Smartphone 'zombies' wreak havoc in Tokyo

Accidents spike as mobile devices distract more pedestrians

When the lights change at the Shibuya crossing in Japan's capital, one of the world's busiest pedestrian thoroughfares, hundreds of people with their eyes glued to smartphones pick their way over the road.

Despite being engrossed in the latest installment of Candy Crush or busy chatting with their friends on messaging app Line, most manage to weave around cyclists, skateboarders and fellow Tokyoites.

But the growing ranks of these cellphone addicts are turning cities like Tokyo, London, New York and Hong Kong into increasingly hazardous hot spots, where zombified shoppers appear to be part of vast games of human pinball.

"Hey, watch it!" barks a middle-aged salaryman as a hipster typing on his smartphone slams into him during one recent Friday evening crush hour.

Tetsuya Yamamoto, a senior official at Tokyo Fire Department's disaster prevention and safety section, said: "Incidents involving people walking or on bicycles account for 41 percent of phone-related accidents.

"If people continue walking around looking at their phones, I think we could see more accidents happening."

It goes beyond being an innocuous inconvenience where both people apologize before continuing on their merry way.

The Tokyo Fire Department, which runs the ambulance service in the megalopolis, says that in the four years to 2013, 122 people had to be rushed to hospital after accidents caused by pedestrians using cellphones.

As well as the vaguely comedic incidents of businessmen smacking into lampposts or tripping over dogs, this total also included a middle-aged man who died after straying onto a railway crossing while looking at his phone.

More than half of Japanese now own a smartphone, and the proportion is rising fast, including children who customarily walk to and from school.

Research by Japanese mobile giant NTT Docomo estimates a pedestrian's average field of vision while staring down at a smartphone is just 5 percent of what our eyes take in normally.

"Children wouldn't be safe in that situation," said Hiroshi Suzuki, manager of corporate social responsibility at the company. "It's dangerous, and it's our job to make sure it doesn't actually happen."

The company ran a computer simulation of what could occur in Shibuya if everyone crossing the intersection was looking at their smartphones.

Swarming over road

The results, based on a fairly average 1,500 people swarming over the road at any one time, were alarming: 446 collisions, 103 knockdowns and 21 dropped phones. Only about a third get to the other side without incident.

That 82 of the 103 who fell to the ground managed to cling onto their precious phones tells its own story.

Japanese media reported that about half of the 56 bodies recovered from the peak of a volcano after a recent eruption were found clutching cellphones with photos of the deadly lava and ash on them.

Apparently, they had thought it more important to be able to show their social media friends what was happening than to try to save themselves.

Suzuki travels to schools across Japan teaching children how to be responsible with smartphones through the use of cartoons.

"We use the story of the tortoise and the hare," he said. "The hare shoots off tapping away on his smartphone, and then falls down a hole. We want the children to know they could be the hare."

Social harmony

Phone fidgeters dawdling along at a snail's pace, forcing cyclists and baby-buggy-pushing moms to swerve out of the way, have become such an irritant in Tokyo that public notices have started to appear warning offenders to expect "icy stares", appealing to the Japanese sense of social harmony - assuming people look up from their phones in the first place.

Smartphone apps activated by sensors that flash warning signs or display the pavement on the screen have also been developed in response to the problem.

Tokyo is just one of the places struggling to cope with this very 21st-century menace.

In southwestern China, an amusement park in Chongqing has divided a pavement within its grounds into two lanes - one labeled "No mobile phones" and the other "Mobile phone use permitted but all consequences are your responsibility."

Recorded announcements on Hong Kong's subway network warn passengers in Cantonese, Mandarin and English that they are about to step onto an escalator.

In one city in New York state, there was even a bid to legislate against the use of electronic devices while crossing the road.

NTT Docomo's Suzuki in Tokyo said despite the city's high density and huge population - 35 million in the greater urban area - there's no need yet for people to wear crash helmets when they go to the shops.

"I don't think we will see the need for that in the near future," he said. "But our message is that it could happen. We're all potential victims."