Cell theory

Unless you live in Japan, you can’t buy these phones, which are incompatible with networks elsewhere. This is embarrassing for the Japanese consumer-electronics industry, which helped make the country a global economic power. In the last few years, policymakers and technology experts have taken to fretting about a “Galapagos effect’’ — named for the archipelago where Charles Darwin found a dazzling variety of tortoises unknown to the outside world.

But the Galapagos effect is also heartening. It raises the possibility that, far from creating a single global culture, technology only multiplies the ways in which different societies can reveal their uniqueness.

In some ways, the world is becoming standardized, and communications technology bears some of the blame for this creeping uniformity. Yet in Japan, the most conspicuous form of that technology shows an exoticism all its own.

It’s not just the perfume chips. Unlike the graphics-intensive iPhones and Android smartphones that occupy an ever larger share of the US market, high-end Japanese cellphones still use a text-heavy user interface — one that has barely changed since the introduction of mobile Internet services more than a decade ago. But Japan’s otherwise conservative mobile carriers are quick to add dazzling new features. Many phones have TV tuners, fingerprint readers for security, 10-megapixel cameras with zoom lenses, and electronic-payment chips that can be used at cash registers.

While cellphones are capable of replacing scores of other products, from land-line phones to watches to thermometers, the list of must-have features is likely to differ from society to society. Japanese are less likely than Americans to own PCs at home and more likely to use phones as their main way online. Because cellphone customers are always in a position to send and receive e-mails of any length, there’s little demand for US- and European-style texting, in which information moves only 160 characters at a time. Instead, cellphone use in Japan has evolved in a much more florid direction. There’s even a genre of cellphone novels.

At dominant cellphone carrier NTT DoCoMo’s Mobile Society Research Institute, chief researcher Hiroyasu Yuhashi goes so far as to suggest that national character affects which features that a market demands. A few years ago, he said in a recent interview, his company was convinced videoconferencing was the next killer app for cellphones. But the public was too modest to want that kind of face-to-face interaction over the phone.

“It was not fit for Japanese people,’’ he says.

Yuhashi’s view is far from universal. Many business experts say handsets catch on for their technical capabilities, not their cultural resonance. The iPhone — which looks the same everywhere — has a faster processor, greater storage capacity, and simpler user interface than the typical Japanese handset. Sales of the Apple product are growing rapidly in Japan. Japanese manufacturers may be tempted to respond with their own common-denominator phones that look alike no matter where they’re sold.

At the least, features now bundled into Japanese phones may find their way around the globe. Takeshi Natsuno, a former DoCoMo executive who’s widely billed as the father of the mobile Internet in Japan, insists that people across societies have the same needs. Take the fingerprint reader: If US phones had a similar feature, he says, “Tiger Woods would be saved.’’

But while Woods’s problems are as old as humankind, other challenges vary from place to place. In the United States, phones are now built to work easily with Facebook. In Kenya, cellphone carriers have devised ways to move money to distant villages using cheap handsets. In a world with nearly 5 billion cellphones, these devices may look less and less alike as time goes by.

Let’s hope so. We already celebrate the differences between Boston and Kyoto, Shakespeare and kabuki, and rare beef and fresh sashimi. And maybe someday in the distant future, history museums in America will put on exhibits about 21st-century Japanese phones.

Dante Ramos, the Globe’s deputy editorial page editor, reported this column on a fellowship through the Foreign Press Center of Japan.