Living the Wireless Lifestyle.(Cover Story)

Byline: Kay Itoi

Chika Matsumoto rarely puts her cell phone down, even when she's hanging out with friends at a hamburger shop or soaking in the bathtub. The 17-year-old high-school student is constantly e-mailing her friends. "I want to be aware of what's going on with my friends and not to be left out," she says. Her mother wonders: is this an addiction?

If so, it's one most Tokyo residents share. Although this city may not have the most Wi-Fi hotspots, its population has, arguably, embraced the wireless lifestyle more than any other city. The Japanese were slow to catch on to the Internet, but they made up for it by going for cell phones in a big way. These days just about every person over the age of 12 owns a mobile phone--82 million subscribers, of whom a fifth have a super-high-speed 3G phone. "In terms of the variety of ways mobile technologies help shape people's lives, there's no other place like Tokyo," says Hiroshi Miyanaga, the country's leading telecom expert and a professor at Tokyo University of Science.

The comfort level with cell phones should serve Tokyo residents well as wireless technology develops; many experts think the computer of the future will look more like a cell phone than like a PC. Already in Japan cultural pressures have pushed the cell-phone craze from an emphasis on voice to one on data. Riding a typically packed local train, Tokyo art coordinator Masako ...