Originally Posted by
Jay71
Alternatively, you can try for wifi hotspots. Apparently there's a free wifi solution for visitors:
SoftBank Free Wi-Fi Passport. Not sure how wide of extensive the hotspot coverage is though.
That one has... issues. I couldn't sign up roaming from my home provider (Sprint). I thought maybe it was treating my Sprint phone as "local" on SoftBank, so I tried again with SIMs from China Unicom, China Mobile HK, PCCW, Wind Canada, Koodo, 3 Italy, T-Mobile Austria, and Vodafone Romania (yes, I was getting a bit desperate towards the end). All of them gave a "the number you dialed is out of service" message when I tried dialing the number that's supposed to give you the passcode (except my Sprint phone gave the message in Japanese, thus why I wondered if it was being treated as "local" on SoftBank). For reference, I tried this pretty much exactly one month ago in Osaka and Tokyo.