"Please Don't Call Them Garakei": What a Client Once Told Me

The other day, while writing an article about EVs, I used the word “garakei” for the first time in a long while. It is a Japanese nickname for the old flip phones that dominated Japan before smartphones.

As I wrote it, I suddenly remembered something from years ago.

Back then, I worked at a company that built websites for mobile phones.

One of our clients was Japan’s largest mobile carrier, and the person in charge there would warn us at every single meeting:

“Please don’t call them ‘garakei.’ Never write it in your emails, either. Call them ‘feature phones.’”

The first time I heard it, I had no idea what they were talking about.

But I soon figured out the reason.

“Garakei” is short for “Galápagos keitai,” or “Galápagos phone.”

It carries a sarcastic meaning: an oddball that was left behind by the rest of the world and evolved in strange ways inside Japan alone, like the animals of the Galápagos Islands.

They probably didn’t want their company’s flagship product called by a name like that.

I understand the feeling.

But the whole country was already calling them “garakei,” so there was nothing to be done.

The word spread around the time smartphones started taking off rapidly.

Japan’s carriers and manufacturers were one, two, no, three steps behind in the shift to smartphones.

Faced with that reality, what they chose to tackle was policing the wording in their business partners’ emails.

Japanese People Love Euphemisms

To be fair, using words to cover up inconvenient realities is not a special skill of that carrier alone.

When the Allied forces arrived in Japan after its defeat in World War II, they were not called the “occupation army.” They were called “shinchūgun,” roughly “the forces that have advanced and are stationed here.”

As if they had just moved forward a little and happened to be staying for a while.

“Defeat in the war” became “the end of the war.”

During the war, Japan’s Imperial General Headquarters was even better at this. It called retreats “advancing in another direction,” and the annihilation of entire units “gyokusai,” meaning “shattering like a jewel.”

They probably didn’t want to admit, right to the very end, that they had lost.

This tradition is still alive and well today.

Firing people became “restructuring.” That still sounded harsh, so it became “voluntary early retirement.” And lately, it has been promoted all the way to “second-career support.”

Job rejection letters say, “We pray for your continued success in the future.”

Apparently you were not rejected for lack of ability. It just wasn’t meant to be.

High-interest debt is called “revolving payments” and advertised as “a smart way to pay a fixed amount every month.”

I had no idea debt could be smart.

None of these euphemisms exist to protect anyone.

The people using them just don’t want to face reality.

Which Word Disappeared?

No matter how closely that person watched the wording of our emails, it didn’t change by a single millimeter the fact that Japanese mobile phones lost their market to the iPhone.

Looking back, the sight of them being more passionate about standardizing terminology than about catching up on smartphones said a lot about that organization at the time.

Later, when the 3G networks were shut down, garakei phones all but disappeared.

The name, however, is still in active use. I used it myself just the other day.

Meanwhile, since then, I have hardly ever met anyone who actually says “feature phone.”