Come March 2026, NTT will end its Dial 104 telephone directory service, through which operators look up phone numbers using names or addresses and provide them to users who dial the three-digit number for a fee, the company has announced.
The service has a special connection with Okinawa Prefecture, where NTT, as part of a project aimed at revitalizing the prefecture, set up call centers in the 1990s that went on to become the country's largest, receiving calls from Tokyo in addition to the immediate areas of coverage.
At their peak in 1999, Okinawa's call centers received around 125,000 calls a day. But with more and more people not using landlines anymore, that number plunged to some 7,000 in 2023 — a 94% decrease.
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