Telephones

Installing a telephone line. Unless someone has arranged to have a telephone already installed in your apartment when you move in, this is an area where you will likely need either language skills or outside help. You will have to contact NTT (Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) and ask them to come and install the line. For the privilege of using their business, you will have to pay a deposit of 72,800 yen (around $560), in addition to installation fees, which could be as high as 10,000 yen if an NTT technician has to come out and fool around with the wires. When you leave Japan, NTT pays part of the "deposit" back, around 46,000 yen ($350). [NOTE: all charges valid as of 1995; they may have gone up or down since then.]

Fortunately, there is a way around this: you can buy a telephone line from another foreigner who is leaving Japan. If you look in the Tokyo Weekender, Tokyo Classifieds or the Daily Yomiuri among other resources, you can find advertisements for telephone lines for sale; prices range from 50,000 to 60,000 yen, though you really shouldn't have to pay much more than 50,000. For less than 1,000 yen, you can arrange for transfer of ownership; all you have to do is have the seller make arrangements at his local NTT office, then you both must appear at your local NTT office at the same time to complete the transfer (make sure the person you're buying from has no outstanding bills on the line!). In turn, when you leave Japan, you can sell the line to someone else and get all, not just two-thirds, of your money back.

Basic phone charges come out to about 2,000 a month, not including usage and fees for extra services. Since local calls are not free, usage fees can get high depending on use. For $20 to $40 a month, you can get what is called a "tele-houdai" service which allows unlimited "free" local calls--however, the catch is that you can only make free calls between 11pm and 8am, and you can only call to one of two numbers you register with NTT. This setup is primarily for Internet users who otherwise pay too much as 10 yen every 90 seconds.

Public phones are commonly available and are color-coded; most are green telephones, which take 10- and 100-yen coins as well as phone cards, but only a few of these phones can handle international calls; gray phones are becoming more common, also take coins and phone cards, and all can handle international calls. A type of public phone that is quickly going out of style are pink telephones; now only found in older shops and businesses, pink phones can only take 10-yen coins, cannot handle international calls, and are not incredibly reliable.

TELEPHONE CARDS -- These are business-card-sized flimsy plastic cards which you can buy at a number of locations. They come with a certain amount of pre-paid units on them (e.g., 100 10-yen units, 500 10-yen units, etc.). Insert them into a green or gray public phone and the machine will display how many units are left on the card. When you finish, the phone spits out the card and beeps at you. At intervals, tiny holes will be punched along a line of numbers on the card to show you approximately how many units are left. When depleted, the cards are disposable.

Telephone cards display illustrations or photos on their faces, usually commercial ones; however, personal photos may be placed on specially ordered cards for a fee, and some people even print their name, title and phone numbers on them and use them for business cards. Some people collect depleted phone cards. Phone card pirates have found ways to tamper with them electronically to "recharge" the cards, and then sell them to passers-by; one famous spot you could get them at (at least as of 1995) was the top of the Yamanote line platform staircase at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, where illegal aliens hawked them to commuters.



Here are a few vocabulary words for telephones:

denwa telephone (literally, "electric speech")
denwa bango phone number
denwa-cho phone book
Haro Peiji "Hello Page," NTT's Yellow Pages
denwa o suru/kakeru to make a phone call
denwa o kiru to hang up
rusuban denwa answering machine
naisen extension
hanashi-chuu busy (lit., "in the middle of talking")
104 Number for information
110 Police emergency number
119 Fire/ambulence emergency number
"Moshi moshi" Said when answering telephone



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