and shorts, sporting a straw fedora and carrying not one but two cellphones.The first, emerging from a vast pink bag, is a slim, honey-colored basic model with a flat-rate voice plan that enables Kato to enjoy long chats with friends who have the same plan. The second is a hot-pink Sony Ericsson that connects her to everybody else. With it Kato can access the Internet, read the news, watch television, update her blog and the diary she keeps on Mixi, a social networking site, and, most important, text her broader social circle.To read this report in The Washington Post in full, see:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032602218.html

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