One of the things that shocks foreigners when they first come to Japan is how phone communication works here. Back in the day Japanese feature phones were light-years ahead of their overseas rivals. Rather than rely on simple text messages, phones sent messages via email.

It caught new arrivals to the country unawares but really was a better system. It allowed for larger messages and for the user to add colour and decoration, which led to a standard set of emoticons which all Japanese phones share to this day. You could also send messages to someone’s phone from any computer, which is good for sending messages for free. This however caused the system’s biggest downfall. It was really easy to spam a phone’s email from a pc. I had to disable emails from computers on my phone because of the constant spam I was getting and I am generally very careful about who I let know my email address.

Fast forward a few years and the entire phone landscape has changed, Japanese phones are no longer number one and pretty much everything uses iOS or Android. Now that smart phones have taken over instant messaging is all the rage. What instant messenger is everyone using? It’s not Facebook Messenger, it’s not Skype and it certainly isn’t any platform specific app. No, everyone here uses LINE.

Never heard of it? I’m not surprised but in about a year users have risen to 20 million in Japan alone. Which is seriously impressive considering that only 10 - 20 million use the likes of Facebook and Twitter here. Hell, Mixi, the leader in the Japanese social network sphere only has 30 million active users and that has been around for ages.

Made by the Japanese wing of Naver, a Korean company it seems to have appealed to the Japanese sensibility by adding something that the likes of Skype and Facebook haven’t, cuteness.

Not only does it use all the common emoticons but it has come up with cute little pictures (which it calls stickers) to insert into the chats. A fair few are available for free but a couple of months back Naver introduced the sticker shop so people with cash to burn can drop a few yen on new sets of cute characters doing lovable things.

The introduction of this kind of thing shows that Naver intends to exploit the hell out of LINE. Capitalising on the intense popularity of the chat program they have introduced an Instagram style camera app. The twist here is that you can put the little Line stickers all over the photos too. They have even made a greeting card app using the popular stickers.  Any picture made in these apps can sent via Line or any other social network for that matter.

Naver have even added a Tetris style puzzle game called LINE Birzzle to the Line brand, any link to the original chat app is spurious at best but if you download it you get free new stickers to use in chats.

It’s looking like Naver want to take over the world. 25 million of its users are based outside Japan, the company expect 100 million users by the end of the year and they have said they want to build a social network to rival Facebook. For now everything they have made is available for free (with micro transactions for extras) which makes them one of the good guys. So, if you want a VoIP chat/instant messaging program with a Japanese feel give it a go, be an early adopter of the Line international revolution.

We use emoticons all the time and by now instinctively know what they mean. Japanese people however, use a whole different set of them which they call emoji. Quite what some of these emoji mean is hard to work out, so to get a grip on my (￣^￣)ゞfrom my
☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆ I turned to Google and found a few interesting things.

What Japan Thinks is a website that I have looked at from time to time which shows the results of various opinion polls conducted in Japan translated into English. In a old post from almost 6 years ago the site lists the 30 most popular emoji of the time. Some of the meanings are pretty obvious, such as (＾▽＾) meaning laughing, but many take some explaining. How we are supposed to discern joyful from ( ・ω・) I’ve no idea.

The question that ran across my lips while looking a these things however was, “Just what face are these emoticons supposed to represent?” You know, it’s not hard to visualise what face :p represents but U^ェ^U , that’s a whole different kettle of fish. The Google search I mentioned before threw up something that may help me, an iOS app called Twikao.

Twikao is an app which takes a picture of your face and then generates a emoji using facial recognition. Armed with this I am going to try to recreate some of the emoji I found in the What Japan Thinks post using my face and see if I can’t get a one to one match.

The challenge begins now!

1- （＾_＾）v Laughing

VERDICT: FAIL, the generated emoji is way too happy (and far less tired looking).

2- (>_<)> Troubled

VERDICT: Hmm, missing (what I think is) the arm but capturing the bags under my eyes beautifully.

3- （　ﾟ Дﾟ）Shocked

VERDICT: Looks pretty shocked to me but the mouth is all wrong. Dunno were it got that sweat drop from.

4- (*￣m￣) Dissatisfied

VERDICT: MEGA FAIL! Despite pulling my best dissatisfied face, I got a happy Wolverine.

5-（*´▽｀*） Infatuation

VERDICT: Gah! This is what I was looking for from number 3. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL.

I’m not sure what has been learnt here, other than the lighting in my room is very yellow.

Remember those old Supasnaps cameras? The ones that had half the film case hanging out and the fold away plastic viewfinder? They were all the rage when I was a kid and I would often take mine on school trips. Unfortunately from a 24 odd exposure roll I would often just end up with 9 photos back from the shop. 1 would be any good, a couple would be blurry and the rest would contain my finger in some shape or form.

My nostalgia for these old things was triggered by discovering the No Finder iPhone app on iTunes. No Finder is a camera app that (you guessed it) contains no viewfinder, just a big red button and some colour options. So you basically have to aim the iPod in the direction of what you want to shoot and hope for the best. This leads to the same sort of unpredictable fun that the Supasnaps camera did in my youth.

I’m am basically a man-child so I decided to go on an outing to a random place and relive my childhood happily snapping away in random directions and discovering the result only after the event. The location I choose was Kappabashi-dori in Tokyo.

Kappabashi-dori is a road near Asakusa’s famous Sensouji temple and is the capital’s go to place for restaurant supplies. The shops along the road sell everything from super sharp knives to industrial fridges to menu holders. Everything including the kitchen sink. The shops are very open to bargain hunters and tourists searching for crockery or unusual gifts. For me however the reason to go was not for the plates but for the delicious plastic food.

If you have ever been to Japan you would have noticed that the most mouthwatering food is on display outside almost every restaurant. This food never goes off because it is not real, it can’t be eaten and only ever touched to give a quick dusting. The fake plastic food is one of the things that Kappabashi-dori is best known for and can be bought from there very easily, as the restaurants buy it or in the form of things like fridge magnets and keyrings.

So below is a collection of photos taken at random, Supasnaps style. I think it came out rather well all things considered but if I had done this with a real camera I would have wasted about two rolls of film or so. God bless the digital age.

I’ll leave up to your imagination quite how many blurry shots I had to edit out.

Wise. Fortress. Exception. Promotion. Potted. Upset. Uphill. Sweet. Niche. Outsiders. Flourish. Coveted. Love. Plate. Jobs. Ninja. Quiz. Aid. Stalwart. Flag. Clarified. Heir. Stale. Hammered. Confidence. Blanks. Futile. Super. Target. Retired. History. Stranded. Solid. Unlucky. Break-up. Teamwork. Involved. Consistent. Karate.

No, I’ve not gone crazy, nor are these the words to a Shiina Ringo song. These are the words that the Opta statistician man ends his tweets with. Opta is the organisation that tracks the stats of football competitions around the world. They have a number a twitter accounts, each serving a different league, which tweet random topical stats about things going on in the world of football. I’m not sure about the others but @OptaJoe, the account for the English Premier League, always ends his posts with a random word at the end.

For example, he may tweet:

31 – Fernando Torres’ 2nd goal v Wolves last weekend saw the most passes in the lead up to a PL goal this season.

and will then append “Teamwork” to the end of that.

Another example is that he once put “Bulldog” on the end of:

25% – A quarter of all goals scored in the Premier League this season have been scored by English players.

I love it. Every time I read one of his posts, I imagine it read in the style of Terry-Thomas trying to chat up a girl.

Recently one of my friends got an iPhone app uploaded to the app store and these Opta tweets have given me an idea for an app of my own. It would have a database of all of @optajoe’s tweets with that magical final word removed. The user would then have to guess what word he used from a multiple choice of 4.

A mock-up of my app. It could be called Opta Prose.

I’m sure you will agree with me when I say it will definitely sell like hot cakes.