Best phone plan for living in Japan ?

9 comments

1. Your neighbor’s wifi

2. Hard to answer, but, I do like that docomos Ahamo gives you 20g/month, including roaming, so if you popped home, or another supported country, you have 20g to use at no extra cost.

   its about 3,000 yen/month

3. Got a [Nuro plan](https://mobile.nuro.jp/plan/) with 5gb/month that I’m pretty sure rolls over and the option to make calls for about 990円/month, though it tends to come out at 1100円ish after calls. It’s a rolling contract so I’m not tied in, nor do I need to buy a handset. Did it all online.

   They’ve got a few different tiers of service and the choice of three different lines, I’m using the Docomo one, there’s also an AU line.

   Someone will probably chime in with a better recommendation but I’m also using Nuro for my broadband and I absolutely hate dealing with the main mobile providers here.

   My wife gave me her old phone when I came to the country but I couldn’t update the OS (android) without going into store, they then told me that I needed an active contract in order to update the phone and they tried to push a new phone on me with said contract. Shitty experience only needed to happen once; I was under the impression the handset was our “property” but apparently not.

4. Get Google Fi before you head ever. No contract, it’ll work right when you get off the plane and if you decide to get a Japanese carrier later it’ll be no problem.

5. Unless I am mistaken, if military (which is kind of implied with the word “stationed”) you fall under SOFA so you don’t get a residence card, so the kind of plan you can get are -heavily- different from residents.

6. I use docomo because it has partnered carriers on other countries as well. Good cellular, data signals too. Monthly rates is reasonable as well.

7. Anything but Softbank…

8. I have unlimited data with AU and it’s never let me down, I even had service in the middle of nowhere Hokkaido.

9. povo – AU network with 0円 monthly fee. Shopping in Beisia and Lawson gives me “free” data. Just doing my usual grocery shopping gives me 5-6GB of data each month. Don’t need more in my case