Less than a month into his new job as head of NTT DoCoMo, Ryuji Yamada received a sharp reminder of just how stiff competition is becoming in the Japanese mobile phone market when smaller rival Softbank launched Apple’s new 3G iPhone in Japan.

On the opening day of a 22-country launch of the iPhone earlier this month, more than 1,500 people, many of whom had queued for days, waited patiently outside Softbank’s Omote Sando store in central Tokyo to get hold of the new handset.