Having your cellphone battery die is an annoyance, but apparently in Japan it could lead to social ostracism according to an article in Online Journalism Review about how cellphones are changing the ways in which Japanese teenagers socialize:
One college student I spoke to described leaving one’s phone at home or letting the battery die as “the new taboo.” Teens and twentysomethings usually do not bother to set a time and place for their meetings. They exchange as many as 5 to 15 messages throughout the day that progressively narrows in on a time and place, two points eventually converging in a coordinated dance through the urban jungle. To not have a keitai [cellphone] is to be walking blind, disconnected from just-in-time information on where and when you are in the social networks of time and place.
