Necessity?

Nicely photoshopped image aside, lets do some mathematics shall we. This endeavour shall not seek to prove or disprove the poor maths skills of lawyers and legal students alike, but would more appropriately give a comparative perspective on living standards between Nippon and Sunnypore. [I have been reading too much legal text, havent I?]

Phone: 0 Yen
Initial Administration Charges: 2580 Yen
Monthly Subscription Charges: 3780 Yen
EZ Web Mandatory Charge: 315 Yen
1000 Packet Discount for Email usage: 1000 Yen

Total: Whatever, you count for me can.



Ok, I know the obvious question would be if you want to save money why subscribe to email in the first place. The answer would be that the 3 main Mobile Service Providers in Japan (Namely NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Vodaphone) do not have integrated SMS service, for you lucky jokers back in Singapore, can you imagine a world where Starhub customers cannot SMS Singtel customers? Youd probably just curl up and die. Anyway, there isn't SMS at all in Japan. Within KDDI itself, of which i am a customer, you could C-mail other KDDI customers but then it is limited to 100 characters, so most people just email. It is cool, to think of it, but they better not start spamming me because I pay for every byte i send and receive, which is what the Packet Discount stands for.

Another thing about Japan is that you have to learn to be very very patient when it comes to administrative stuff. It is true that nowhere else on earth do they treat a customer so well, but on the flipside, the red tape is mindboggling, and when you are tired all the domo gomenasais in the world do not seem to help. Anyway, my gripe is that as an student, I am supposed to be entitled to a 50% discount, which is why I chose KDDI in the first place. (DoCoMo has cooler phones) However, because of my ambiguous status as a "Tokubetsu ChuoKou Gakusei", I am not granted this discount when I am obviously a student. I mean, which part of GAKUSEI do they not understand. Then again, if you were in my shoes you would understand why I just quit trying to convince them and just signed up for the non discounted plan, since i can hence Cmail other KDDI students. The people at the Law Faculty were amazing, and helped me contact the people to demand my student status derived rights, but because of some newly enacted company guideline which is too complicated to explain here, I still cannot get the discount, and the Japanese staff at the Law faculty summed it up accurately and pertinently in one word:

"Ridiculous."