If you`ve stumbled upon my blog from an aggregator or blog search engine, you may be a little miffed to find that my entries tagged with Japan thus far havent been a celebration of the technological mecca which the country so cearly represents for many people. So, this is for you.

 I bought a new phone, or `keitai` as we say over here. The phone itself - a Sharp 912SH - is beautiful, with a crystal clear rotatable display, 3.2 megapixel camera, digital mobile TV tuner and a proper web browser. It`s a perfect example of the mythical Japanese mobile phone - well designed, feature packed, technologically advanced, unlikely to be for sale on a high stret near you soon.

 That, however, may be no bad thing, considering the ordeal I had to go through to get one. In Ireland, you can buy a phone in literally 2 minutes. In Japan, you`d better bring a packed lunch. Whole forests were ravaged and octopi drained to produce the reams of paperwork required to obtain my phone. And if - as happened all too frequently - a comma was misplaced or an i left undotted, everything was ripped up and we started again. And again. When we eventually finished our form filling, the people at the other end of the infernal fax machine had wisely long-since called it a night, and we were big return again tomorrow.

 At which point, it all started again.

I have since come to the conclusion that the whole process of buying a mobile phone in Japan is designed to break the human spirity, to render you a shell of a man, ready to be filled with convoluted price-plans and add-ons. Kind of like A Clockwork Orange, but with lots of photocopying.

 Oh sorry, ranting again. Hey, I did see a `Brain Training`-styled `Face Training`game for the Nintendo DS today, where you imitate the on-screen facial expressions in order to train your face. For what, I don`t know. Look like a spastic, maybe.

 Oh wait, that`s Mario Party 8.