How the iPhone won over Japan and gave the world emoji
It’s easy to see how the iPhone changed the world 10
years ago — now pretty much every public place is packed with people
peering into their palms in a way that would have been difficult to
imagine before 2007. But as Steve Jobs pointed out during his famous
introduction to the product, Apple was entering a market where the
existing competitors weren’t all that great; they were either somewhat
hard to use and dumb, or hard to use and somewhat dumb.
What if Apple had entered a market with a complex,
entrenched ecosystem based on advanced infrastructure and services,
where devices offered an endless array of features that people actually
made use of? And what if it actually succeeded in overturning this
market and brought many of its advantages to the rest of the world?
That would have been even more impressive. But that’s exactly what happened in Japan.
The first iPhone to hit Japan was the 3G in 2008. At that
point, Apple had answered two of the biggest criticisms of the original
model often made by mobile aficionados: the lack of 3G connectivity,
and the inability to install third-party apps. But the iPhone 3G wasn’t
anywhere near meeting the list of various features that Japanese users
had come to consider table stakes.
There was no infrared port, the most common way to
exchange contact details IRL at the time. The AIM-style SMS chat
interface made no sense in a country where everyone already used push
mobile email. The Safari browser was literally too good — it
couldn’t load Japanese C-HTML mobile websites or services like NTT
Docomo’s i-mode portal, which essentially amounted to a fork of the
entire web. The camera couldn’t focus on QR codes, which were frequently
used to launch said websites. There was no Felica NFC for mobile
payments. There was no TV tuner. Hell, there wasn’t a loop to attach a
little Rilakkuma charm to.
And perhaps most critically, there weren’t even emoji. First developed by NTT Docomo
in the late ‘90s, other carriers like KDDI and SoftBank soon developed
their own interchangeable character sets; emoji, literally meaning
“picture characters,” quickly became an essential feature of mobile
communication and expression in Japan. Apple didn’t have any support for
emoji at all when it launched the iPhone 3G in July 2008, but later
provided a character set for Japanese users with the iOS 2.2 update that
November.
Although you could unlock emoji on global iPhones with
hidden features in third-party apps, Apple didn’t officially enable the
characters around the world until iOS 5 came out nearly three years
later. The Unicode Consortium had been codifying emoji since 2007, but
Apple was the first major international phone maker to add compatible
characters to its own software, and it’s impossible to imagine the
subsequent global phenomenon taking place without the iPhone.
I moved to Japan in 2008 and got a midrange SoftBank flip
phone made by NEC. I really loved that phone. I could watch TV or play Mega Man 2
on the train, it lit up with cute LED animations on the outside
whenever I got a message, and the vibrant world of Japanese mobile
communications was a great way for me to start making some headway with
the language. I’d meet people at parties, exchange details with them
over infrared, then arrange to hang out the next time by sending an
emoji-peppered message to their @softbank.ne.jp mobile email address.
Today, although I might sometimes have trouble with a tricky turn of
phrase in a novel or a phone call with the tax office, I consider myself
absolutely fluent at texting in Japanese. It’s like a whole other form
of the language unto itself, and without any formal education it’s the
one I ended up learning first.
That phone died the next summer in an unfortunate camping
downpour — Japanese phones have been waterproof for a while, yes, but
at that point it was still a high-end feature — and I decided to replace
it with an iPhone 3G. Granted, the iPhone clearly offered a ton of
advantages over a Japanese flip phone, like Google Maps, the App Store,
its breakthrough user interface, and so on. But often none of that
mattered. Often, using an iPhone in a Japan just straight-up sucked. The
missing features hurt, of course, but the bigger problem was that
having experienced what life was like in the tightly integrated Japanese
mobile ecosystem, moving to the iPhone felt like using a product that
simply wasn’t designed for the world I lived in. Because, well, it
wasn’t.
How, then, did Apple get to its current position where Japan is one of its strongest and most lucrative markets?
Although there were teething pains associated with using
an iPhone in Japan at first, the product’s breakthroughs were no less
revolutionary here. Apple’s brand was already very strong, and the
iPhone was always going to find at least some audience among Japan’s
affluent, tech-savvy consumers. But it wouldn’t have reached critical
mass without some extremely aggressive moves from its initial carrier
partner, SoftBank.
SoftBank secured exclusive rights to the iPhone in Japan
much like AT&T did in the US. Japanese carriers, however, were
traditionally far more involved in the development of phones, and
Japan’s two biggest — KDDI and the dominant NTT Docomo — refused to sell
the iPhone for years. This gave SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son,
a longtime friend and admirer of Steve Jobs, an opening to
differentiate his also-ran network. Son deployed audacious pricing and
smart marketing campaigns to position the iPhone as an exotic, advanced,
and attainable device. I got my 3G in 2009 for essentially nothing via a
campaign called “iPhone for everybody.”
The SoftBank CEO’s relationship with Jobs also helped
Apple tailor the iPhone for Japan. “Masayoshi Son was quick to start
persuading Apple how important emoji is in the Japanese market and Apple
decided to make the change,” veteran Japanese tech journalist Nobuyuki
Hayashi tells me. “If the initial iPhone carrier were someone else, I am
not sure if they could successfully persuade Steve Jobs to add emoji to
the iPhone.” SoftBank’s tactics shook up the Japanese mobile industry,
and KDDI eventually started selling the iPhone with the 4S in 2011.
After years of losing subscribers to its smaller rivals, NTT Docomo
finally caved in 2014 for the iPhone 6 launch.
Once it was clear that Japan would indeed move from flip
phones to smartphones, Apple found itself with very little competition.
Arch-rival Samsung’s mobile presence in Japan is very small barring the
occasional burst of promotion from Docomo and KDDI, which usually remove
the manufacturers’ logos along with much of the individual brand cachet
they may have. And domestic phone makers have struggled to compete on
performance or pricing in recent years; the likes of Panasonic, Toshiba,
and Fujitsu have largely retreated from the high-end market.
The iPhone remains the best-selling smartphone in Japan,
then, and it’s hard to see that changing anytime soon. And the launch of
the iPhone 7 was arguably more significant here than anywhere else.
Apple’s first waterproof phone brought it up to par with Japanese
manufacturers, and the company also produced Japan-specific models compatible with Felica,
the ubiquitous version of NFC found in train ticket gates, vending
machines, and store registers. It’s another rare example of Apple
bending its own products to fit a specific country. The traditional
Apple Pay model simply wouldn’t have worked in Japan, where split-second
payments from topped-up electronic wallets are the norm.
In turn, Apple’s efforts in Japan have resonated around
the world. We certainly wouldn’t have emoji otherwise, and we might not
have waterproof iPhones — even iOS 11’s built-in QR code reader
will primarily be intended for Asian markets. In any case, the iPhone’s
success in Japan is remarkable and unprecedented. Apple came from
nowhere to dominate an insular market, eventually integrated with it,
and brought some of its best elements to everywhere else.
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