Japan, You've Got Mail.

• Position: Brief Article

Until now, e-mail has never really caught on in Japan because relatively few people there have had personal computers. But the messages seem to be everywhere these days, because people are sending them with cell phones. And the change hasn't been easy. Programmers had to adapt the Japanese language, with more than 2,000 characters, to a postage-stamp-size screen and a keypad with only 15 buttons.

The language barrier has been broken by using 200...