It might be the latest gossip from her girlfriends, or a note from someone special. Even though it's the middle of the evening and the car isn't particularly crowded, there are at least three other people reading or writing on their phones. If they are not there already, cell phones are rapidly becoming Japan's most popular tool for accessing e-mail and the web.

The small, sleek devices provide up to 64 kilobits of bandwidth, optional color graphic displays and batteries that can last for up to six-hundred hours between charges; they are cheap to buy and use and probably won't be available here for several more years.

In America (especially here in Silicon Valley), we often think that our lifestyles represent the pinnacle of technology. Even though the US might be a world leader in high tech development, a trip through Japan is a sobering reminder that we are a long way from first place in applying those technologies.

"At the time, I was a total beginner," she told us, "but I wanted to be able to do the same thing." Her friend was, as it turned out, a professional graphic designer and a strong advocate of the Mac. She bought the Performa and began the process of teaching herself how to use it.

It is the case with many new users who start out on a Macintosh, she discovered that she was a fast learner and her skills expanded in some unexpected directions. Within three months, the Performa was serving as a MIDI sequencer for her keyboard and had become an integral part of her studio. As her graphic and desktop publishing skills grew, she began using the Mac to create lessons and worksheets for her students, who are primarily young schoolchildren.

Using the Japanese version of Opcode, she also began publishing her own sheet music and exercises to use in her lessons. "I still feel like I am in the minority, being a Mac user," she admitted, "but over the past few years, I've seen a slow increase in people using the Mac."

Even though, for a number of reasons, it's far from being the nation's market leader, the Macintosh and Mac OS are possibly the most "Japanese" products ever produced by the United States. MacDirectory went to Japan to take an informal look at how well the platform is doing there.

In Japan, the decision to buy a Mac is not often an easy one to make. Particularly among first time users who are new to home computing, the cultural rule of thumb is to buy what your friends have. For nine out of ten people, that's a Windows PC. Manami Shimomura, a thirty-something piano teacher in Kyoto, is still very happy that her introduction to home computers came from a member of the Mac minority. Her old Performa 575 still sits in a corner of her bright and neat studio on the ground floor of the house she shares with her parents. Now there is a Strawberry iMac sitting on the small computer table between her Yamaha electronic keyboard and baby grand piano.

Her introduction to computers came six years earlier through one of her volunteer groups. A member showed up with a beautiful publicity flyer that he had made himself on his home computer.

Most beginners, she observed, still start out on Windows PCs. But as they gain experience they will sometimes switch over to the Mac. "When they learn enough to see the difference, they may change over. People who start with a Mac often stay with it," she told us.

Manami noticed that when the little iMac came to Japan, it brought with it some big changes. "After the iMac arrived, so many girls started appearing in the computer shopping district." The unusual new computer struck a chord with the style-conscious consumers. Manami insists that the reason she bought her iMac in March of last year was that she had outgrown her Performa and needed more computing power to run the latest versions of the software she depended on. But she adds with a smile, "the iMac was so cute!" She shyly also confessed that she needed the PowerPC processor to run PostPet, a very unique e-mail program that is sweeping across Japan with Pokémon-like popularity.