Well, I did it and it worked! (post needs pictures, I’ll add some soon!)
I went to Japan for a month and had voice and data on my cell phones, for my trip, on a tourist visa, for about $70 total…
…and I paid for it all with my furreign credit card !!!
A few caveats in the fine print:
1) I already owned a Softbank “dumb-phone” and had used it the previous year for a pre-paid sim. Save an extra Y3,000 cash only please at the airport.
2) I had a few old android phones that I knew worked in Japan with their 3G WCDMA bands.
3) I had all the address info for where I would be staying all lined up in advance, including a local phone number.
So if you are just going to visit for 2 weeks, save yourself the hassle and get the $1/day plus insane charges rental sim from Softbank, at the airport and stick it in your unlocked iPhone or android phone. Sure you will end up spending $70-80 or more, Big Deal. Enjoy!
Likewise, if you have a teaching visa or some other residency papers, you might want to consider a data-voice plan, which you can get since you are NOT a dodgy tourist. It will keep for phone from overheating and exploding. (just kidding)
Ok.. Here’s how it all went down.
Voice plan by Softbank pay as you go:
Refill the Softbank flip-phone at the airport for Y3,000. This gives me 2 months of 6Y/sec phoning, text messaging (ask them to activate the text plan) and a year of receive only after that – which will do you no good after you get back from Japan – except that the sim and the assigned phone number will still be valid, so you can activate it again next year.
No, you cannot top it up while out of Japan. Phhhhttttt!
If this is your first time setting up a Softbank phone (or any Japanese phone co.’s pay as you go plan, because you bought one of my wonders, or a friend met you at the airport with their mom’s old flip phone), you will have to drop another Y3,000 in Japanese hard currency to get registered. They will also want you passport, local address, blood sample ,DNA swab and sexual preferences. (Ok, I exaggerate – passport and local address will do) This extra charge kicked in 2 years ago and sucks. I hope the government wises up before the 2020 Olympic games.
On the positive side. the airport Softbank counters can process your outlander credit card. DO NOT ASSUME that the Softbank shop in your local town can do so as well.
Note that Softbank wants a Softbank flip phone for pay as you go accounts. Showing them an old unlocked WCDMA flip phone from home will get the X with the fingers sign. Ditto for another Japanese company’s unlocked phone Showing them the unlocked Softbank ZTE smartphone will cause their little robot heads to assplode, because those smartphones were originally locked not only to Softbank, but to a subset of special data-plan sim that they don’t offer any more. So even though you unlocked it and use it for 2G/3G pay as you go back in the frozen wilds of Canada, they will get confused and refuse to sell you a pay as you go plan.
Domo Arrigato…. (Ok, the counter folks can figure out what you are up to, but rules is rules and no one ever got a bonus in Japan for breaking them)
Besides, the flip phone’s battery charge will last for 2-3 days. Do you really want a battery warning from your power-hungry smartphone when you are calling your only friend in Japan at 11pm to intercede for you with the nice officer who thinks you stole that bike you are riding? …When your breath smells a bit beer-y? Speakerphone ON! Yipe: “Please tell the nice officer you lent me your brother’s bike!”
Flip phone (also called “feature phones”) are for pay as you go voice and SMS text. And for calling 119 when you fall down the side of a cliff.
Android phones are for Data-only plans.
A data only sim (or data only USIM as all sims are confusingly called in translated Japanese correspondence) looks like a regular phone sim, but connect only to a data network. We have these in the U.S. and Canada etc too, we call them Tablet sims.
Basically, a data sim gets you data connectivity, usually a gig or two per month for under Y1,000 plus set-up fee. Some will whack you for extra fees over that use, others will just pro-rate the usage by days and if you go over, clamp the speed down to slightly above dial-up speeds for the rest of that day. Since you can still use Google Maps and upload twitter pix at low speeds, guess which plan type I prefer. If you plan to live-stream a matsuri with periscope, get the former type and pay the overage.
I went with ASAHI NET [http://asahi-net.jp/en/] and their LTE plan [http://asahi-net.jp/en/service/mobile/lte/]
Asahi has English support staff and it cost me all of 6 cents/min on my discount long distance plan to call them at 9pm at night in Canada (10 or 11am Tokyo time, depending on the season) and pester their staff (Hi Bruce!) until I had signed up a month before my trip (note the hard to understand 2 month free sign up campaign) and charged it to my Canadian Visa card (which they confirmed as working). Much fun was also had getting the full address where I was staying into their system (they want the name ??? of the apartment building??) as well as the correct name for the size of the sim I needed for my old smartphone. All in all, after 10 minutes I had confirmation that two envelopes were on their way to my friend’s house and that I would be charged about Y3,000 plus tax or so for 2GB per month plus unlimited slow speed after that. At no time do they need my passport info or anything like that. No voice plan so no chance I would do phone fraud on old ladies, so no passport, blood sample, DNA swab, etc required by law.
Aside: I see they are going up to 3GB in August. Bonus!
Once in Japan, I ripped open the envelopes, inserted the sim and figured out the APN SETTINGS (Access Point Names) deep in the settings section of my phone. A simple version of the settings can be found here: http://asahi-net.jp/en/support/guide/mobile/lte/index.html
You will get a more detailed printed version in the mailed package. You will be the ” Standard settings (dynamic IP address)” one.
Here is another Data-sim provider’s guide, with screenshots,for a general idea.
http://rental.cdjapan.co.jp/contents/en_JPY/SETUP
Of course the names in the fields vary.
Wait for it, punch up the browser and do a Google search. Hooray!
Turn on the GPS, pull up Google Maps… Wow! There I am!
Now for the bad news. If you were a permanent resident, you could have signed up for B-mobile’s Data + Voice plan. You would never, never, never use the voice service, because it costs too much, but your smartphone would not be having conniption fits trying to lock onto a voice service tower signal. It is having such conniption fits right now. There is a sim in your phone’s slot, so that means that something should connect, only it can’t, because the sim is set to refuse all voice service connections. Your phone has now boosted it’s transmit and receive functions to the max and is SCREAMING out for understanding – which it will not get. Meanwhile your battery is getting drained. Fast!
Airplane mode time!
Oh, and I suppose you can do all this stuff with an old iPhone 4 (or 5 -it uses the funny mid-sized sim, the 6 uses the reall teeny tiny one) as long as you have it Jailbroken/ unlocked.
Oh, by the way, a few more info bits. Most of all the data-sim plans in Japan are subcontracted from NTT/ Docomo. NTT used to be a government company and they over-built data capacity like 100 men. So they subcontract it out. But when the sim arrives in the mail, it looks like an NTT/Docomo sim. That’s the way it is. And no, NTT/Docomo is by no means the cheapest.
These subcontractors are all called MVNO’s for some reason.
More on the usual ones here: Read the fine print to see if you can get any plans mentioned on a tourist visa: http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan
So that’s how I did it.
Sure I had to keep the smartphone in Airplane mode when I didn’t need it and yup, it was a bit of a pain to wait until it came back to life before I could tweet a picture, but it worked. On the day before I flew home I pulled the sim and mailed it back to Asahi Net. Later I found out that I had messed up the cancel notice timing and had therefore bought an extra month of service I couldn’t use, for a total of 2 theoretical months of service that turned into 3, even though I was only there for 1 month, all for appx $40 total, so I could complain, but really, why bother?
I never exceeded my daily slice of the 2GB/month, so I was never slowed down. And I never had to beg for the password for a wi-fi hotspot at a coffee shop either. I was even able to make short Google Voice calls. I switched between 2 old android phones and tried and tried to connect a certain useless Phablet, and even ran “tethering” on one of them just to see if I could do it. Asahi Net is cool with all this. Some others are not. Read the fine print and ask questions.
And when the tall buildings in one block of Yokohama blocked my data signal, I could still text on my Softbank dumb-phone. Hooray for the department of redundancy, redundancy department.
As Miles O’Brian quipped:
“Never go into battle without multiple redundant backup systems!”
Advanced Class:
For next year I am going to try the Xposed + Docomo Data Sim patch on my new Android 4.4 dual sim smartphone. I will even see if the old ZTE Star 7 running Android 2.3 (AKA Gingerbread) can be coaxed into running the modified Xposed framework for 2.3 / Gingerbread. If not, I will still keep the old ZTE with me – I have 2 spare batteries for it.
More details on the patch are here: http://www.japanmobiletech.com/2013/08/improved-fix-for-docomo-mvno-data-only.html
Be warned: this is advanced voodoo! Your phone need to be unlocked, “rooted” and you should probably back it up completely before mucking about. Not quite a rom modification, the “framework” approach stuffs a little extra on top of your phone’s stock Android system, allowing you to load a patch that tells the silly phone transmitter and receiver to calm down and stop looking for voice services because they aren’t any. Data only. Go back to sleep. These are not the droids…
The whole Japan Mobile Tech site is full of neat info, but it is a bit advanced and geared to
folks who live in Japan, on work visas, residency cards, etc. Visit and enjoy: http://www.japanmobiletech.com/
By the way… If you think it is odd that you carry a flip/ dumb/ “feature” phone around as well as a smartphone, check out this recent study. Plenty of folks in Japan do it too, to save big. See: Cheap smartphone SIM card deals in Japan By Ken Y-N at the What Japan Thinks blog.
Q1: Do you have another communications device as well as the one you use your cheap SIM card on? (Sample size=1,064, multiple answer)
| Yes, feature phone |
55.5% |
| Yes, tablet |
52.3% |
| Yes, other |
4.5% |
| No, no other device |
16.6% |
So that’s a wrap!
Next time, I might detail on what to do when your $45 Ebay Phablet from China turns out not to have the WCDMA bands it claimed to have, or how to convince the local Softbank store staff to “sim-lock remove” your used Softbank ZTE Star 7 smartphone for only Y3,000 plus tax, plus 1 hour of confusion, avoidance and denial.
Hint: Smile and be politely persistent.
My Japanese Cell Phone 