To cellphone or not?

MY first stop of the day was at the bank to open an account. I had the Alien Certificate, passport, stamp and money. I was met by the same two ladies who last time told me I had to get these items to open an account. This time they said the Alien Certificate was not good enough and turned me down. I was in and out in a matter of seconds and very disappointed and off to a not so good start to the day.

Getting a cellphone in most places is considered a bit of a hassle but not something which you need to book an entire day to do. Of course if you speak Japanese in Japan it would probably help...

I walked into the cellphone store with an idea of what I wanted but not sure how it would play out. I needed a phone with the company Softbank. I wanted a cool phone with a great camera for cheap with a one year contract, well ideally of course it would have come with a car and chauffeur too, but I might have been expecting too much.

The girl there seemed fairly friendly, after a bit of an unfruitful exchange of my terrible Japanese and her terrible English she pulled out a laptop and used Yahoo translate to try to get some basic things across. Of course this led to some ridiculously terrible English sentences such as "the phone work it Softbank." I resorted to using broken simple sentence like "how much is phone with 1 year contract". I only hope some of the simple sentences I constructed were translated better than what I got from the Japanese translations...

After an hour of difficult conversation, she told me she had called someone else who spoke English and that they would be there in 10 minutes, So I sat and waited happily for someone I who could answer my questions. The 10 minutes turned into 30, which in turn turned into an hour. Finally another girl arrived and joined the first, her English was simply a memorization of some key phrases the other didn't know.

It took another hour or more (I stopped looking at the time, it was discouraging) to get my questions on how a contract affects how much you pay for a phone, and how the discount systems works. I tried to ask about if a phone bought in Japan would work in Canada, the consensus is that the phone would work, but only with a Japanese SIM card. I expect that if the phone were unlocked it would work in Canada though I'm not sure.

I had to give them my Alien Certificate, Passport and Mastercard (no bank account yet) and a paper on which I had my full address. They also required a home number, so I gave them the number of the guesthouse.

It took them a long long time to get the phone papers organized and input, which included an hour session on scanning and rescanning every part of everything on my passport and Alien Certificate, with many problems and paper jams (my Alien Certificate is now ruffled from being jammed and pulled out of the scanner). It was so funny I was almost laughing.

Finally everything was in place. I was told it would take 30 minutes to process the order. I waited patiently and 30 minutes later it came back declined due to the fact some parts of the forms were improperly filled out. So ensued another bout of fixing papers and scanning and another 30 minute wait. I decided I had to eat something, it was 2:00pm. I left them to wait and grabbed a small snack and drinks from the grocery store nearby. I brought back coke bottles for the two girls, I figured a bit of sugar in their blood might get them going too.

I came back and found out that the forms were Ok but that my permission to pay monthly for the phone instead of in one lump sum was declined. The reasons were "undisclosed by Softbank", meaning they wouldn't tell me. I didn't really want to cough up US$480 for a semi-decent phone in on shot. So I took another cheaper one, both in price US$160 and options, and went with that. I had to go through the whole thing all over. By the time I was accepted and had my phone it was 4:30, nearly 6 1/2 hours after walking into the store. I grabbed the phone I paid for and nearly ran! Oh, and the phones don't come with chargers, you have to pay another US$12 for that too.

The system from what I understand is as follows:
The Phone: you pay a certain amount for a phone, the cheapest being about US$260 and the most expensive somewhere around US$1200. There are no rebates on the phones no matter if you take a plan or not. There is however an extra fee if you choose to go the prepaid card way. The phone however can be paid in monthly installments over 24 months (or in one shot). Of course everyone wants to pay monthly but it's at the discretion of Softbank whether you'll be allowed to.
The plan: you pay ¥800 per month for the Universal Fee (System access fee) plus your plan. plans are fairly cheap but don't include much.
White (basic) - ¥980 call to other users are free between 1am and 9pm. All other calls are ¥42/min(US$0.42).
Double white (add on) - for an extra ¥980 you get to call other phones for ¥21/min(US$0.21)
Basic pack (add on) - ¥318 for email on your phone and text messaging.
Other stuff like TV and Internet etc are available for about US$5 each.

So the plans are pretty cheap all in all.

So what phone did I get?

Here are the specs:
Panasonic 830P
49 x 109 x 15.4 mm and about 114 g
3″ wide LCD screen with 240 × 427 pixels
0.77 inches organic EL external LCD
2 megapixel camera
3G speeds
infrared
Streaming TV support
38MB of internal memory
microSD card support up to 2GB