Roughly 60 percent of Japanese high school students have mobile phones and half of them exchange 10 or more e-mail messages a day using their phones, according to a recent 1999 poll on youth trends by the Management and Coordination Agency.

Conducted in November and December last year in Miyagi, Chiba, Tokyo, Ishikawa, Nara and Kumamoto prefectures, the wide-ranging survey covered 3,100 second-year students, most aged 16 or 17, and their parents or guardians.

Of the students polled, 58.7 percent had mobile phones.

Of the parents and guardians, 84.7 percent approved of their children having mobile phones because it makes contacting them easier. More than half, 61.4 percent, said they know more about what their children are up to than they did before they started using mobile phones.

However, 35.5 percent of the adults complained that their children talked on their phones too much.

Of the students, 33.4 percent said they pay their phone bills with their own money, with 9.3 percent receiving allowances and earning part-time wages of 30,000 yen or more a month.

Almost half, 48.4 percent, made new friends using their phones.

In other areas of the survey, 20.6 percent of students said they had worn earrings in the last year and 40 percent had dyed their hair.

Although Japanese law prohibits those aged under 20 from drinking alcohol, 60.8 percent admitted to having done so before. As for sex, 17.8 percent said they were not virgins.

Twenty-four percent said they were interested in literature and philosophy, and 37.2 percent said they read the newspaper every day.