How long have we looked towards the Land of the Rising Sun for the latest technological advances, for consumer electronics, for the latest musical synthesizers, for a glimpse at a robot-filled future?  Pretty long!  So, why then are more and more Japanese bypassing the latest smartphones in favor of retro mobiles?

We call them clamshells, or flip phones.  But the Japanese call them “Gara-Kei”, which means “Galapagos Phone” – a reference to how they have evolved to serve a uniquely Japanese market.  If you can remember all the way back to the dark ages of 2004, “gara-kei” have regular numerical dialing, a few buttons, an usually have access to email and rudimentary internet services, usually on sites that start with “m” instead of “www”.  And to be sure, Japanese users were accessing those features while westerners were looking at their Nokias and wondering what would come next.

Sales of Gara-kei were up 5.7 percent in 2014 over the previous year.  Sales of iPhones and the latest Androids were down.  50 percent of the Japanese mobile phone market is made of Gara-kei users.

There’s no polling to determine why, but there are some educated guesses we can make.  Japan’s population is aging, and older consumers are less likely to use or even care about the latest smart phone gadgetry and features, preferring just to call, text, and get it out of the way.  Smartphones are expensive; gara-kei are cheap.  Smart-phones are fragile; clamshells gold over and protect the keys and screen.  Smartphones eat batteries; flip-phones sip dainty amounts electricity.