“One of Japan’s top cell phone innovators says that for all his country’s technological prowess, it could never have produced the iPhone,” Yuri Kageyama reports for The Associated Press.

“Japan’s telecommunications industry stifles the kind of creativity that is so apparent in Apple’s Web-surfing phone, says Takeshi Natsuno, who developed Japan’s first Internet-linking cell phone service “i-mode” in 1999, when such systems were still groundbreaking,” Kageyama reports.

“‘This is a great device,’ he said, affectionately touching a black iPhone 3G during an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. ‘This kind of device cannot be produced by Japanese manufacturers. Never,’” Kageyama reports.

“Natsuno, 43, who quit top Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo three months ago, expressed disenchantment with this nation’s phone industry, which he said was dominated by stodgy conservatives, who lacked the charisma and creative sensibilities of a Steve Jobs, chief executive at Cupertino, California-based Apple,” Kageyama reports.

“The iPhone, introduced in Japan last month, has drawn long lines although it still makes up a tiny portion of Japan’s 115 million cell-phone market,” Kageyama reports.

MacDailyNews Take: No, really? You mean Apple hasn’t sold tens of millions of units in the first four weeks and therefore still makes up just a tiny portion of Japan’s cellphone market, despite being introduced a whole month ago? Who’da thunk it? Cripes, Mr. Obvious. What’s next, Yuri, “water is wet?”

Kageyama continues, “Natsuno, now professor of policy management at Keio University, warned that Japan’s telecommunications business is doomed unless it can change quickly.”

Full article here.

[UPDATE: 3:04pm EDT: Revised "Take" after further reflection. In our own defense, we read a lot of, um, stuff, each day and some of what's written just wears us out.]