Tokyoites rarely use their phones to call – preferring instead to text. To stay in contact with your new Japanese friends, setting up your iPhone for email so you can text back and forth is the cheapest and easiest way to stay in touch. Plus, you can email friends back home as well.

In an ideal world, you bring your iPhone to Tokyo, use it to your heart’s content, and return home to see that AT&T has charged you a reasonable fee for your calls and data use. Unfortunately, that “reasonable fee” has often been in the thousands of dollars (US dollars) range for US AT&T users. On top of that, foreigners can’t buy prepaid sim cards in Japan. To avoid problems, here are some options:

Light users: Get a global roaming plan from AT&T.

Tokyo is 3G only, so original iPhone users are out of luck. If you have a 3G or 3Gs, dial AT&T at 611 and buy a “20MB Data Global Add-on” before you leave the US (rather than just going on roaming). It’s relatively inexpensive ($29.99 for 20MB, good for a month) if you are careful with your data usage. In our experience, 20MB on a weeklong trip is enough to stay in contact with local friends via text emails (locals rarely call) and use maps on occasion. This is how we prepare our iPhones when we go to Tokyo.

You’ll also be able to make and receive calls from back home for $2.29 a minute ($1.69 with a $5.99 discount plan). More info from AT&T.

For more data, it is $59.99 for 50MB, $119.99 for 100MB, $199.99 for 200MB.

Renting an iPhone or an iPhone sim card

For heavy iPhone users. As Global Advanced Comm’s prices have recently gone up, we are less inclined to suggest this service except for those with very heavy data needs.

If your phone is unlocked, you can rent a sim from Global Advanced Comm – ~$85 per week with unlimited data (including skype, maps and short messages via email). ~25¢ per minute to local landlines, ~40¢ per minute to local mobiles. Pick up the sim from airport or have it delivered to your hotel. Get it from Global Advanced Comm.

If it’s not unlocked, you can simply rent the a whole iPhone 3GS (~$85 per week) with the same rates. Get it from Global Advanced Comm. It’s ~$225 to rent for the whole month.

Use Wi-Fi.

Unfortunately, free public wi-fi hotspots are few and far between (all the locals have 3G phones, so they don’t need wi-fi). One option is visiting the Wired Cafe locations in Harajuku or Shibuya for your daily fix of coffee and free wi-fi. You’ll likely find yourself stopping by on occasion but this isn’t the easiest way to stay in touch with your local friends and people back home.

Rent a phone at the airport

Though many will want to do this, this is an expensive option and we don’t recommend it. There are kiosks in Narita airport that will rent you dumbphones from $15-50 a week, with additional charges for calls ($1.50/minute or more) and data. Adding SMS messages can be anywhere from 25¢ to $1 per message. This is really expensive, especially since locals never talk on the phone, they just email each other (they use email instead of SMS). Plus you have to walk around with a crap phone.

For example: Renting a Softbank sim at the airport – ¥105 per day, ¥15 per local message sent, ¥105 per local call, free to receive all calls/SMSses. Difficult to set up SMS on iPhone, once you do, you can only receive SMS from other softbank users. Approximately $30/MB of data. More info from the SoftBank website.

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