I’m in Okayama Japan, (edit: a cool website that shows some of the highlights of Okayama, or see wikitravel) the sister city of San Jose! It’s more of a suburb with a population close to SF. It’s not as dense but it’s a great place to view and visit japan in easy to swallow doses.

Just about everywhere we go, I see individuals on wireless or portable media devices (PSPs seem popular). I see folks using cell phones to do a lot of texting, to use to take pictures and videos for instant publishing.

Many folks use mobile based email to communicate, more so than Instant Messaging, my cousin tells me. There are numerous wifi hotspots as there is little infrastructure for a wired network. My cousin ‘borrows’ other wifi signals in his building sometimes their a little spotty he says.

Considering we’re taking the train and public transport quite a bit, (and I see many folks are on the trains) having access to information from wherever you’re at makes sense.

This research from Ipsos indicates that Japan has the highest adoption rate (95% of all households own a mobile devices) of all countires for wireless devices, and it has a high percentage rate that use the web (40% in 2005 browse the web for news). Ipsos also indicates in this report that next to China, Japan has the longest weekly duration of users online, (13.9 hours a week).

I stumbled upon this blog and research site that focuses on the Japan Mobile Revolution, Wireless Watch Japan, if you’re into this amazing usage trend, I would check out this site/blog.

I was supposed to meet Coach Wei at the Ajax conference in San Jose (I covered the keynote only, due to time restrictions) he’s been watching the Web 2.0 space in Japan. Perhaps I’ll meet up with him at a future conference.