If the suicide prevention hotline cost $15/hr in the USA people would freak out! But since it's Japan it's whatever.

Just wanted to leave a comment that I really enjoy reading the articles about how the Japanese solve or create infrastructure problems for their ageing conservative society posted on here the past few weeks.

Also read a very interesting piece about the railway system the other day. Thank you for providing a valuable perspective I wouldn’t get access to otherwise and also proposing possible solutions and practical advise for your fellow citizens. Keep up the good work.

Was kinda curious about the pricing and honestly the pricing[0] seems like one digit less than I expected. 10k JPY for the number, then 1k JPY per some of the various options (stuff like routing seems to be literally "we set up a phone tree and at the end of the phone tree we just dial a number you give us")

So it sounds like in the end you need to pay 10k JPY per queue + an extra bit of money to wire it all together. Maybe with Twilio you can set up something similarly fire-and-forget but "I explain to Docomo once how to set up my phone tree" sounds nicer than "I set up a twilio... thingy".

I'm sure somebody out there has at least considered being the layer over Twilio that just offers some of these straightforward services... but... toll-free numbers on Twilio cost 27 cents a minute in Japan. Sounds real close to that 33 yen.[1]

[0]: https://www.ntt.com/business/services/voice-video/freedial-n...

[1]: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/voice/pricing/jp