Kevin is correct in the sense that the 215k quoted is not a good metric to base the July sales of iPhone here in Japan. That number only reflects the total net new subscriptions month-on-month. For example, if SBM signed 300k new contracts (existing clients 2-yr deals expired and were renewed, new customers bought a 2nd handset or churned from other operators), while 100k ended their agreements.. then “net-new” would be 200k.

Lets say – for a fun guess – that the actual activity over the month for SoftBank Mobile was more like 1M+ new contracts signed. Using the ball-park figure of 4% from GfK Marketing research [links below] then it would be somewhere in the 50k unit range, which is basically what the Tech-On article was saying.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080826p2a00m0na013000c.html
http://www.gfkjpn.co.jp/update_file/pdf/126.pdf

Hope that helps..

http://www.japantoday.com/category/technology/view/softbank-mobile-corp-is-boosting-its-efforts-to-shore-up-sales-of-apple-incs-iphone-3g-just-one-month-after-the-handsets-strong-japanese-debut

No where in the referenced original article does it say that “215,400 to be more precise, were due to the iPhone 3G alone”.

215,400 is the total number of their new subscribers, and is only partly attributed to iPhones.