Quoting NTT sources, last Saturday's Nikkei reported that NTT's fixed line subscribers will fall to a 10 year low, below 60 million, by the end of March 2004, down 2% on March 2003.
Decline said to be caused by cellphone use (79,787,200 at the end of Dec. 2003 -- Japan's population is 127 million) and rise of DSL lines which compete with NTT's ISDN. ISDN is at around 8.8 million lines, down 1.3 million from March 2003.
It's cellphones. Just wait for flat rate mobile.