New Delhi: Japan’s 50-year tryst with the pager which saw it become a cultural mainstay has come to an end after the last pager provider shut down the radio signals that power the service on Monday midnight.Tokyo Telemessage Inc, which last manufactured a device more than 20 years ago, announced that its services would stop at around midnight on Monday. The device, also known as a beeper, was used to alert users that somebody is trying to call them. Advances in technology allowed callers to send messages and transmit news updates.According to Japan Times, the tiny device was initially used by companies to communicate with sales staff who were out of the office but has recently been used by hospitals. Hospitals did not encourage the usage of cell phones due to issues like poor reception and the possibility of electromagnetic waves disrupting medical devices.Pagers were commonly referred to as pokeberu (pocket bells) and according to the newspaper, sales of the devices began in Japan in 1968 with the predecessor of NTT Corp. While initial designs only showed the caller’s number, later models allowed callers to send preset messages and then custom messages.From the late 80s, the popularity of pagers spiked after users began sending “short messages by creatively combining numbers and text characters”. According to Japan Times, the device became a staple of the country’s 90s culture, prominently featuring in TV series, movies and music videos. The “pager boom” was further driven by female high school students who “came up with clever combinations to exchange messages”.The newspaper said:“Among the short numerical messages were “33414,” which in Japanese can be pronounced “samishiiyo,” meaning “I’m lonely.” Another was “999,” a series of three (san) nines (kyū) that was a casual way to say “sankyū” (“thank you”).”The pager’s popularity in Japan peaked in 1996, when more than 10 million users were estimated to exist. The entry of the mobile phone meant the device’s usage declined slowly, aided by new services such as email, texting and sending multimedia messages.A report from March 1997 says that beepers “are evolving from chatting tools for teenagers into handy, inexpensive terminal devices for up-to-the-minute information”. The NTT, which was the leading paging service company at the time, began sending news updates and other information free of charge that year.Users could receive updates on news dispatches from wire services, weather and sports news (including baseball, sumo, and soccer results), which were transmitted daily between 6 am and 10 pm. While the news report speculates that this service could shore up beeper sales again, the introduction of the cell phone meant that the downward spiral never picked up again.A report in December 2018 estimated that there were still 1,500 pager users in Japan, some of whom worked in hospitals. Another report speculated that since more than 20% of the country’s population was more than 65 years old, a reluctance to part with old technology could also explain the high number of pager users.“Japan is a high-tech hub, but many older devices like fax machines remain in common use—a curiosity sometimes attributed in part to conservative approaches to modernization in its non-manufacturing sector,” Gizmodo said.Other pager service providers in Japan like NTT Docomo and Okinawa Telemessage shut down their services in 2007 and 2017 respectively. Tokyo Telemessage, which manufactured its last pagers more than 20 years ago, continued to operate in Tokyo and neighbouring Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa prefectures before it shut down its service.