Ito, Mizuko; Okabe, Daisuke; and Matsuda, Misa, eds. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life.

• Author: Broad, David B.
• Position: Book review

Ito, Mizuko; Okabe, Daisuke; and Matsuda, Misa, eds. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 357 pages. Cloth, $39.95.

This is a collection of research articles about the phenomenon of keitai (the Japanese term for a mobile phone or phones and the use of such devices). Japanese social scientists have seemingly embraced the integration of theory and empirical methodologies more than American or European scholars. In tone, they are Parsonian (perhaps in part because of translation effects), but they do not leave theory untested long. The range of theoretical groundings achieved in this collection is quite remarkable. In one of the articles, Georg W.E Hegel, Karl Marx, Karl Mannheim, Marshall McLuhan, and Thomas Kuhn are referenced and the concepts of spirit of the era, fetish objectification, world village, framing of ideology, and paradigm shift, respectively, are employed as heuristics for exploring the revolutionary adoption of keitai. But these authors' penchant for empirical testing of theory is evident in every one of the fifteen articles in the present collection.

First, a little history. After their defeat at the hands of the United States in World War II, the Japanese both endured and embraced the American occupation led by Douglas MacArthur. In the Shinto/Buddhist mind, enduring and embracing are not so difficult to reconcile. MacArthur brought with him 200 scientists and engineers to assist in the economic recovery and Americanization of Japan. One of them was W. Edwards Deming, a statistician whose ideas for process improvement in manufacturing became the basis for Total Quality Management (TQM). One particular Japanese professor, whose former students included a number of CEOs of nascent Japanese industries, was quite taken with Deming's ideas, and he recommended that his mentees attend Deming's seminars. This marked the beginning of Japan's industrial and technological leap of quality that has made so many Japanese products the preferred products of the world. The history of keitai is a chapter in that larger history.

Throughout the economic transformation that TQM undergirds in Japan, traditional Japanese culture has survived. Japanese adoption of technology, which has outpaced and eclipsed the world in many respects, has also been shaped by the cultural centrality of family and respect. According to Philip Sugai, a marketing professor at International University of Japan...