Like many foreigners in Japan, my credit card’s billing address is in my home country (US), so I’m not able to access the Japanese app store. Well, not without some fiddling around, at least (check out Wide Island View’s article: How to access Japan-only apps for more info…). In any case I haven’t gotten around to trying to access the Japanese app store yet, so for this article I’ll keep things simple: all these apps can be downloaded from the US app store.

1. 乗換案内 (Norikae Annai)

Developer: Jorudan Co., Ltd.
Price: FREE
App Store: Get Norikae Annai at the iTunes store

This one’s a no-brainer. Next to phone calls and email, finding train times is one of the most important functions that a mobile device in Japan needs to be able to execute. While on most traditional Japanese phones this is achieved by bookmarking the site, then visiting it whenever you need information, this iPhone application streamlines the process.

Screenshots

Note: Good train-finding services in Japan are only available in Japanese. This app is not an exception.

If you’re a traveler just visiting Tokyo for a few days, try the English-capable app Tokyo Underground for navigating around inner Tokyo (it’s more of a guide than a train finder). However I can’t offer any detailed opinion on it since I haven’t tried it (I don’t live in Tokyo).

2. QR コード (QR Code)

Developer: Ryo Shimizu
Price: FREE (Pay-version upgrade $0.99)
App Store: Get QR Code at the iTunes store

Japan has two mobile traditions that other countries have yet to really pick up on. One is infrared (赤外線) data transfer (for swapping contact information quickly) and the other is QR codes. While the iPhone doesn’t have infrared capabilities, you can get this app which will whip up a QR Code containing your contact information for someone with a traditional Japanese mobile phone to scan (don’t worry, Japanese mobile phones are light-years ahead of current iPhone apps for being able to successfully decode QRs).

While primarily useful for giving your contact information, you may also want to read some QR data from time to time and my experience (I’ve tried about 5 different apps) is that this app also offers the most reliable reader. See the screenshots below for proof that it works.

Screenshots

The paid version of this app offers you the ability to do stuff with the information read from a QR code. For example, if it reads someone’s contact info, you’ll have the option to add that to your address book… or if the QR code contains a web URL, you’ll be able to jump to the URL automatically. In the free version it just shows you the raw data. Since I use the app primarily to give my contact info to others, I haven’t upgraded yet.

3. 顔文字挿入 (FaceMail)

Developer: n1system ltd.
Price: FREE (Pay-version upgrade $3.99)
App Store: Get FaceMail Free at the iTunes store
＼(^o^)／ わぁいわぁい！！iPhoneで顔文字が使える～！
(゜∀゜)　え？何・・・？　(￣□￣;)!!　3.99ドル！！！高ぇ。
(●д●) 困っちゃうな・・・。

If you like to use Japanese kaomoji (faces made using various characters), then this is the app for you. You start drafting an email with this app and can insert various faces from different categories, and then either copy and paste them into another app or send your email draft with faces to your regular email app to finish.

Screenshots

You get access to some faces (such as the ones I used above) for free, but a much bigger selection with the pay version and you can even add your own custom faces. I really want this app but I’m not sure yet if I want it enough to pay $4 for it. Might wait for it to go on sale or something… hmmm…

4. らじおたっち (LadioTouch)

Developer: Kawauso.com
Price: FREE
App Store: Get LadioTouch at the iTunes store

It’s no Pandora but at least this Japanese internet radio app doesn’t give me any problems because of my region. (If anyone knows of a better Japanese internet radio app, please let me know)

Screenshots

I’m not an expert on internet radio so this comparison might be completely wrong… but the way it works reminds me of how shoutcast radio stations felt like 8 years ago or so. You can’t skip songs, and you might have to check through a few channels before you get a decent signal and something that is actually playing music rather than talk radio. Although on the other hand Japanese talk radio could be a good way to improve your Japanese…

I wonder if this app works outside Japan?

5. SkyBook

Developer: aill
Price: $3.99
App Store: Get SkyBook at the iTunes store

What you say?! 7000 Japanese classic short stories and novels by authors like Akutagawa Ryuunosuke, Natsume Soseki, Dasai Osamu and Mori Ougai?! On iPhone?! YES, please!!

This app allows you to search and download from a huge collection of free (= copyright expired or copyright released by author) fiction and non-fiction titles at Japan’s Aozora Bunko (the 7000 titles are not automatically available to you for offline reading, you have to download them from within the app). But in fact what SkyBook does is not what sets it apart, as there are a number of apps that access the same collection in the same way (some for free). The beauty of this app is how well organized and presented it is. Books you download get placed on a nice slide-able bookshelf and you get great options for customizing your view (although I like the default settings best). Searching Aozora with SkyBook is also much less painstaking than with some of the other apps.

Screenshots

As a bonus tip, if you come across a word you don’t know or can’t read, touch it for two seconds to open up a search dialog for the word that goes to Goo’s dictionary (= the dictionary.com of Japan). You can look up the word quickly and then go right back to reading without ever closing the app, beautiful! This app is a must-have among must-haves for anyone with sufficient Japanese reading skill.

6. 大辞林 (Daijirin)

Developer: MONOKAKIDO Co., Ltd.
Price: $21.99
App Store: Get Daijirin at the iTunes store

This app gives me an otaku-gasm every time I open it. For those of you who don’t know… Daijirin is kind of like the Webster’s or the Oxford dictionary of Japanese; it is arguably the single-most defining modern Jap-Jap dictionary there is, a truly massive tribute to the Japanese language, and this app pulls everything together perfectly for the iPhone.

Get this, all 238,000+ entries in the dictionary are laid out in a beautiful grid which you can scroll both horizontally and vertically. You can literally scan word to word across the whole language! Now that alone would be enough to keep me entertained for hours, but the dictionary has also added illustrations for many popular entries, more entries than were in the most recent print edition and a bookmark and history function to help you build your next vocabulary list. The cherry on top is that you can also select any word within a definition to jump to the definition for that word.

Screenshots

Yes, it is Japanese only, made by and for Japanese people. It may look expensive compared to most other apps, but to have this on your iPhone is worth several times what they’re asking.

Now all we need is the Daikanwa for iPhone…

7. Imiwa?

   Developer: Pierre-Phi di Costanzo
Price: FREE
App Store: Get Imiwa? at the iTunes store

While it’s not the monster dictionary that Daijirin is, “Imiwa?” is an amazing feat in and of itself. This Japanese-English iPhone app is great for quick translations and has a surprisingly complete and reliable index of words. I honestly think this is as good as or even better than the Genius J-E dictionary that is in most people’s hand-held electronic dictionaries (but not the E-J dictionary as I will explain in a moment). I have this app, use it frequently, and highly recommend it to anyone, including all travelers, students of all levels, Japanese native speakers, and anyone else who comes into contact with Japanese on a regular basis.

I do however have a couple reservations about this program. My biggest gripe: all data is indexed by Japanese word. This is great for looking up a Japanese word in English, but not so great if you’re going the other way. A search for an English word brings up a list of difficult-to-differentiate Japanese words that contain your query in their translation/definition, and you have to check each of these entries one by one, a pretty frustrating process that can also make it easy to pick the wrong word.

Screenshots

Also, a recent update seems to have resolved a lot of issues with bad and incorrect example phrase translations. But I still can’t help but be wary when the romanizations for many sentences have had their spacing inserted by someone who clearly had no business doing so. Imiwa? does differentiate between “Certified” and regular examples, thankfully.

8. 漢字でQ (Kanji de Q)

Developer: GYRO Inc.
Price: $2.99
App Store: Get Kanji de Q at the iTunes store
uquery link: 漢字でQ

Think you’re good at kanji? Think again. This app provides a simplistic yet fun quiz-game interface to help you polish your Japanese with around 4000 難読 (nandoku = difficult to read) words. This app was intended to be challenging for Japanese natives so it’s definitely only for advanced learners.

Screenshots

This app also makes for a great party game if you’re out with Japanese people. There’s a few apps like this but this one seemed to me to have the largest and best selection of words.

9. Kamehameha

Developer: Issay Yoshida
Price: FREE
App Store: Get Kamehameha at the iTunes store… NOW!
uquery link: Kamehameha

Yeah right, as if there was any chance at all that I would not list this toy.

Screenshots

Press start to begin “charging” your Kamehameha beam, and when you’ve built up enough energy (= when you’ve struck fear into the heart of your opponent by dramatically saying ka~~me~~ha~~me~~!), then you thrust/swing your iPhone forward to release the beam (HA~~~~~!!!!!!!).

Just remember to check to make sure your iPhone has its usb cable unplugged first… and be careful not to actually hurl your several hundred dollar 3GS into a concrete wall or your friend’s forehead.

10. TSUZUMIN

Developer: Tempus Fugit, Inc.
Price: FREE
App Store: Get TSUZUMIN at the iTunes store
uquery link: TSUZUMIN

Instant Japanese atmosphere. I love these sounds.

One more thing

Studying Japanese? Nihonshock offers a free digital Basic Japanese cheat sheet (in PDF form), and it looks awesome in iBooks! It’s totally free, so go get yours today. If you like it, there’s a whole set of advanced cheat sheets available in printed form, and also a digital version of the Numbers and Time cheat sheet for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

Final Word

Well, that’s all for now. If I find any more awesome Japan-related apps around the app store I’ll be sure to let everyone know. I might post a follow-up article on apps from the Japanese store once I get around to figuring out how to get in… anyway, follow me on twitter since that’s the one place I will definitely post cool apps I find, even if I don’t get around to blogging about them.

Further Reading

Here are a couple links to more articles around the internet with Japan-related iPhone app info. Happy surfing!

• A guide to useful iPhone apps in Japan by Wide Island View
• How to access Japan-only apps, also by Wide Island View
• Roundup of Japanese grammar/vocab study iPhone apps

Sharemo is Japanese ingenuity at its best. It’s a new kind of website, dubbed “social sharing“, where people can list things they have but don’t need around the house, and borrow or take similarly listed items from other people across the country.

Sharemo homepage

Click to enlarge.

Every item sent through Sharemo is paid for on delivery, so you only pay for what’s shipped to you. There aren’t even any fees to sign up. Interested yet? I thought so…

This almost sounded too good to be true, so I decided to sign up and check it out for myself. Here’s what I discovered…

What do you need to sign up?

1. a Japanese physical address
2. a Japanese mobile phone email address
3. some knowledge of Japanese language or a Japanese friend
   • The website is in Japanese only.
4. about 5 minutes

Sharemo works as advertised

I quickly set out to find a couple small items to test the service. After browsing through a small selection of Sharemo’s more than 35000 listed items, I eventually selected this Nintendo DS game and a couple of Haruki Murakami books. I requested the items through the Sharemo website on a Saturday night, received shipment notifications (that told me how much shipping would cost) on Monday (for the DS game) and Tuesday (for the Murakami books), and the items arrived at the time I requested (9~12AM) on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively. Fabulous!

Each item you borrow from someone on Sharemo has a share period (シェア期間), which in my case is 10 days for the game and 90 days for the books. This period starts after I order the item and during this period no one can put a request in for it, but after it’s over the item becomes available for the next user to request. How long you will be able to keep it after the period is over depends on if there is someone who wants it next, so basically you just wait. Then when another Sharemo user decides they want one of the items that I currently have, they “order” it, I get access to their mailing address and I send it to them COD.

In addition, if you are “borrowing” from someone in the same city as you (or somewhere close), you can even privately arrange with the current holder to go pick up the item yourself or meet somewhere and exchange, which will save you the shipping fee. Some people will contact you after you make the order and suggest different shipping methods to try and save you some money.

What’s available on Sharemo?

There’s a lot of junk on Sharemo, to be honest. Used baby clothes, AV cables for your TV and so on. You know, the kind of stuff that’s left over at the end of a garage sale. But everything is nicely categorized so you can find something you want fairly easily. Personally, I think Sharemo is most useful as a resource for finding…

• Video games
• DVD movies
• Books & manga
• Kitchenware
• Small appliances

But you can also get things like used clothing, musical instruments and sporting goods. Here’s a sample listing and a part-by-part translation (click to enlarge the picture if you can’t read the numbers).

Listing Translation

Click to enlarge

1. suihanki = rice cooker
   • This is the title for the item listing.
2. furi- = free/available
   • This is the status of the item.
   • There are 4 different statuses:
     • Available (フリー/furi-),
     • Being Shared (シェア中/shea chuu),
     • Take only (引き取り限定/hikitori gentei)
     • Retired (引退/intai).
3. Listing period.
   • How long the item will be listed on Sharemo for before it is retired, the original owner chooses this when they list (or as they say on Sharemo, when you “デビュー = debut”) an item.
4. shea ninzuu = number of sharers
   • The number of people that have shared the item so far.
5. kategori- = item category
   • In this case: Appliances/AV/PC > Household > Kitchen
6. shea taishou = share target
   • People can specify a minimum R-point class for an item, either to add some assurance that the persons borrowing are reliable Sharemo users or just simply as a kind of reward for other good sharers.
7. shea kikan = share period
   • How long you will be able to have the item before it can be requested by the next Sharemo user.
8. Item options
   • 引き取り/hikitori = Take — 不可/fuka = Not allowed
   • 入れ替え/irekae = Trade-in — NG = No good (not possible)
     • For multiple items being shared as a set, this is an option for you to keep one of the original items, replacing it with a similar item of your own. (good for clothes, maybe? hmmm…)
   • 付け足し/tsuketashi = Add-in — NG = No good (not possible)
     • For an incomplete collection of items (ie. a manga series that is missing a volume or two), this indicates whether sharers are allowed to add the missing parts if they have it.
9. o-da- suru = place order
   • The button is deactivated because we don’t have enough R-points (see #6)
10. sheamono ID = Share Item ID
11. joutai = Condition
    • Whether the item is in good condition, damaged or broken.

You can also find consumable items like cosmetics or food and drink. And there’s even a category just for pet food (?!). (Note: most consumable items listed on Sharemo are typically “take only” items, not to be returned or passed on.)

Can’t find what you want? Well that’s okay, there’s a request board where you can ask for someone to list a specific item for you! The guys at Sharemo really thought this out pretty well.

Get free stuff (and keep it too!)

Example of an item you can take for free

Listing, borrowing, and sending items on Sharemo all accrue “R” points. Members who have been using the service for a long time and who have saved up many points have access to a wider selection of items to borrow.

But members can also use their Sharemo R-points as a kind of currency to “take” items from other people. These “take only” items (listed as 引き取り限定) can be “purchased” with an amount of your R points specified by the person who listed the item (0 to 1000 points—yes, there are items you can take for 0 R points). You still have to pay for delivery, though.

From what I’ve seen of the items so far, most of the “take only” items are available for 100-500 points, which is not that much considering you get 500 points for signing up or listing an item and 100 points for passing on a borrowed item. You also get points for things like logging in and commenting on an item.

Get rid of your junk

Well, not everything is easy to get rid of, even on Sharemo. People probably won’t want to pay the shipping cost to borrow or even take your stinky old refrigerator, but if you’ve got lots of old books, small kitchen appliances, computer peripherals and old clothes that are cluttering up your tiny Japanese apartment, then this is a good option for you.

Worried about shipping?

If you’re just starting with the service, there’s an element of uncertainty about the shipping aspect of Sharemo. How much will it cost? How long will it take? What if I’m not home when the item arrives? How do I send to the next person when they ask for it? Well worry not, I tested the waters myself and all is safe.

Cost is I think just about what you would expect. Delivery of the Nintendo DS game I borrowed was 600 yen and the two small Murakami books were also 600 yen shipped together. For the books it might have been cheaper just to buy them used at one of Japan’s many used book stores but oh well. I think my next test will be to borrow a coffee maker and see how much that costs to deliver. I’ll be sure to add that information into this article later.

As for delivery time, once an item is in the mail system it takes only a day or two to arrive, and you specify a desired delivery time when you request the item. But the catch is you never know how long it will take the sender to actually get around to mailing it. This isn’t really a problem though as my (limited) experience is that people are very timely with their shipments. Japanese are typically very responsible which is part of the reason a site like this actually works.

my pay-on-delivery DS game as it arrived

If you’re not home when your COD (着払い/chakubarai) Sharemo item arrives, that’s not a problem; you get an Undeliverable item notice in your postbox and you have to take it to your local post office (or go through one of the delivery re-scheduling procedures, which you can even do online), where they’ll ask to see your ID and then give you your item and take your money.

To send your shared item out again, simply put it in an envelope, box, bag or whatever the thing fits in and take it to the post office. Tell them you want to send it via 「ゆうパック着払い」 (yuupakku chakubarai) and the staff will be able to help you.

The history of Sharemo

Apparently Sharemo has been around for some time on the Japanese mobile web, but it opened its service up to more users with a standard desktop-browser website this Summer. At the time of this article they were still running their grand opening campaign which gives users 500 R for signing up.

Sharemo is owned by Enigmo Inc., a Tokyo company focused on internet shopping and marketing services.

Relevant links

• Sharemo website
• Enigmo website (English)
• Official Sharemo English-language profile page
• My profile on Sharemo!
• Sharemo on Twitter (though they never tweet…)
• A smaller, older article on Sharemo at Techcrunch

Okay, that’s a wrap. Happy sharing, everyone! Let me know if you find anything interesting