{"id":32154,"date":"2014-07-16T07:34:28","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T07:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=32154"},"modified":"2014-07-16T07:34:28","modified_gmt":"2014-07-16T07:34:28","slug":"japan-enters-the-era-of-smartphones-and-dumbwalking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2014\/07\/japan-enters-the-era-of-smartphones-and-dumbwalking\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan enters the era of smartphones and ‘dumbwalking’"},"content":{"rendered":"
Japan has been a late adopter when it comes to smartphones, but it’s catching up quickly – already more than half the population owns one. But Tokyo is a crowded city, and warnings are being issued about the risk of mass collisions among phone-using pedestrians at one busy crossing.<\/p>\n
It’s 5pm on a Friday and I’m standing in a coffee shop above Shibuya crossing – one of the most famous intersections in the world.<\/p>\n
It’s a place where every two minutes, more than a thousand of Tokyo’s smartly dressed commuters and fashion-making teens gather at eight points, ready to cross – then rush straight for each other.<\/p>\n
It looks like they must crash, this sea of people, but they swerve and swing around each other, like dancers pirouetting, and they all get to the other side safely.<\/p>\n
It’s awe-inspiring, so much so that at times it leads people – including myself – to say rather trite things about how it’s the perfect symbol of Japanese society: the many individuals acting together for the greater good.<\/p>\n
But the reason I’m here, isn’t to gawp in amazement, it’s in the hope that I’ll see people crash.<\/p>\n
I want businessmen ploughing into each other, their umbrellas flying off their arms, and immaculately uniformed schoolchildren tripping up grannies.<\/p>\n
Why may I get to see this now, when I wouldn’t have had the chance even a year ago? It’s very simple – smartphones.<\/p>\n
Smartphone use is booming in Japan. In 2012, only about a quarter of Japanese used them, most being perfectly happy with their everyday mobiles.<\/p>\n
But people have now realised smartphones are just too useful to ignore, especially because they can be used to read newspapers and manga, the Japanese comics which have gone global, without straining your eyes.<\/p>\n
More than half of all Japanese now own a smartphone and the proportion is rising fast.<\/p>\n
But with that rise has grown another phenomenon – the smartphone walk.<\/p>\n
It’s that glacial pace people only adopt when they’re staring at a phone screen – their head down, arms outstretched, looking like zombies trying to find human prey.<\/p>\n
Researchers here have found people don’t just walk more slowly when they’re on smartphones, their field of vision is reduced to 5% of what it should be, and some are worrying what this means for Shibuya.<\/p>\n
Recently the Japanese mobile giant NTT Docomo\u00a0released a simulation<\/a>\u00a0of what would happen there if everyone crossing was doing the smartphone walk.<\/p>\n There would be more than 400 collisions every time, it said, and most likely just 36% of people would get across. Orderly Japanese society as we know it, would be at an end.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, the person who seems most annoyed about this phenomenon is an American.<\/p>\n