Losing your Cellphone in Japan

Ben Shearon

My first piece of advice would be not to lose your keitai in the first place! It really is a major hassle, for a variety of reasons. Failing that, I would advise you to back up any important information that you have on your keitai, especially phone numbers and email addresses. This can be done very easily if you have a memory card, and less easily if you have to make do with pen and paper. I suspect that your phone supplier may be able to help with this, but haven't asked yet.

I would also recommend enabling some of the security features on your phone, so that it is necessary to input a password in order to access certain features. This of course is a trade off between convenience (how many times a day are you willing to input your password?) and safety (the less functions someone can use on your phone the less useful it is for them).

Regardless of whether you backed up your data or not, let's assume that you have lost your phone. This is a list of things you may want to think about doing:

1. Call your phone and see if someone picks up. If they do, you are extremely lucky. Negotiate with said person as to how to recover your phone. With any luck, the saga ends here. However, if no one picks up, then...

2. Call your phone company IMMEDIATELY and ask them to turn off your account temporarily. Bear in mind that you are liable for any and all calls made from your phone up until it is turned off. Turning off the account can take up to an hour from when you call them. Tell them that you have lost your phone and would like to be informed if it has been found.

3. Call the places you might have lost your phone in and see if it has been found. Also call the local police station and inform them that you lost your phone and give them a description.

4. Wait.

5. Wait some more.

6. When you get tired of waiting, you will probably want to get a new phone. You now have a choice of keeping your number and email address and staying with your current company, who will probably try to charge you a fortune for getting a new phone, or change to a new company and have to get a new number and email address, as well as pay penalty fees to your old company for canceling your contract early. Either way it won't be cheap.

By way of example, I would like to tell you about a friend of mine who lost his phone on the train. Once he realised it was gone, he got his wife to call and email the phone just in case a nice person had picked it up. She got through once and the person hung up. Not a good sign. She then called the company who blocked the account.

My friend then reported the loss to the station, and the station at the end of the line (Tokyo!), and the local police. Six days later there was still no sign of the phone, so my friend cracked and bought a new one from a new company. The next morning he phoned his old company to cancel his account, only to be told that the phone had been found a couple of days ago and was at a police station. They had apparently sent him a letter to inform him.

Of course the new contract was binding, so this wasn't too useful at that point! The moral of the story is that patience is a virtue, and checking repeatedly with the company might be a good idea...

And of course the friend is me.