I'm pretty sure, there are phone stores available in Japan..

Absolutely... but they are rther expensive. And unless you have a resident alien card.... you can't actually buy one anymore (post 1996).

best,

............john

Pre-pay is about 10,000 yen for the phone and the PP cards come in 3000 and 5000 yen amounts.

Also if you are in Japan for more then 2 weeks it is a simple matter to get the alien reg card. I suggest it is also a good souvenier.

I don't know what sort of deals the providers in the US have but make sure on the pricing before you go. As long as you do have a 3G phone, you should be able to use in Japan, but roaming charges were about $2 a minute when I was there.

The rent-a-phone companies at the Narita airport was pretty pricey the last time I checked, but free to receive calls, so I have rented from there once before, but for the most part, had friends and family call me, not vice-versa. You can just rent a sim card rather than a phone if your phone is already unlocked.

Actually buying a phone is a lot of hassle, especially through retail since you have to have proof of residence. If you really want one though, what I did was buy a keitai through yahoo auctions japan (still need a shipping location in Japan or overprice on ebay) and once you leave Japan, you can unlock the phone to be used in the States or wherever with a hypersim. You are, for the most part, restricted to DoCoMo phones, however, and internet options and 1seg TV doesn't work outside japan, even with a dataplan.

I'm in Japan at the moment and a friend and I just went to try to buy him a new phone model (his is 2G and new is 3G) today and transfer his EXISTING personal pre-paid keitai account to a new phone. Without an alien registration card he could not do it. Period.

He already got the same story at the phone stores in Narita airport too.

The only thing he could do was to buy minutes for the existing phone. (And the LOCAL rate is jacked up on that DoCoMo phone to 90Y a minute). As soon as that phone account which he owns lapses (the service contract expires because he is not renewing the minutes cards) ..... his phone becomes a useless piece of junk (just like mine did in 2007).

My rentafonejapan cell I'm using here is only 45Y a minute to the USA. A bit expensive at 35Y a minute local..... bit that is still way less than most plans.

best,

..................john

From SG- If you have a 3G phone, it works perfectly well. Mine did.

Do you know if there's some kind of list of 3G phones, or if Sprint has 3G phones? I've been trying to search online, but I'm not exactly technologically savvy, so I don't really understand a lot of the search results.