It’s not only young people whose gaze is fixed on tiny screens. But for these users in Tokyo, clicking and scrolling is anything but second nature.
“I can’t deal with all of the apps that jump out at me,” says one. “How do I know if I’ve definitely ended a call?” asks another.
They are common concerns among the four women and one man attending a beginner’s smartphone class at a public facility for older residents in Nerima in the Japanese capital’s north-west suburbs.
In Yasushi Nishioka, they have a patient guide to navigating the myriad functions and settings that can make the smartphone a portal into a new world of hyper-connectivity, but also a vortex for digital dystopia.
“Please don’t feel like you need to remember everything,” says Nishioka, a retired programmer for an IT company. “It’s just a question of holding it in your hand and getting used to it.”
Yasushi Nishioka guides his students, most of them in their 70s, at the smartphone training session in Nerima, Tokyo. Photograph: Justin McCurry/The GuardianThe participants, most of whom are in their 70s, say they are intimidated by their devices – three iPhones and two Android devices. But they are determined not to spend their later years in analogue isolation after the closure of Japan’s 3G network.
The country’s telecom companies have gradually plunged older networks into darkness. The 2G service had completely shut down by 2012 and by 2022 au, a popular carrier, no longer offered 3G, with rival SoftBank following suit in 2024. At the end of March, NTT Docomo became the last to pull the 3G plug, citing the need to retire inefficient base stations to reduce electricity consumption.
While some flip phones are still compatible with 4G, the move affected an estimated half a million people and more than 400 phone models, as well as early car navigation systems, vending machines that rely on 3G for cashless payment systems and unstaffed car parks that use the network for remote management, according to the Mainichi Shimbun news site.
The smartphone beginners were taken through the functions and settings of their devices, including volume control and online payments. Photograph: Justin McCurry/The GuardianDocomo and other carriers are helping subscribers – a mixture of stubborn flip phone users and the smartphone anxious – by offering classes that include sessions on taking photos and video and shopping safely online.
Unless they embrace the smartphone, which works only on 4G and 5G networks, flip phone loyalists will lose their voice-call and email functions and have their contracts cancelled along with their phone numbers.
Japan’s garakei phones – a combination of Galápagos, in reference to their availability only for the domestic market, and keitai denwa, meaning mobile phone – were ubiquitous before the first iPhone was released here in 2008.
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