From MobileCrunch:

Big shake up in Japan’s cell phone industry (100 million mobile subscribers) today: NTT Docomo, the country’s leading carrier (55 million customers), is planning to make all of its cell phones SIM free as early as April 2011 (the start of the new fiscal year in most Japanese companies).

Docomo’s president Ryuji Yamada told Japanese daily The Nikkei in an interview that all that customers will need to do is to simply replace SIM cards when switching to another carrier. The move is a reaction to guidelines released by Japan’s Communications Ministry in June, according to which the country’s leading cell phone carriers (Docomo, KDDI au, and SoftBank Mobile) should “consider” selling just unlocked handsets in the future.

Read the entire article.