temporary cell phones

[Anonymous]

hello all,
I will be in Japan mostly in Tokyo for one month and a half.
I would like to have a cell phone for that time to be in touch
with my family in the states and also to use while in Japan
to be reachable easily by friends/colleauges.
What is the most economical way to have a cell phone in
Japan? The ones you pre-pay seem VERY expensive and I
have a tight budget... any advice???
Thanks very much,
Alissa

[Anonymous]

Yes they are killer expensive but just like me, you have no choice.
Either that or nothing since a working visa & gaijin card are required for the moderatly priced regular services.

I have been unable to find a way around this and it will affect my job search severly.

Pre paid phone calls are >>100<< yen per minute, So my job hunt calls from Tokyo are going to be REAL SHORT.

[Anonymous]

J-Phone preca prepaid is now 60 yen a minute.

[Anonymous]

A true bargain : (

Anyway, Thanks for the update/////

[Anonymous]

Remember, though, incoming calls are free here. So don't make calls from your prepaid phone (unless they're very short), make them from a pay phone, and just use your prepaid for receiving calls.

Also, you might check the back page of recent issues of Tokyo Notice Board; there's a company here that rents phones. I don't know what their rates are, but they may well be rather less than prepaid rates, and of course you'll get web and e-mail and all that good stuff, too.

[Anonymous]

Yahoo have just introduced a new type of short term rental. 10,000 yen deposit and 5 thousand for a call card, meant to be cheaperthan regular cards. Also offer a by the day service, sounds like an option. Good luck

[Anonymous]

We recently had to deal with this issue and what we ended up doing was buying a new Prica J-phone at .jp Yahoo Auctions for Y3000 and a Y3000 phone card. So that was $50 for the few weeks I used it. I made a couple of calls to the U.S. and they were billed at the same Y60/minute rate. It also did email & "skymail" which was fun & useful. You can bring the phone home as a souvenir or sell it after you're done and recoup most of your cost. Of course you would need to enlist a resident in Japan to provide a domestic address and a bank account to furikomi to. As was already mentioned, if you take care to keep outgoing calls short you can get by quite economically.