Suicide seats and Japanese phones

Phones come with everything things days. Japanese phones, however, are miles ahead of the ones we use. According to the latest statistics from the country’s Telecommunication Carriers Association, a whopping 74% of the country’s mobile phone users are now carrying around 3G devices. For the less techie types, that’s a phone that can connect to the internet at hyperspeed.

Just what are the Japanese using these ultra-sophisticated handsets for? I went to the EZweb home page of KDDI, the country’s leader mobile network operator to find out. My Japanese being about zilch, I clicked on Google’s translation service, which gave me this.

Music, Movies, Shopping, Games, Entertainment, Learning and Reading, so far so good. EZ Nabi Walk and EZ Suicide Seat, however, gave me pause. I think we are talking about personal sat nav, which sounds like a great thing to have when travelling or just getting from A to B in a new part of town. But an EZ Suicide Seat?

Further clicking - with the handy translator - yields the explanation that the “suicide seat” function is for using the sat nav function while being driven in a car. It’s called that, the site explains, because ”the person who sits in the suicide seat supports the driver.” I guess that’s up until he or she commits suicide.

To be fair, Google admits that this translation service is still in beta.