We have about 4 cleanup actvities in our neighborhood each year which revolve around pulling weeds, cleaning ditches, and reclaiming the park from the forces of nature. These are common in Japan, and in theory I'm all for it. What's not to like about getting together with the neighbors to clean things up in a spirit of shared responisibility? In practice, though, there's never a good time for neighborhood cleaning. Yesterday's road-cleanup event was no excepton. Since I work Saturdays, I was loathe to drag my ass out of bed early Sunday and join the work gang in front of the community center building at 8 a.m. My wife offered to go, but one of her old friends was in town from Kyoto, so I told her I'd go and started praying for rain, major rain, as the farmers our area seem to work in anything short of a full-bore typhoon.
So what does this have to with a MacBook? My prayers were answered with a torrential thunderstorm; cleanup was cancelled; I went back to bed, had a leisurely breakfast of apple pancakes and soon found myself at Yamada Denki, an electronics chain, where I roamed the aisles in search of a USB wireless network adaptor. My old adapter had gone belly-up, and I wanted to get my computer back on our home network and connected to the Internet.
I was just about to pick up a replacement, when my wife came up and excitedly told me that a massive computer sale was in progress--why waste money on an adapter when we could save big and replace my aging computer with one with built-in wireless networking? She led me past some of the latest offerings from Sony and Fujitsu and lo, Yamada Denki was selling Apple computers again. There was an iMac next to a couple of MacBooks. Stranger still, one of the MacBooks was running Windows XP. Pamphlets explaining how to use Bootcamp were available in quantity.
Here's the deal. The good folks at Yamada Denki were selling the MacBook for the same price as the Japanese Apple Store, but Yahoo! BB (broadband to you and me), would give you a 25,000 yen discount if you switched to them for your Internet provider. Throw in Yamada Denki's liberal trade-in offer and it looked like we could jettison the old computer and take a new MacBook home for something south of 100,000 yen.
My wife, in her role of Minister of Finance, gazed at the MacBook. She evaluated its sleek white form and the 13.1 inch screen. She had wanted something with a built-in TV tuner. I explained that it was half the weight of my present laptop, that it could travel with us, that I could use it at work and home. It would join her Mac Mini on our home network and all would be sweetness and light.
My wife had bigger plans, the consolidation of Internet, TV and telephony under the Yahoo! Japan banner. Yes the MacBook was an attractive machine, and the price was right, but Yamada Denki would take our old computer, saving us the 3000 yen recycling fee. We could dump NTT and use Yahoo! BB for our provider. Yahoo! BB also offered TV over IP and VOIP; we could get Internet access, the phone, and TV all through the fiber cable and save additional yen by dumping SkyPerfect, satellite TV service. Once we were hooked up with Yahoo, we could call fellow Yahoo! BB members all over Japan for free. Most of people my wife calls are on Yahoo! BB.
All that was left to do was to run downstairs, talk to the Yahoo rep, and confirm that we could be hooked up and I would be going home with a new MacBook. She made a quick call. I took my son the the bathroom. When I got back my wife was in the midst of a long talk with the woman representing Yahoo! Japan. Alas, we were outside the Yahoo! area. Only barely--by two blocks, but the we'll bring cable to your doorstep campaign was over. Yahoo had no plans to head up the hill towards our house. She advised us to wait patiently and call back regularly to see when Yahoo! would absorb us into the network.
So, I went home without a MacBook, but I didn't feel too bad about it. In the next post I'll tell you why.
