TOWNPOCKET

~ the last words ~

In August 2005 the narrow streets behind Harajuku filled up with readers, and none of them took money. A shop would set a small pad down near the counter, and a customer who had already installed the TOWNPOCKET app held a phone against it. After that the shop lived inside the phone, with its opening hours and its number kept where they could be found again. The trade press described the result as a bookmark, which is exactly what it was, performed by walking into a building and touching a piece of its furniture.

The service itself belonged to TechFirm, a Tokyo software company. The campaign that carried it into Ura-Harajuku belonged to URAHARA.ORG, a neighborhood organization whose interest was foot traffic and whose representative 高橋嘉一 stated the goal without decoration: to increase the number of people who came to Ura-Harajuku. TechFirm's 小泉耕二 put the same thing from the shopkeeper's side, saying they had never had any means of drawing a customer as far as the door, and that TOWNPOCKET gave them a cheap way to push information out. NTT DoCoMo supplied the wallet-phone layer underneath all of it.

That layer is where the distance sits. At launch the service ran on the 901iC and the 901iS and on nothing else. Those were DoCoMo handset series sold in Japan, and au support was described only as under consideration. A phone bought in Ankara in 2005 had no chip in it to touch anything with and would not have one for years. What eventually arrived in Turkey came from the other direction entirely, as a contactless bank card, by which time the idea of a shop writing itself into your pocket had already been tried and buried inside one neighborhood of Tokyo.

~ the record ~

~ touching the shop ~

The direction of travel is the thing worth being precise about, because it is the opposite of what a reader by a till usually means. Nothing left the phone. The shop pushed its own details onto the handset: what kind of place it was, the phone number, the hours, the way to get in touch. You were not identifying yourself to the shop. You were collecting the shop.

There was a fallback for people whose handsets had no FeliCa chip, and it dates the product more precisely than anything else in it. The reader also carried a QR code and a blank-mail address, so a phone without a chip could still reach the mobile site through its own carrier portal and register a favorite shop by hand. All three Japanese carrier portals of the day were named as routes in.

~ a hundred and fifty-three doors ~

The launch list runs to 153 shops, spread across the blocks that sit between Takeshita-dori and Omotesando. A hundred and nine of them sold clothes. Fourteen were places to eat and ten were hair salons. Thirteen more sold accessories, and seven sold shoes or sportswear. URAHARA.ORG said the count would reach 300 by the end of September, and set a target of more than 300,000 users.

The opening campaign ran to the 28th of that August. Bookmark five shops or more inside the window and you qualified for a draw held at a venue in Harajuku, where everyone who turned up left with something carrying the URAHARA.ORG name on it. The roadmap pointed somewhere more ordinary: discount coupons and mail magazines from the shops were planned for November, and a district-wide points system was under consideration for the winter. A fashion district was being quietly rebuilt as a loyalty program.

~ what the register calls it ~

The only surviving record of the end is a line in the table of discontinued Osaifu-Keitai services on Japanese Wikipedia, which gives 5 October 2006 and carries no reference of any kind. That same line files TOWNPOCKET under 会員証, membership card, alongside the video rental and karaoke chains whose loyalty cards really did move onto handsets. Its own launch coverage says otherwise in the headline. The register has it recorded as the category it was shelved next to rather than the thing it did.

TechFirm is still trading, and the shape of the company explains more than the register does. It was incorporated in August 1991 in Jingumae, which is the Harajuku address itself, and its original stated business was planning and running events. It became a software company in 1998 and kept going. A product that asked people to walk into the shops of one district and collect them was built by a firm that had started out running events, in that same district, under a different name.

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