Likewise, once a child's peers start to use keitai, or when the keitai is used for school or after-school club activities, these circumstances will prompt a child's desire to own a keitai.

Moreover, in the aforementioned Cabinet Office ( Citation2006) survey, “widespread TV and newspaper coverage of incidents of child victimization” was the reason given by most respondents for their anxiety over the possibility that their child might be victimized (85. Thus, the difference in commuting methods and times is due to the difference in schools to which the students commute. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life"(2005) edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda. However, its popularity has also spread to other countries internationally, especially to China, the United States, Germany, and South Africa.

But even while I myself believed it was too early, when she started cram school in April, her teacher would always lend her keitai so that she could tell me she was on her way home. Footnote2 In other words, any perceived “deterioration of public safety” is based more on a recent collective societal view rather than on an actual observed increase in significant violent acts against children. HowardForums is a discussion board dedicated to mobile phones with over 1,000,000 members and growing! The keitai is thought in some ways to manage or mitigate risk through the capacity to be in full-time potential contact with parents and/or guardians.

Footnote5 On the other hand, as has been mentioned, most parents have developed a strong sense that their children are at risk, and thus, once they start to employ keitai as a measure for ensuring “child safety”, it is difficult to choose not to use it as such. As of 2013 [update], the Japanese mobile phone market is broadly divided into a high-end, consisting of smartphones (スマートフォン ( sumātofon), abbreviated as スマフォ ( sumafo) or スマホ ( sumaho)); mid-range, consisting of feature phones ( garakei); and a low-end, consisting of Personal Handy-phone System (PHS, handy phone ( ハンディフォン, handifon) or pitchi ( ピッチ), from PHS ( ピーエッチエス, pīetchiesu)). It concludes that we are approaching a transition point, a degree of embedding of keitai use in everyday life where the keitai, assumed earlier to be “unnecessary” for children, is felt to have become “necessary”.

quot; Lead users play a key role in determining the fate of both technological and industrial development in the digital era. I first heard about this book from Trip Hawkins, during a mobile track of the Game Developer Conference. But on the other hand, I'm wondering what to do about my daughter in her sixth year of elementary school.

A reflection will be offered on how the focus on the tactility will contribute to describe the totality of the media experience.With more than 95% ownership among senior high school students, schools that in the latter half of the 1990s had restricted its use have passed the stage of “tacit consent”, and now many use keitai as a means for communication among students and teachers as well as for e-mailing information about after-school club activity. Instead, parents use a variety of strategies to delay the apparently inevitable acquisition; their children meanwhile may employ their own strategic discursive devices to hasten their keitai ownership.

Moreover, the percentage of respondents who attended national or private junior high schools was 40.

In the early 2000s, mobile games gained mainstream popularity in Japan, years before the United States and Europe. Based on actor-network theory, Dobashi ( Citation2007) suggests that we should not focus on individual “particularities”—reducing the factors influencing such decisions to the specific characteristics, abilities, or tastes of an individual—but that instead we should look at the “environment” of that individual. In fact, what we see is that various circumstances accumulate over time, building a pattern within which initially reluctant or hesitant parents eventually come to see the keitai as inevitable. So if my problem was sim+hypersim+phone+country then it MIGHT work for you, since you wouldn't be roaming or anything. Footnote10 Overall, then, the decision maker regarding elementary school children's keitai acquisition earlier or later is not the children themselves but their parents.