Andile Masuku|Published 1 hour ago
It’s 8.30 am on the dot last Wednesday in Kawasaki, an industrial city in the greater Tokyo area. Half an hour before the Apple Store opens, and already an orderly, curiously-constituted queue of a dozen or so people has formed outside the front door. My wife Sithabiso and I join behind what appears to be a homeless man, standing against the shop’s minimalist glass shopfront in the shadow of Toshiba’s looming new global headquarters.
We’re all here hoping to cop one of the latest iPhone 17 devices that Apple has taken to drip-releasing for sale. Limited pre-orders and tiny batches made available at their stores to anyone willing to show up early every morning. Pre-order customers need to wait at least two weeks. Want it sooner? Rise early, join the queue, and wish for the best.
Truth be told, neither Sithabiso nor I are inclined to queue for hyped consumer goods, but her old iPhone went on the blink just days before we landed in Japan, and there’s a significant cost saving buying the device here compared to back home. We had to try our luck.
Most coveted are the new flagship iPhone 17 Pro models which, word on the street suggests, only about 10 to 20 drop per store daily. Odds improve for anyone seeking an entry-level iPhone 17 model (256GB or 512GB) as roughly 40 are said to be made available per shop every day. So, we’re hopeful.
The Pro models were claimed by the first few people in queue. Ahead of us, a chatty Greek cybersecurity specialist who’s made Tokyo his home for 12 years had been queuing for a 17 Pro three days running, was again denied his prize.
He explained the dynamics with weary expertise. Earlier, he’d casually mentioned that he was first cousin of the late South African rapper Costa Titch (real name Constantinos Tsobanoglou), who tragically died after collapsing whilst performing at Ultra South Africa in Johannesburg in March 2023. One of those small-world moments. Here we were: two Zimbos, a Greek expat with South African musical ties, and dozens of locals, all united in pursuit of rectangles of engineered desire.
The conversation had started when I mentioned our surprise that our thoughtfully appointed Tokyo hotel room featured a Sony television that wasn’t smart-enabled. Likely a cost consideration rather than technological limitation. “Everyone knows Korean TVs and smart devices are way better,” he quipped. “The Japanese hate admitting how much Korean tech is actually in their own products these days.”
But this isn’t just Apple’s global playbook. It’s scar tissue from a two-decade battle between local telecom control and outsider ambition.
Rewind to the early 2000s, when Japan wasn’t queuing for iPhones; the world was studying NTT DoCoMo’s mobile mastery. NTT DoCoMo is Japan’s largest mobile telecommunications company and a subsidiary of NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation), which holds a significant government stake of about one-third.
Their i-mode service, launched in 1999, was a walled garden of micropayments, ringtones, and apps that achieved 90% penetration by around 2006. Subsidised gadgets, ecosystem lock-in through FeliCA (Sony’s contactless chip technology that powers everything from Suica train passes, those prepaid rechargeable cards that get you on any Tokyo train, to vending machine payments). Like Safaricom’s M-PESA, it was a fortress built on local consumer behaviours and regulatory norms.
Apple knocked in 2007, but DoCoMo held out until 2013, protecting their ¥500 billion ($5 billion) revenue moat. Masayoshi Son’s now-famous Japanese telecommunications, robotics, and AI services conglomerate cum global investment holding company, SoftBank, bent first in 2008, accepting Jobs’ “no customisation” terms. This queue? It’s the aftermath of that capitulation. Scarcity tactics now keep demand humming in a market Apple dominates at 49% share as of Q3 2025.
Yet DoCoMo adapted rather than crumbled. Facing an estimated 12.4% year-on-year mobile revenue dip in Q1 FY2025, they’ve moved beyond traditional telco, forging partnerships in software-defined vehicles and data centres whilst holding 82 million subscribers.
Apple made concessions too: integrating FeliCA for local payment rails (even Apple Pay needs it to work in Japan), tailoring Apple Intelligence for LINE (the super app that makes WhatsApp look primitive, handling everything from messaging to shopping to government services), navigating antitrust probes, respecting enterprise norms. Both sides stayed humble, remixing their approaches to survive.
Walking through Kawasaki to reach the queue, I’d passed functional phone booths. Actual working payphones in 2025, standing like monuments to Japan’s peculiar ability to preserve the old whilst embracing the new. The contrast would become even starker later during forays into Tokyo proper, where 15-floor consumer cathedrals like Sony’s Ginza flagship house everything from cameras to, Sumitomo Life’s (partner of Vitality in Japan) “Vitality Plaza Ginza Flagship Store”. A South African health insurer in one of Japan’s most prestigious electronics temples captures something essential about these spaces: they’re global stages where some unexpected intersections occur.
This dance between sovereignty and surrender resonates powerfully with Africa’s current moment. Safaricom’s (read Vodafone’s) M-PESA, launched in 2007, disrupted incumbent banking much like SoftBank’s Apple gamble disrupted DoCoMo. They didn’t just adopt foreign tech; they transformed it into an ecosystem serving 50 million users.
The recently announced M-PESA Fintech 2.0 upgrade, said to boost transaction capacity from 4 500 to 12 000 per second, shows the same pattern: defending the pipes whilst creating new revenue beyond traditional telco. MTN and Econet’s data centre pushes and AI partnerships echo this playbook. Just as Japan’s FeliCA became invisible infrastructure for daily life, M-PESA has woven itself into the fabric of East African commerce. It appears that the question isn’t whether to use outside technology, but how to maintain control whilst adapting.
What strikes you most isn’t the consumption itself but how it coexists with remarkable social cohesion. The morning rush in Tokyo reveals armies of black-and-white-clad corporate employees moving with choreographed precision, never speaking on phones during train journeys, maintaining a public courtesy that feels almost anachronistic in our globalised world.
Yet this same society that prioritises collective harmony also embraces a particularly intense form of consumer desire. The pursuit of the yen, as someone in the queue put it, feels almost religious. No matter what you own, what you bought yesterday, how full your wardrobe, Tokyo’s commercial landscape ensures there’s always something else to want.
Japan’s peculiar history of sovereignty provides an ideal laboratory for observing these dynamics. Technically, never colonised despite gunboats at its shores, it absorbed Western technology on its own terms during the Meiji Restoration, then built its own empire. From centuries of isolation to imperial aggressor (awkwardly, both modern day North and South Korea were subject to Japanese occupation at some point) to occupied territory to waning economic miracle.
They seem to contend with sovereignty uniquely here: as something negotiated, defended, wielded. DoCoMo’s thirteen-year resistance to Apple wasn’t mere stubbornness but striving for sovereignty by other means, the same instinct that once strategically transformed foreign threats into domestic strength.
I later thought about what the Kawasaki Apple Store queue revealed. In Africa, we clamour chaotically for fuel during shortages, for forex when currencies collapse, and even for government grants. In Tokyo, they queue pristinely for products deliberately withheld and for trains rarely ever late. Same ritual, different scarcity. Same waiting, different wanting.
Andile Masuku is Co-founder and Executive Producer at African Tech Roundup. Connect and engage with Andile on X (@MasukuAndile) and via LinkedIn.
*** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL
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