Originally Posted by freakazoid

The nice part about HanaCell is that you only have to pay for the months you use it, while keeping the same sim/number/contract. IIRC Mobal used to offer to suspend their contracts, but I can't find anything like that with their current offers. HanaCell does have some bitter pills on their own. You can't port your number to a different provider, their outgoing call rates are expensive and maybe worst of all, you can't use SMS service outside Japan. The latter is especially bad if you want to signup/(re)install apps that require a phone number and you're outside Japan.