Vodafone’s Japanese market share started to slide, and in 2006, it sold its operations to SoftBank.

Not every maker succumbs to this whirligig and, not surprisingly, those that don’t aren’t Japanese. Apple has announced a new iPhone model roughly once a year. Its iPhone 5 came out in September, and the company is not expected to introduce a new model until the fall. Samsung Electronics is focusing its resources on its sleek Galaxy S4 smartphone, which went on sale in April, a full year after its predecessor the Galaxy S3.

The scattershot efforts by Japanese handset designers could not compete with a single blockbuster product like Apple’s iPhone, Mr. Kushida said. It turned out that Japanese consumers didn’t want a new phone each season after all, he said, but a well-designed one.

Since its release in 2008, the iPhone has been a best seller in Japan, becoming the most popular handset here. In 2012, the iPhone led all handsets with an overall 15 percent market share, ahead of former market leaders Sharp and Fujitsu, according to data provider IDC Japan.

Looking at smartphones only, Apple’s dominance in Japan is even stronger: for the first three months of 2013, Apple’s mobile platform market share came to 49.2 percent, compared with Android’s 45.8 percent, according to Kantar WorldPanel, which tracks mobile phone sales.

Sony’s Xperia Z, which runs on the Android operating system, was shaping up to be Japan’s greatest challenger to the iPhone as well as to another global blockbuster, Samsung’s Galaxy series. The Xperia Z won rave reviews for its sleek aluminum case, sharp five-inch display, fast-capture camera and high-definition video.

The Xperia Z has topped sales charts, selling at least 630,000 units in Japan in its first 10 weeks, according to the data provider, GfK Japan. DoCoMo had said that it aimed to sell about a million units in Japan, and analysts agree that sales here are now approaching that number. Sony’s chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, has repeatedly promoted the Xperia Z’s strong sales in Japan as one of the few bright spots in its money-losing electronics sector.

Still, production of the Xperia Z has ceased for the Japanese market, and the model will no longer be available in Japan once stock runs out at retail stores across the country, both Sony and NTT DoCoMo said. “The Japanese market operates on a far quicker life cycle than markets overseas,” said Yu Tominaga, a Sony spokesman in Tokyo. “Demand changes fast here, but we are set up to respond to that,” he said.