Voices In Space

Yesterday would've been really unpleasant except I was obliged to walk for several hours. Yes, I like walking that much. It was a long walk for a smart phone. I had to get a new smart phone. When I came to Japan in 2020, I bought an iPhone 5 for just 5000 yen, or about thirty two dollars. The Japanese generally dislike old technology so it's easy to find old phones and appliances at various used stores such as Hard Off. I hate smart phones so the fact that the iPhone 5 could make and receive calls made it perfectly adequate for me. But then last week I discovered it no longer makes or receives calls.

Apparently my service provider, Softbank, discontinued use of "3G" on the 15th of this month, as I found out when I visited a store yesterday. The iPhone 5 doesn't support anything higher. Apparently I needed something no older than an iPhone 12, which was first released in 2020. In the span of four years, they've already gotten up to the iPhone 15! You may be slightly confused that this information is new to me but you have to realise my disdain for smart phones runs pretty deep. Sure, I have to admit they're useful. When I visited Tokyo a couple years ago, it was nice to have Google maps at my finger tips. When I first arrived in Japan, I didn't have a working smart phone so I had to find spots where I could sit down with my laptop and find wifi, which was certainly cumbersome. But I dislike the way smart phones lull people away from physical reality. You may get where you're going using google maps on a smart phone, but you actually learn about an area by walking it and looking around, getting a little lost, and doing it multiple times. There are plenty of foreign teachers in Japan who know nothing about the towns they've lived in for years. I talked to one American who casually spoke of the courage it took him to visit a hamburger restaurant down the street from his apartment.

Anyway, I didn't find a sweet deal like I did with the iPhone 5 four years ago. The Hard Off I went to had only one smart phone calibrated for Softbank and it was 110,000 yen, or around 711 dollars. That's not much different from the price of a new one. I didn't buy it and walked to another used goods store. It put me in a bad mood, feeling the increasing inevitability of being forced to spend a lot of money on something I really didn't want. How can so many people afford these things? Practically everyone at the schools where I work, teachers and students, have them. Presumably parents have their own and then buy others for their kids! How did it come to this? I did read recently Japan has a much higher standard of living than other countries.

I ended up ordering an iPhone 12 from Amazon for about 256 dollars. Hopefully it works. I just need to be able to make phone calls, for Pete's sake. It would be nice if I could get Skype working properly on it. It's a weird irony that Skype works perfectly well on my computer for no extra fees. I can make video calls for free but audio calls are the province of a new economic stratum.

X Sonnet #1836

Collected notes were breathing pulp and ink.
Resurging gowns replace your style cheap.
A wobbly chair was pushed beyond the brink.
The captives chat below the stony keep.
An extra mountain scorned the use of names.
As summer stole the spring, a chill was chased.
Across the knights there sat a row of dames.
More dice were rolled than any press has faced.
It's tricks and traps inflate the dummy brain.
A rusty droid's amused by human need.
But hungry buckets find they choke on rain.
Alas, deluge has washed away the seed.
Required calls demand a lengthy walk.
Enormous work conducts the normal talk.