Cell-phone purchasing is the latest addition to Japan's century-old love affair with the vending machine

DAVID McNEILLwrites his INNOVATION IN... column about vending machines, this month.

FOR THOUSANDS of Japanese, the day begins with a swipe, click, whirr and the thud of a canned drink falling into the bottom of a metal vendor. No fiddling for coins either: that first morning coffee can be bought using a train pass, a credit card and even a mobile phone.

In a country with the highest concentration of vending machines on the planet – 5.2 million, or one for roughly every 20 people – a smorgasbord of products can be found behind coin-operated glass display boxes: eggs, umbrellas, bento lunch boxes, noodles and rice balls, cigarettes, toilet paper, beer and batteries among them.

Little is safe from the machine. In the days when humans exclusively staffed the reception counters of Japanese love hotels, bashful couples waited as a liver-spotted hand slid a key out from beneath a curtain and a croaky voice announced a room number. For some, being served by granny was a libido-killing moment.

But punters are increasingly spared those embarrassing encounters. In thousands of hotels, a push-button panel displays vacancies and a female-voiced vending machine inside each room times the stay while automatically locking the door. The only way out is to pay the machine – or start a fire.

“I prefer this way because it’s more private,” says 23-year-old Yuki Nakamura, a regular visitor with her boyfriend to hotels around the west Tokyo area. Naturally, inside each room is another vending machine selling all the paraphernalia anyone could need for a hot date.

Convenience, service, innovation, attention to detail and smart technology; it is what for some makes Japan the template of 21st century society, a country that struggles to dull the friction of modern life and cherishes Sartre’s dictum, “hell is other people”.

Few places here are more than a short walk from the ubiquitous 24-hour humming neon box: country lanes, forests, beachfronts; even the top of Japan’s national icon, Mount Fuji. Vandalism is rare, even in the remotest location, and the machines are invariably well stocked, sometimes with up to 30 different products.

Engineers see the electronic vendor as one of the solutions to Japan’s looming population crisis. With over 50,000 fewer Japanese born in 2008 than the previous year, the machine is increasingly playing the role of service worker that in other advanced countries is performed by immigrants. Some machines have even been programmed to talk in “warmer” local dialects such as Osaka and automatically dispense free drinks and food following an earthquake.

The vending box has been around for a hundred years but exploded in popularity after the introduction of 100-yen coins in the 1960s. Today, the machines clock up annual sales of nearly 7 trillion yen (€51 billion), according to the Japan Vending Machine Manufacturers Association.

The industry, however, is an environmental nightmare, spewing out millions of cans and plastic bottles, and tons of coolant gases and consuming the equivalent of more than the output of a 1-megawatt nuclear power plant every year. And Japan’s 600,000 cigarette machines – 40 times the US figure – are blamed for fuelling the epidemic of underage smoking in a country with the fourth-highest smoking rate in the world.

But high-tech help is at hand. Coca Cola Japan, which owns almost a million vending machines, has spent a fortune developing a low-emission, eco-friendly model and says it will phase out older machines by 2020; Suntory and Kirin are following suit helped by the big manufacturers Matsushita and Fuji Denki. Matsushita has launched a machine that uses 30 per cent less electricity.

The big industry prize is linking vending machines with almost 90 million Japanese cell-phones. Handsets are already widely used to buy concert tickets, book restaurants and scan ticket barriers in train stations, thanks to a contactless technology developed by Sony Corp and mobile-phone giant NTT DoCoMo.

Dubbed “mobile-wallet”, the technology uses FeliCa chips – mini radios that send out a signal read by a sensor – which are embedded in millions of handsets. The phone is swiped over the sensor like a barcode, and the cost is deducted from credits stored on the phone.

NTT's clout – it controls about half the Japanese subscriber market – means the system is now the de factostandard and ready to be rolled out abroad. Sony has employed a US partner to develop FeliCa outside Japan. "Mobile-phone purchasing is the wave of the future," says Takashi Kurosaki of the Japan Vending Machine Manufacturers Association.