But people have now realised smartphones are just too useful to ignore, especially because they can be used to read newspapers and manga, the Japanese comics which have gone global, without straining your eyes.

More than half of all Japanese now own a smartphone and the proportion is rising fast.

But with that rise has grown another phenomenon - the smartphone walk.

It's that glacial pace people only adopt when they're staring at a phone screen - their head down, arms outstretched, looking like zombies trying to find human prey.

Researchers here have found people don't just walk more slowly when they're on smartphones, their field of vision is reduced to 5% of what it should be, and some are worrying what this means for Shibuya.

Recently the Japanese mobile giant NTT Docomo released a simulationof what would happen there if everyone crossing was doing the smartphone walk.

There would be more than 400 collisions every time, it said, and most likely just 36% of people would get across. Orderly Japanese society as we know it, would be at an end.

Surprisingly, the person who seems most annoyed about this phenomenon is an American.

Michael Cucek is a consultant who has lived here for more than 20 years. In his spare time, he writes a popular political blog called Shisakuthat has recently been littered with posts about what he calls "dumbwalking".

I met Michael this week in Sugamo, a part of Tokyo popular with pensioners who, understandably enough, all walk incredibly slowly.

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