Japanese iPhone Hell

Today I picked up a 16 GB Japanese iPhone. I wanted it for:

• Maps - quick access to GPS-like positioning (using cell towers) and a great map interface was honestly the number one draw. Navigating in Japan is hell. Most streets don't have names. Being able to find where you are quickly is awesome.
• New iPod. Previously I had an old 1 GB iPod nano.
  
• Applications - after seeing some apps running on a friends iPod, I was impressed and wanted to check them out too. I've already got a Japanese dictionary and a nice application for accessing and uploading pictures to Flickr.
  
• Advanced web browser.
• Possibly doing some coding on it. The technology is pretty cool.
  

When I pulled it out of the box it is hard not to be wowed by the screen and interface. The pros of the iPhone are well documented on the web. Today I'm here to tell you what I've discovered, in less than 4 hours of owning an iPhone in Japan, what sucks about it. The hell of an iPhone in Japan:

• I was forced to change my e-mail address from my previous SoftBank phone's e-mail even though that is the same carrier that provides the iPhone in Japan. I have to contact everyone on my contact list to tell them that I've changed it. My previous phone was immediatly deactivated so I didn't have a chance to e-mail them using my old phone. That's maybe not so bad, but...
  
• You can't import your contact list from your old phone.
• SoftBank offers a way to download your old address book as a CSV file from the Internet but that file can't be imported directly into the iPhone. Moreover, the Japanese text in that file was completely garbled on both my Mac and Windows PC running English operating systems. Clearly not using UTF-8 encoding. Useless.
  
• Lots of people in Japan set their cellphones to block all Internet e-mail addresses. The iPhone e-mail system is considered by the carriers as an Internet e-mail address. After painstakingly retyping in all of my contacts and trying to send an "hey, I updated my address" e-mail about half of my friends' phones blocked my e-mail. Getting in contact with some of these people without being able to e-mail them is actually going to be a challenge. Arghh! Cellphone e-mail in general is often favored over phone calls, I don't even have a lot of my friends' phone numbers.
  
• The address book is incredibly slow as is the predictive Japanese dictionary. When you open it you literally have to wait about 5 seconds before you can press the "add contact" button, for example.
  
• You can't sort the address book by hiragana characters, at least not while in English UI mode. All Japanese people are forced into the "other" group making finding people a lot harder.
• Nearly all Japanese cell phones support "kaomoji", or face characters. They typically support tons of them - not just happy faces but also symbols for hopitals, getting a haircut, getting a massage, thumbs-up, etc. The iPhone does not support them at all and when you receive an e-mail that uses them the kaomoji is just a garbage character. Some people I know often substitute those characters instead of typing in the actual word in Japanese. Those e-mails are going to be gibberish on the iPhone. This is possibly the number one thing that screams "this is a phone from overseas".
  

I'm sure there are other hidden gems waiting for me to discover. I'm praying Apple will update their firmware to better serve the Japanese market. They also need to work with the other carriers besides SoftBank to treat e-mails that originate from the iPhone as cellphone e-mails. Honestly, most Japanese people I have spoken to who have an iPhone are bitching about more than singing its praises.

If anyone has any tips for getting around these messaging issues in particular please leave a comment!