To be without a keitai in Japan, and certainly on the Odakyū, is to be caught cybernetically nude. A train-aberration. They inhabit every bag, pocket and chain. They hang from straps-aroundthe-neck. They poke out from handbags. They are manufactured in a rainbow of colours, Shinjuku salaryman utility-black to Harajuku teen-girl pink. Their ring-tones can be alarm clocks or musical.

Japan is nothing if not a culture of icons. Temples. Shrines. Advertising. Satchels. Restaurants. When the Cui-dore (Kuidaore) restaurant in Osaka closed in 2008 after sixty years of business nearly the whole of Kansai (and beyond) headed into grief-therapy. Not because of the food, good as it was reputed to be, but because of Cuidore Tarou, the bespectacled full-sized mascot clad in red and white striped clown suit. This was prime time news, front page newspaper reportage. It might have been better reported in the Obituary columns.

The Japanese keitai might be another fetish-of-fetishes. The young, especially, have them be-decked in mascots (masukotto), charms, tassels, chains, a whole variety of talisman.

One day to the next, and from your Odakyū perch, you see mobiles with their sutorappu – silver medallions, intricate chains, a satin puffball bit of decor, different types of bead, multi-colour threads, actual and fake keys, small crucifixes (Japan is about 2% Christian), fingerrings, snippets of lace, even bottle-openers. Small soft-toy dolls or dogs or bears come into play. Hearts in plastic or metal (sometimes with arrows slanted through them) figure prominently. Occasionally there is an omamori, a temple good-luck charm. This is truly to engage in your own keitai shrine decoration. How not to think it homage to telephonic gods, the presiding deities of speak-to and be spoken-to? A religion of keitai-ism? Telephonism?

And then there are keitai on the move. Train colloquia. Getting off the train colloquia. Striding forth colloquia.

Plain old-fashioned, non-stop natter. Odakyū natter.