![\"Mayor](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/c1_5811892_800.jpg\")
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Mayor Masafumi Kouki says he worried for many months about the “negative effects of excessive smartphone use, especially the sharp decrease in direct human communication”. <\/p>\n
TOYOAKE (JAPAN) – Police won’t be rounding up people glued to phones in Japan’s Toyoake, but the mayor believes his two-hour limit can help residents find a healthier relationship with their screens.<\/p>\n
Masafumi Kouki told AFP he has worried for many months about the “negative effects of excessive smartphone use, especially the sharp decrease in direct human communication”.<\/p>\n
“Even on trains, everyone just stares at their phones, and no one talks anymore,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t believe this should be considered normal, so I wanted to create an opportunity for our residents to reflect on whether they might be overusing their smartphones.”<\/p>\n
A local ordinance on the appropriate use of phones, laptops and tablets came into force last week in Toyoake, a largely grey, concrete suburb of the industrial metropolis Nagoya.<\/p>\n
There are no penalties for exceeding its recommended two-hour limit, which applies to adults and children alike and was approved by the city council in a 12-7 vote.<\/p>\n
Instead, the aim is to encourage self-regulation.<\/p>\n
“It’s certainly a rare step — we know that,” said the 56-year-old Kouki, whose own phone screen has multiple cracks.<\/p>\n
When the ordinance was first proposed, “opposition was almost universal”.<\/p>\n
But many citizens came round to the idea, he said, when they learned that the daily cap does not include work or study time and is meant as a guideline, not a strict rule.<\/p>\n
– ‘Overreach’ –<\/p>\n
Among Toyoake’s population of nearly 68,000, not everyone is convinced.<\/p>\n
“Nowadays… we do everything — studying, hobbies, communication — through a single smartphone,” said 22-year-old law student Shutaro Kihara.<\/p>\n
So the ordinance is “rather meaningless or ineffective” for young people, he said.<\/p>\n
City lawmaker Mariko Fujie, 50, voted against Kouki’s decree.<\/p>\n
Excessive smartphone use is a social problem that needs addressing, she told AFP.<\/p>\n
But “I feel a strong resistance to regulating people’s personal free time through an ordinance”, she said.<\/p>\n
“It feels like an overreach.”<\/p>\n
Ikka Ito, a middle school student playing a video game near a local station, uses his phone for four to five hours a day.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been voluntarily cutting back compared to before the ordinance was announced,” without his parents telling him to, he said.<\/p>\n
But there are downsides, too.<\/p>\n
“If you reduce smartphone time, you can’t stay in touch” with friends, Ito said.<\/p>\n
One goal is to improve citizens’ health by helping them get more sleep.<\/p>\n
Toyoake’s ordinance urges elementary school students to avoid smartphones after 9pm, while junior high students and older are advised not to use them after 10pm.<\/p>\n
– Sleepy citizens –<\/p>\n
Surveys have found that people in Japan get less sleep than those in other developed economies, often due to long working hours.<\/p>\n
Toyoake resident Kokuka Hirano, 59, said she is “sleep-deprived” because of her phone.<\/p>\n
“I want to research various things I don’t understand, so I end up watching news from different countries,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Time runs away from me.”<\/p>\n
Hirano wants to limit her smartphone use to devote more time to exercise and cooking.<\/p>\n
But “three or four hours would be more reasonable… two hours feels too strict”.<\/p>\n
Studies show that as well as smartphones interfering with sleep, which can affect mental health, heavy use of social media is linked with loneliness, depression and anxiety.<\/p>\n
Global efforts to limit potential harm to children include an upcoming Australian ban on social media for under-16s.<\/p>\n
Mayor Kouki has two children aged 10 and seven who don’t own smartphones, although the 10-year-old borrows his wife’s without permission.<\/p>\n
Kouki said he likes using his phone to watch Japanese baseball highlights, but the family now shuns screens during mealtimes.<\/p>\n
Yumi Watanabe, a 36-year-old mother-of-three in Toyoake, said most parents she knows let their children explore freely online, which is “scary”.<\/p>\n
Even so, the ordinance “wasn’t really necessary”, she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s something each person can judge for themselves as they go.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Masafumi Kouki says he worried for many months about the “negative effects of excessive smartphone use, especially…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[64,63,941,30563,18404,203,40608,4016,7461,105,13964],"class_list":["post-202536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-japan","tag-limit","tag-mayor","tag-mobile","tag-screentime","tag-sleep","tag-smartphone","tag-technology","tag-use"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}