Japan Home Phones

Getting phone service in Japan is expensive because phone lines must be purchased. To buy a new phone line, you must go to the nearest NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, the telephone company) office with a form of identification such as your passport or your alien registration card. Including the nonrefundable charge to purchase the Japan home phone line, the subscription charge, the installation fee, and a 5 percent consumption tax, the initial hookup will cost around 80,000 yen. You get a portion of this money back when you leave Japan by selling your line to someone else. Also, you can save a considerable amount of money if you buy a used phone line have been paid by the seller or they will be carried over to your account.
To have your Japan home phone line installed you must arrange an appointment with NTT. It is important that someone is home the purchase the actual phone unit from any discount electronics store, where prices are negotiable, or you can rent one from NTT for small price.
NTT also offers a number of optional services for a small monthly charge:

1. ·Touch-tone line service including voice-mail service
2. ·Reservation service for seats on JR trains for those living in the Tokyo area
3. ·Airline reservation service and a bank and securities brokerage answering service
4. ·Call-waiting and call-forwarding services

Monthly basic charge for Japan home phone is 1,750 yen in big cities (areas with more than 400,000 subscribers).
Tip: Japanese long distance carriers charge extremely high prices for international calls, I would recommends getting a callback service that costs a fraction of the price the Japanese carriers charge. To be eligible for callback service you need to have a foreign credit card to which your calls can be charged. How it works if simple: you dial the phone number of the callback service, and when you hear a tone you dial you account number and the hang up. Within ten seconds your phone will ring and you will hear a dial tone; you then dial the phone number as if you were in the country you are calling. This way foreign rate will apply instead of Japanese rates. The Japan Time is full of advertisement for these companies.