The Watch That Is Your Lifeline To the World

#24: The Watch That Is Your Lifeline To the World
By DONOVAN WEBSTER

Photograph by Julius Rooymans

Like most everyone on the streets of Akihabara, Tokyo's electronics district, Masafumi Miki wants to hurry along the future, since he knows precisely what he needs from it.
"I want a wristwatch that brings the world to me," he says. "With Internet access and a cell telephone. It would have my credit- and cash-card numbers installed inside too, so I wouldn't have to carry money and would only press a 'pay' button to buy things. And G.P.S. as well, with G.P.S.-guided maps and, O.K., maybe a digital TV, all miniaturized. All in one to wear on my wrist."

Standing on a crowded sidewalk beneath a late-afternoon sun, Miki, black-haired and 27 years old, tugs at the sleeve of his black suit jacket, revealing his plain black Casio. "Maybe the electronics could snap into different, interchangeable straps," he says. "Black or camouflage or waterproof, so it could be in style at all times."
Miki looks away from his wrist, letting his arm drop. His gaze skips across the flashing neon, blaring music and swirling sidewalk humanity of Akihabara, a 27-block district of downtown Tokyo and the world's epicenter for new-tech. "For me and people like me," he says, "we're interested in practical new technologies to make our lives easier.
"Only a few years in the future," Miki continues, "I can imagine the whole world available to me on my wrist. Small. Useful. All in one. And I'm sure, when this watch arrives, it will come to Akihabara first. It is just a question of time."
If you work in the electronics business or the cell-phone business or have anything to do with high-tech consumer goods, Akihabara sits squarely in the middle of your radar screen. Frank Nuovo, the chief designer for the cell-phone maker Nokia, tells me he makes regular pilgrimages. "Any electronics designer not visiting the Akihabara three or four times a year -- just to see what's going on -- well, they're not doing their job," he says. "They're destined to fall behind."
I've come to Akihabara to catch up, to see the latest goods hitting the high-tech beach. But on my first visit, on a spring evening, as the streets run shiny with rain, I have the impression I've been here before. It takes a minute, but then I realize I'm in a movie cliche: Akihabara is a real-life study for the futuristic Los Angeles of "Blade Runner." The neighborhood is stuffed with thousands of stores -- everything from high-rise chain retailers to peddlers hawking odds and ends from carts and booths -- and as I step from the taxi, I'm sucked right in. With the human traffic surging around me, I try to stay focused and zero in on the goods.
It's immediately clear that the hottest seller in Akihabara is a new iteration of Internet telephones, a technology just arriving on American shores, though available in Japan for nearly two years. Called i-phones, j-phones, e-phones or Web phones (depending on the maker and service provider), each unit is the size of a Three Musketeers bar and includes a small viewer screen, a profoundly miniaturized keypad and a toggle switch for flipping through Web pages.
On the sidewalks of Akihabara, merchants hang the phones on tiered racks like children's toys. I stoped to handle a few of the models, tossing them up and down in my palm. They're nothing like the clumsy cell phones most of us use in the United States. Like Masafumi Miki's dream watch, they're small, useful, all in one. You can buy them in virtually any color -- neon pink, grasshopper green, black, chrome, whatever- but that's only the start. Then you have to customize them.
A quick field study shows that Tokyo -- especially Tokyo's youth -- is under the thrall of a Customizing Fetish. Many decorate their phones with small, budlike lights at the antenna's tips, which flash bright red or blue or white when the phone is in use. Others plaster their handsets with nonsense slogans like "X-treme Colorado Lifestyle 001-0." One phone, in the hands of a teenage girl wearing a navy blue school uniform, is topped by a tiny "Hello Kitty" feline figurine; when you tap the cat, a spring-loaded antenna rockets out to full extension. Still another phone, in a trippy Day-Glo pink, comes with a small digital camera, so you can zap photos to your friends while talking. It's easy to imagine hipsters in Japan having an assortment of phones in their dresser drawers, picking out just the right one for the day like a pair of shoes.
Not everything in Akihabara sells. A cultural anthropologist could spend years deconstructing jumbly piles of dead-end gadgets and appliances in the less-visited corners of some shops and booths. Did someone think the world needed a camouflage-veneered rice cooker? Apparently so, since one sits forgotten on a shelf at the back of one store, covered in dust.
I follow the crowds to the popular gadgets, puzzling over a pen-shaped piece of gray plastic that I eventually learn is Sony's new Music Clip. It plays digital tunes, MP3's and that kind of thing, available on the Internet. I find a lime green digital video camera, which plugs into an i-phone. It's a portable update of the old videophone, and its picture quality is surprisingly lousy. I can easily see these stacked up next to the camouflage rice cooker.
I also can't quite figure out why anyone would want those eyeglass-style DVD viewers, like Walkmans for your eyes. But that puts me in the minority at Akihabara. There's a swell of interest in two competing models I find in a department-store display -- Olympus's Eye-Trek and Sony's Glasstron. Back out on the street, I strap on a Lungman watch, which gives me a read-out on my heart rate. How long will it be before there's one that keeps track of how many calories I'm burning every minute of the day?
The only gadgets in Akihabara that can compete with the i-phones for pure visual sex appeal are the squarish minidisc players. I've seen these before in the U.S., but I was pretty convinced that they were nonstarters, already destined for the scrap heap. Perhaps in the U.S. they are, but not here in Tokyo. A.T.M.-style "Music PODs" are sprouting across the city, allowing kids to pick out the songs and burn their own minidiscs, like mixed tapes. I wonder if the technology flourished in Japan because the players themselves, available in weird colors and designs, make such suitable fashion accessories: another layer of conspicuous techno plastic for kids to wear around.
Standing outside a flashy, six-story Sega arcade, I strike up a conversation with Mimachi Hiroyaso, a 27-year-old pump salesman. He's in search of the best price on one of the strange gray and blue boxes, each about half the size of a cigarette pack, that I've been seeing everywhere. Hiroyaso explains that it's called a Memory Stick, and they store digital images or music or games or data of virtually any kind. You can plug them into your computer or phone or camera. Probably your watch too. The idea is that you carry it around with you, so you always have what you need, a mini-briefcase for the future.
Hiroyaso wants one, but he has been holding out for a good deal. "It will become the connection between my PC and my digital camera, my MP3 player, telephone and DVD television," he says, adjusting a heavy bag slung from his shoulder. "Once I get the Memory Stick, that will be the ultimate thing."
Iwao Yamashita is an executive of the Laox department store, which has a neon-covered high-rise operation smack in the middle of Akihabara. He's also a civic committeeman for the district, so I'm hoping he'll be able to explain how all this technology landed in one place. Tall and lean, dressed in a dark suit, he tells me that Akihabara really began to take shape in the hardscrabble years following World War II. It was where you went to buy black-market radios, cobbled together in workshops and tiny factories from whatever components were available. By the early 1970's, when Japanese electronics makers looked as if they were going to conquer the world, the place started to take off. Nearly $5 billion a year is spent there now.
Yamashita used to work for Matsushita Electric, which started Panasonic -- Japan's first breakaway international electronics brand -- and he still invokes the principles of the company's legendary founder, Konosuke Matsushita.
"Mr. Matsushita believed that new technologies should carry a low price and high availability," says Yamashita, "so the technological jar would fill from the bottom, not go to those who can afford it first to trickle down over time, the way it is done in the United States. This way, technologies that are really useful will be implemented throughout society very quickly."
If there's one thing that comes across from a couple of afternoons wandering Akihabara, it's the growing power of the shopping mob. In the U.S., consumers are passive about high-tech products. We stress out about buying the wrong model or signing up for the wrong service or whatever. In Japan, people plunge right in -- and not only that, they make very specific demands. In Akihabara, they seem almost to will the new technologies they want into being.
While teenagers dominate much of the tech market in Japan, Yamashita believes that's changing. "We will see the emergence of a new silver market," he says. "People in middle age now, comfortable with new technologies and able to pay for innovations that make their lives more comfortable as their health begins to fade." Already, Yamashita says, a massage chair that recognizes your sore spots has become a big seller in Japan. He also has high hopes for a microwave oven that you can e-mail from work with instructions on how to cook your dinner. There'll be an exploding market, he predicts, for voice-activated technologies that release people from keyboards and switches. "Everything in the coming years will be more like that," he says. "We're moving from developing the hardware -- the appliances themselves -- to the software: the applications these appliances are capable of. Really, we're looking at the possibility of a new kind of world."
On a recent Friday evening in Tokyo, one of the first warm sunsets of spring, the cherry blossoms have started scattering their pinkish-white petals, and people are out walking, enjoying the twilight. Young executives trudge home, their ears buried in cushioned earphones connected to minidisc players. In cafes, men sip beer and read their e-mail on wireless laptop PC's.
I stop a pair of 14-year-old girls emerging from the subway, Rie Tanimoto and Aiko Tanaka. Dressed in the global teenager uniform of jeans, sweatshirts and platform sneakers, they're out for the evening, clutching their i-phones. "My parents got me this last year," says Tanimoto, showing off her small, silvery accessory. "It's surprising how quickly it has become a necessity; I can be out, in the middle of Tokyo, and still be connected. My phone is an immediate tool-"
"And the e-mail is a necessity," Tanaka adds. "You can still get messages at times you can't use the telephone -- when you're in class at school. You've got information you might have missed otherwise."
Still, though their phones have become peer life-support units, they are not perfect. "I'd like a bigger screen," says Tanimoto. "As long as the phone's body itself doesn't get any bigger -- just the screen."
"I'd like one that gives a better-quality picture," says Tanaka.
"And," adds Tanimoto, "I wish I could listen to music on it, MP3 or the radio. So I could have portable music as well as my friends' phone calls and the e-mails and the Web."
With that, the girls walk off into the dusk, i-phones dangling on lanyards from their wrists. No doubt, right now in Akihabara, engineers are struggling to miniaturize a digital music player and somehow insert it into the next-generation Internet/wireless telephone. And when they finish, they'll have to get right to work on Masafumi Miki's all-in-one watch.

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June 11, 2000

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