The iPhone's popularity in Japan is cracking open an industry long thought inaccessible to outsiders.
For years, the typical Japanese cell phone — built to operate on a network hardly used anywhere else in the world — has been stuffed with quirky games and other applications that cater to finicky local tastes.
That helps explain why Japan's mobile phone industry earned the nickname "Galapagos" — drawing parallels with the exotic animals that evolved on the isolated islands off South America — and why cell phones are called galakei, which combines keitai, the Japanese word for cell phone, with Galapagos.