Last December, during its end-of-quarter news conference, NTT announced that it would shorten the length of time for a basic call on public telephones when the consumption tax is raised from 5 to 8 percent in April. Since pay phones don't give change and NTT discontinued its IC card service in 2006, it would have been difficult to pass the extra tax levy on to users, so the more logical scheme was to make a ¥10 call shorter. As it stands, ¥10 will get you 60 seconds of connection to a number within the same calling exchange during the day. After April it will be shortened to something like 58 seconds.

At the time it wasn't exactly breaking news, and for obvious reasons. Who uses pay phones any more? As long as you have a cell phone you likely won't even notice that pay phones still exist, but they do. According to a government white paper on telecommunications that came out last year and cited on the Sarayomi blog, as of March 2013 there were 210,000 pay phones in Japan. In 2002 there were 680,000. (The peak year was 1986, when there were 910,000.) That means two-thirds disappeared over an 11-year period.