Amazing coincidence this.

When it comes to mobile phones, every visitor to Japan is treated the same. You could be
from the US or Europe or India or Somalia, you could be having GSM or CDMA or whatever,
it simply won't work here. Period.

The alternative is renting out a mobile phone for the duration of your stay here. Rates vary depending on where you rent from. The Hilton charges 1000Yen for a day as rental, while I have seen ads in the Metro trains offering as cheap as 250Yen per day. Since a mobile phone
is more of a necessity than the luxury it was some years ago, I rent one when I am here.

The hotel's rental range is all Sony Ericsson camera mobiles. Since I have a digital camera to take snaps and also because the hotel does not provide the cable to transfer images to your
PC, I do not use the camera on the mobile. Last time I was here, I did try out some snaps just for the heck of it and to check out the image quality.

So, this time around also, when I rented out a phone, I just stuck to using the phone only for making /receiving calls and never used it to take snaps. Yesterday I was feeling bored and
was just fiddling around with the phone's menu and end up at the data folder where images
are stored.

I see 30-odd images in the folder which must have been taken by the person who rented
this phone out earlier. I go through them and see that most of them have been taken in some pub / karaoke / hotel room etc and some of them are pretty personal with a few also having intimate moments of a couple (a Caucasian male and a Japanese female).

I am surprised how people could be so careless to leave their personal stuff on something as public as a rental mobile. I scroll through the images to see the girl dancing, the guy and girl sitting in a bar, he with his hands around her and then they move on to some serious stuff.

After some 15 such snaps, the images change from the couple to buildings, hotels and cars.
There is a snap of the Metropolitan building (one of the tallest here) taken from ground level looking up to its dizzying heights. I can't help thinking to myself that I would have tried this angle when I visited the building during my last visit. And there is a snap of a lovely black
Lexus and a sexy black Merc S-class convertible. I again think, "Hmmm, someone who likes cars as much as me".

But then I notice that the cars are parked at the Hilton. Intuition kicks in and I get this
feeling that these snaps are too familiar. I go through more of them and yes, there are more Hondas, BMWs and Suzukis. By now I am sure that these were taken by me last time when I was here. Just to confirm, I check the date on the snaps and yes, they were during the time I was here last.

No wonder they looked familiar. I don't know how many phones the Hilton rents out in total,
but it was such an amazing coincidence that I got the same phone that I had got when I was here a couple of months ago.

And yes, I will delete the personal snaps of the couple, before it gets into the hands of some prankster.