IN A narrow shopping street in the Mita district of Tokyo, the owner of the three-storey Red Frog karaoke box is preparing to go out of business.

Hideo Hotaka does not blame his misfortune on deflation, recession or even the elaborate roadworks on the street outside. The problem, he says, is mobile phones. His former customers, especially the teenagers, used to come to karaoke to listen to the latest pop songs in a big group. Now they download the week’s top ten directly on to their phones.

If they want to sing along, the latest mobile phones have that covered, too: Toshiba has introduced a device that turns the phone handset into a microphone and allows downloaded songs to be streamed through a normal television — complete with the words and the bouncing ball telling you what to sing next.

Mr Hotaka is not alone in his plight. Two shops down, Emiko Takeda’s magazine shop has run into difficulties because of a rising tide of state-of-the-art “shoplifting”.

The picture definition on Japanese camera-phones is now so high that people can stand in a shop, surreptitiously photograph the pages of a magazine and then later read their ill-gotten literature from the screens of their mobile phones.

Japan’s booksellers have risen as one to demand that the Government criminalises this practice. Until legislation is passed they will have to rely on polite but ineffective signs in their shops.

“The problem is that the criminals are respectable people,” Ms Takeda said. “If it were some kid who shoved a magazine into his bag and ran off, you could call the police. You can’t really do that when the shoplifter is a housewife with a flashy mobile phone.”

As the mobile screens have improved — some are the same quality as a digital camera — so the thefts have become more ambitious. Students, for example, are finding that entire textbooks can be photographed and read later at palm-sized convenience.

The publishing industry is suffering badly from the advance of mobile phones in Japan. Where once the train carriages were full of people reading comics or newspapers, passengers now concentrate solely on the screens of their phones. Mobile phone operators say that text-message volumes correspond almost exactly with the commuter rush-hour peaks and troughs.

The latest phones come equipped with a tuner that can — fuzzily — pick up television broadcasts, and several operators have introduced phones with navigation software that shows the user as a moving red blip on an ultra-detailed street atlas of Japan.

The Japanese market is comfortably the most advanced in the world. As the phones themselves have become capable of ever greater feats of engineering and technology, their presence in daily life has become ever more pervasive. Industry experts believe that Japan’s market today is what Britain’s will look like in about 18 months’ time.

The third-generation broadband technology whose introduction has been endlessly postponed in Britain has been in action since mid-2002 in Japan. Some services — such as one that translates a cat’s meowing — have died a death; others — such as one that shows videos of all the baseball home runs hit on a given evening — are a wild success.

The pace continues unabated. In June alone, the Japanese public can look forward to a chip from Hitachi that will let mobile phones play video games at the same frame rate as a PlayStation, software that will upload medical records to their doctor’s computer before they reach the surgery, a program that turns the handset into a voice-activated television remote control and a phone equipped with translation software for six languages.

For Shigeru Katayama, an advertising executive from Mitaka, the morning ritual would be unthinkable without his mobile. Before leaving the house he checks the weather forecast before consulting a chat room to discover which coffee shops in his area have cheap deals on that morning.

On the way into the office, he can drop into a convenience store, point his phone at a machine and be presented with concert tickets for the next evening. If it all makes him late for work, Mr Katayama could always call his boss and have a live video conference call from the train.

The floor manager at Sato Musen, a sprawling electronics shop in Tokyo, is convinced that mobile phones have made otaku or “geeks” out of the entire Japanese population: “Some features they will never use, but people love the idea that it exists. I think the Japanese market is ahead of the rest of the world not just because Japanese phone makers are the best, but because as customers, the Japanese are the most adventurous.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?