Sakura Mobile offers reliable, reasonably priced cellular phone services for international students and expats to Japan. Forget about the hassles of dealing with Japanese contracts and huge cancellation fees – the sign-up process with Sakura Mobile can be done online entirely in English.
These benefits and more:
- English customer support
- No 2 years contracts
- Pay your bill with your credit card from home or pay at your local convenience store
- No need to buy a new phone with your contract
- Cheaper international calling fees
Sakura Mobile also has a range of eSIMs aimed at both short and long term visitors. The price scales with the length of your stay and how much data you want, starting with a 3-day, 1GB eSIM for ¥2,100.
Sakura Mobile work with NTT Docomo to ensure reliable coverage around the country. Getting set up was a little clunky due to the website user interface, but not too hard. Instructions are emailed to you, and you follow the link sent to open up your QR code — the process takes about 15 minutes. In terms of speed, Sakura test at a solid speed, but slower than most of the other eSIMs we tested.
Our tests
(Upload/Download/Latency)
Test 1: CTCSCI Tech Ltd: 2.4/3.88/166
Test 2: i3D.net: 0.78/10.3/149
Test 3: Verizon Tokyo: 0.81/17.5/127
Test 4: Rakuten Mobile Inc.: 0.69/4.38/157
Test 5: Web: 92.1/Na/135