Futures of Learning

Japan is one of the national contexts that has had a vibrant gaming culture that has rivaled that of the US, emerging in the late seventies with arcade culture, and coming of it’s own in the international scene with the spread of the Nintendo systems in the mid eighties. In many ways, Japan is seen as the home base for video gaming culture worldwide, and it is in some circles a source of national pride. Japanese developers have dominated internationally, particularly in the console market of Playstation and Nintendo games. Japanese is also home to unique genres of gaming that do not make it out internationally, particularly dating sims, erotic games, and interactive graphical novels. Arcade game design is also unique in the domestic market, with advanced networked gaming and interfaces that are not found in other parts of the world. Unlike countries where there is a strong culture of PC-based game arcades, Japanese arcades are based on customized and high-end coin-drop arcade systems that are home to vibrant location based gaming communities of urban geeks.

As we have seen in the case of other countries, however, there is relatively little research on gaming practice, despite its centrality as an everyday practice. The work that does exist centers on documentation of negative effects from a psychological research perspective. Here we briefly review this dominant research trend before reviewing studies that look at social and cultural dimensions of gaming in the areas of game arcades, online games, and portable gaming.

Perils of Gaming

As we saw in the case of China and Korea, the research literature in Japan on gaming has focused on negative psychological effects. Throughout the eighties and nineties, with the rise of gaming culture, a series of publications has focused on the negative consequences of gaming, as reviewed by Yoshimasa Kijima (2007). The press took up cases of kids becoming addicted to Space Invaders, and later, of elementary school students skipping school to line up for a new release of a popular game franchise. Research tended to follow these trends in public discourse, supporting the thesis that video game play results in violent behavior (Yukawa and Yoshida 2001). For example, Akira Sakamoto (2003, 2005) conducted experimental studies where he separated kids into an experimental and control group and examined the effects of exposure to violent games. He found that kids who were exposed to video games were more prone to applying hostile auditory stimulus to other kids when given the opportunity by the researchers.

Overall, contemporary research on gaming suggests that games reward violent behavior and may result in violent activity. Other research has taken up the question of whether games make kids antisocial, though there has been little empirical support for the claim of causality. The researcher probably most known for arguing for the antisocial effects of gaming is Akio Mori (2002, 2007). His book, The Horror of the Game Brain (ゲーム脳の恐怖), suggests that game play reduces the activity of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that supports higher mental functions such as creativity and social behavior.

Game Arcades and Gamer Communities

Photo by sleepycat

Although the psychological research on negative effects has been dominant in the literature, there is a small and growing body of research that looks at gaming practice. As we have found in other research contexts, this kind of qualitative research tends to be more sympathetic and positive about the social outcomes of gaming. Although there has been virtually no research on gaming practice that takes up gaming in the home, one area has received some research attention is the study of arcade game arcade cultures. This work has tried to work against the dominant cultural image of game centers as corrupting influences. Hiroki Aihara (2001) has written about the unique sociality that game centers provide. He describes how they provide an opportunity for intergenerational contact, where school children can observe the activities of the core gamers, who are generally in their twenties or even older. They also provide a context where kids can participate in a social and competitive environment and achieve status on par with adults.

Hiroyasu Kato (2005, 2006a, 2006b) also describes the ways in which game arcade strip people of their everyday status and identities, providing a space to interact with a new social group around a shared activity. Gamers gain status among a specific community through their skills and hard work. He traces how the regulars at a game arcade develop strong social ties, and how various elements of the game center’s structure contributed to this communal context. For example, he notes how the game machines allow for communal viewing and peer learning, and how the arcade provides a communication notebook for players to leave comments and messages. He also describes how players have gamer names that they use specifically for their gaming status, differentiating it from their real life identity.

Online Games and Social Dynamics

Although Japanese gaming has centered on console, portable, and arcade-based gaming, PC-based networked games are becoming more popular. As with other forms of game research, most studies center on negative psychological effects, such as game-induced violence and antisocial behavior (Hirai and Kasai 2006). Katsura Fuji (2007) conducted a survey examining the relationship between online game activity and real life stress and interpersonal conflict. They found that online games can function as a place to relieve everyday pressures and stress, but can also contribute to a sense of social isolation if the games are used as a flight from everyday life.

Testuro Kobayashi and Kenichi Ikeda (2006) take a more sociological approach in their survey work, examining community dynamics. They found that when players were part of a group that had a flatter social structure based on reciprocity, people gained a positive sense of trust, but when the structure was hierarchical, the effect was negative.  They also found that the positive sense of trust could spill over into everyday life. They argue against the view that online games result in social withdrawal, suggesting instead that people can gain important social skills through online participation.

Portable Gaming and Social Media

Photo by A Malchik!

Mobile gaming has been on the rise in Japan, centered around the Nintendo DS and casual games on the mobile phone. Tamagotchi and card games also represent mobile gaming experiences that have been pervasive among elementary aged kids. Despite the prevalence of mobile gaming, there has almost no research on mobile gaming effects or practices. Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada (2008) have studied the players of a location based mobile game called Mogi, and how the game supports unique social connections between players. My work (Ito 2007) has also looked at how portable gaming promotes unique forms of sociability, by looking at the case of media mixes such as Yugioh and Pokemon. I look at how card games enable a kind of “hypersocial” exchange of game information and tokens that support unique kinds of learning and extroverted kinds of game experiences. Although there has been research on Pokemon uptake overseas (Tobin 2004, Allison 2006), there has been little comparable work conducted in Japan. As in the case of other forms of gaming, research on gaming practice is sparse despite its centrality in the culture.

References

Aihara, Hiroyuki (相原博之). 2001.「ゲームセンター」という空間に子供は何を求めるか？『児童心理』No.754, pp100-105.

Allison, Anne. 2006. Millenial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fuji, Katsura (藤桂). 2007. 「オンラインゲーム利用が孤独感・敵意的認知に及ぼす影響」『筑波大学心理学研究』　33, pp51-57.

Hirai, Daisuke and Makiko Kasai (平井大祐・葛西真記子). 2006.「オンラインゲームへの依存傾向が引き起こす心理臨床的課題：潜在的不登校・ひきこもり心性との関連性」『心理臨床学研究』24(4).

Ito, Mizuko. 2007. Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production. In Joe Karaganis Ed., Structures of Participation in Digital Culture. New York: SSRC Books.

Kato, Hiroyasu (加藤裕康). 2005.「ゲームセンターにおけるコミュニケーション空間の生成」『マス・コミュニケーション研究』No.67, pp106-122.

Kato, Hiroyasu (加藤裕康). 2006a.「ノートを介した小集団における合意形成の過程：コミュニケーション・ノートの誹謗中傷・落書きとイラストの事例から」『社会情報学研究』Vol.11, No.1, pp31-47.

加藤裕康Hiroyasu Kato (2006b)「落書きをめぐるポリティクス--ゲームセンターの伝言・掲示板を事例として」余暇学研究No.9, pp49-58

Kijima, Yoshimasa (木島由晶). 2007. ビデオゲームの現在. 富田他編『デジタルメディアトレーニング』有斐閣選書。

Kobayashi, Tetsuro and Kenichi Ikeda (小林哲郎・池田謙一). 2006. 「オンラインゲーム内のコミュニティにおける社会関係資本の醸成」社会心理学研究22巻1号 pp58-71.

Licoppe, C., & Inada, Y. (2008). “Geolocalized Technologies, Location Aware Communities and Personal Territories “ : The Mogi Case”, Journal of Urban technology 15(3), pp. 5-24.

Mori, Akio (森昭雄) 2007.「脳力」低下社会. PHP研究所.

Mori, Akio (森昭雄). 2002. ゲーム脳の恐怖. 生活人新書.

Sakamoto, A. (2003) Video games use and children’s psychological development: Japanese situations. In D.W. Shwalb, J. Nakazawa, and B.J. Shwalb Eds., Child development in cultural context: Applied research on Japanese children. Westport, CT: Ablex/Greenwood Publishing.

Sakamoto, Akira (坂元章). 2003.「テレビゲームと暴力」問題の過去と現在：社会心理学における研究の動向『シミュレーション＆ゲーミング』13(1).

Sakamoto, Akira (坂元章). 2005. テレビゲームと子供の心：子供たちは凶暴化していくのか？. メタモル出版.

Yukawa, Shingaro and Fujio Yoshida (湯川進太郎 ・吉田富士雄). 2001.「暴力的テレビゲームと攻撃：ゲーム特性および参加性の効果」『筑波大学心理学研究』23.

Tobin, Joseph, ed. 2004 Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon. Durham: Duke University Press.

The growth of mobile media and Internet use and the spread of digital media production tools has led to a variety of new media production practices in Japan. Here we focus on new media production that has grown out of the distinctive mobile media and communication practices of Japan - digital photography and keitai novels. We also touch on digital video production and media literacy programs that have received attention from the research community. 

Digital Photography

As digital photography, mobile communications, and social media have become pervasive in Japanese culture, new media production and sharing has become integral part of everyday self-expression and communication. In the past decade, Japan has seen a phenomenal growth in digital media creation that grows out of casual, social forms of media creation and sharing.

Photo by Joko and Norifumi

For example, when camera phones started to become popular in Japan in the early 2000s, we saw a growth in new forms of amateur photography. As Daisuke Okabe and Mizuko Ito (2006) note, keitai photos are taken of more everyday, low-key scenes and events in contrast to the special events and commemorations that characterized traditional amateur photography. They categorize keitai photos into the genres of personal archiving, visual sharing, and news sharing. The latter two categories are particularly distinctive in that they are embedded in keitai social communication, visual media that are captured in order to share in immediate and lightweight ways with friends and family. Norifumi Arimoto and Daisuke Okabe (2008) argue that keitai cameras have changed certain structures of desire for their users. In the past, when encountering something visually interesting in the environment, people didn’t have a desire to share this visual information with others. They argue that this new kind of desire is something that grew out of the intersection between a new technology and emerging social practices, leading to the growth of a new kind of amateur photo journalistic tendency.

Another form of portable, digital photography that has received some research attention are “print club” (purikura) sticker photos that are taken in photo booths when teens get together. These photos are generally taken as couples or in groups, and then mod them with “graffiti” and print them out on sticker sheets that are shared among friends. The photos can also be sent to mobile phones. They first became popular in the late nineties, and now are a taken-for-granted element of the social landscape for teenage girls. Laura Miller (2005) has studied purikura as a unique expressive and linguistic form that pushes back on dominant notions of Japanese femininity and cuteness. She describes how girls will take and annotate photos to be deliberately grotesque and crass, performing a kind of gender parody. Other researchers have examined how purikura function as a communication tool, making visible social networks of friendships (Kurita 1999; Okabe 2008; Okabe et al. 2009). By exchanging purikura photos and displaying them in elaborately designed purikura albums, teenage girls display their identity, social status, friendships, and taste in ways that are visible to their peers (Okabe 2008; Okabe et al. 2009).

Purikura Album
Photo by Kunikazu

Keitai Novels

In addition to photography, mobile media has also supported new forms of writing and literature. As described in the earlier post on Internet practices, young people began developing “mail magazine” (merumaga), email lists that functioned as personal zines shared over mobile email. This practice of sharing news, musings, and other kinds of information in short bursts over keitai email has evolved over the years into a new genre of literature, the keitai novel. The keitai novel, like merumaga are stories written in installments on a mobile phone and generally ready on a mobile phone, though they can be accessed via PC as well. The past few years has seen this genre become wildly popular in Japan, and the most popular of these novels have been published as print publications as well. In 2007, the three bestselling novels in Japan were keitai novels.

Most writers of keitai novels are teenage girls, mostly from the provinces, with no professional writing experience. They are written in an informal style as if they are writing mobile email. Yumiko Sugiura (2008) has suggested that keitai content sites, like those hosting keitai novels, represent a kind of “writing as consumption” that is different from the traditional mode of “reading as consumption.” Keitai users are writing novels in an informal, amateur mode, as if they are updating an online journal or blog. Rather than simply consuming the writings of professionals, these amateurs have the sense that their own writing could also have value to others.

Keitai novels often have sudden plot twists, are often difficult to follow, and usually include a predictable pattern of dramatic incidents of rape, pregnancy and suicide attempts. Can these works really be considered novels and literature? Chiaki Ishihara (2008) argues that this debate over whether these novels are literature or not is meaningless. She notes that those who don’t recognize these amateur works are and who only recognize traditional literature as true novels are just basing their opinion on their personal tastes. She feels that these keitai works represent a new genre of novel. Satoshi Hamano (2008) expresses a similar view. His view is that those who look down on keitai novels as unoriginal and formulaic are themselves unoriginal, failing to recognize the unique contexts and conventions of the new genre. Viewed from the point of view of keitai literacy, these new novels have a reality and value that is embedded in shared culture of keitai-connected youth.

DIY Video

19 year-old anime fan dancing to the Suzumiya Haruhi theme song

Sites such as YouTube and Nico Video have become popular in Japan as places to share and access commercial video as well as amateur works of various kinds. Much of this video mirrors the kind of sharing and DIY video that we have seen in the US, but there are also some video genres that are unique. For example, the Japanese scene has a genre of videos known as “MADs,” which are similar to the anime music videos that are popular in the overseas fandom of anime. MADs are a broader genre of video making, however, and can include parodies of live action, as well as videos such as that featured above, of a fan dancing to an anime theme song. One particularly popular source for fan made videos has been the character Hatsune Miku, a character that was designed for a software package to create J-pop songs. Videos featuring Miku became hugely popular on Nico Video, becoming a focal point for online communities of video and music creators. Kaoru Endo (2004) has described the creative communities of online video makers as “creative mobs.” As described in an earlier post, these communities will occasionally organize “flash meetings” in real life.

One example of a flash meeting is the gathering of anime fans in Akihabara and other locations, where they got together to dance the Haruhi theme song, uploading these videos onto YouTube. Kaname Tanimura (2008) has studied the cultural significance of these fans of Suzumiya Haruhi. Rather than being a momentary and transitory social connection, however, these fans have continued to stay in communication, centered on their common interest (Suzuki 2002).

Media Literacy Programs

In addition to the culture of digital media production that has been flourishing on the mobile and PC-based Internet, Japan has been home to a several important media literacy programs that seek to support digital media production in educational settings.

From 2001 to 2006, The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies has been the home to the MELL (Media Expression, Learning, and Literacy) ProjectThis project is one of the largest projects in Japan dealing with media literacy, and has functioned as an umbrella for a wide range of media literacy efforts. The early participants in the MELL project included Sociologist Shin Mizukoshi, educational researcher Yuhei Yamauchi, public television producer Katsumi Ichikawa, journalist Akiko Sugaya, and high school educator Naoya Hayashi. The project was led by these five, bur also included 80 members comprised of researchers, graduate students, media professionals, teachers, NPOs and community organizations across the country, as well as 4-500 supporters who subscribed to the MELL email list.

With the adoption of digital media, there was the potential for citizens to actively participate in media rather than simply consuming mass media. The MELL project was developed based on the idea of having people make their own media while simultaneously building new networks and organizations for media making. Mizukoshi used the ecological term “media biotope” (link to Japanese page) to describe his effort to support participatory community media. A biotope is sphere optimized for certain organisms to inhabit. His idea was to create a fertile ground for a variety of different trees to grow, and to challenge the media environment that had become blanketed exclusively by cypress. Mizukoshi writes, “Just as it is critical for humans as organisms to have access to diverse ecologies, it is critical for humans as social beings to have access to diverse media ecologies.”

For example, one project under the MELL umbrella is the Civic Media Sapporo project, which supports local civic journalism. The project has supported citizens of Sapporo to develop community FM radio that was broadcast over the Internet, and has sponsored mdia workshops for elementary students to experience journalism. Another example is the Hacker’s Café, a weekly gathering where people can come by with their laptops to create and share technology hacks with one another.

References

Endo, Kaoru (遠藤薫) Ed. 2004.『インターネットと「世論」形成』東京電機大学出版局.

Hamano, Satoshi (濱野智史). 2008.『アーキテクチャの生態系』NTT出版.

Miller, Laura. 2005. “Bad Girl Photography.” In Bardsley, Miller, Ed. Bad Girls of Japan. Palgrave Macmillan.

Mizukoshi, Shin. http://mellnomoto.com/text/essay/2001/11/post_2.html >メディア・ビオトープのすすめ：マスメディア中心から新しいメディアの生態系へ構造改革 .

Okabe, Daisuke, Mizuko Ito, Aico Shimizu and Jan Chipchase. 2009.. “Purikura as a Social Management Tool.” In Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth Eds., Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media. New York: Routledge.

Sugiura, Yumiko (杉浦由美子). 2007.『ケータイ小説のリアル』中公新書.

Suzuki, Kensuke (鈴木謙介). 2002.『暴走するインターネット』イーストプレス.

Tanimura, Kaname (谷村要). 2008.「インターネットを媒介とした集合行為によるメディア表現活動のメカニズム：「ハレ晴レユカイ」ダンス「祭り」の事例から」No.85, pp69-81.

Photo by cocoarmani

Ever since rapid adoption of the mobile Internet in the late nineties, Japanese mobile phone (keitai) use has been the object of international attention.  Although other countries have led in terms of wireless technology development, mobile phone adoption rates, and certain usage patterns, Japan is considered by many to define the future of mobile phone use (Fitzpatrick 2007). As mentioned in the introductory post, Japan’s information ecology is unique in that most people access the Internet primarily via keitai rather than through PCs. This was a trend that was established in the early years of the mobile Internet in Japan, and continues to persist to this day even as more Japanese adopt broadband access via PCs (shivya 2008).

Japan’s heavy reliance on mobile media needs to be located within a longer historical trajectory. Unlike most other national contexts, certain Japanese populations, specifically young women, have been using mobile communications media for up to fifteen years, representing a uniquely long-term and stabilized pattern of engagement with these media forms. Most trace current mobile messaging back to the “Girls’ Pager Revolution” (Fujimoto 2005) of the early nineties, when teenage girls first hijacked the uses of mobile media for their social purposes (Matsuda 2005a; Okada 2005). These youth eventually moved from pagers to the Personal Handyphone System (PHS), to cellular phones, and eventually to the mobile Internet, evolving their social practices along the way. Japanese mobile Internet adoption was driven forward by mobile messaging as young people, for the first time, were able to send messages of varying length across different terminal devices and mobile service providers. Within a space of a few years between 1995-98, mobile phones shifted from association with business uses to an association with teen street culture (Ito 2004). As part of this shift, keitai use also became strongly associated with girls’ sociability and cultures of cute. The customization of keitai with decorative stickers and straps was emblematic of the changing gender valences of the technology (Hjorth 2008).

In addition to this unique history of mobile youth cultures, Japan is characterized by dense urban ecologies with lively pedestrian cultures, long commute times, and heavy reliance on public transportation. Add to this a high level of traditional and media literacy and a history of innovation and affinity with portable media, and you have a sociotechnical environment that supports robust mobile media adoption. Today, keitai are a pervasive fixture of everyday life in Japan, across generations, and the mobile Internet is in widespread use. Even elementary aged children have been adopting mobile phones in large numbers now in Japan, and it has become a fixture not only of business uses and teen sociability, but of everyday family life as well (Matsuda 2009). In the early years, use of the mobile internet was largely restricted to email and occasional downloads of ringtones of wallpaper. Today, however, a majority of subscribers say they also access news, information and search on the mobile internet. Online games, blogs and social network site access is also popular (shivya 2008). The keitai and PHS penetration rate was about 95% of households as of March 2008, 109,993,500 mobile phone and PHS contracted quantity in November 2008. 4.1% of that market is PHS. CDMA2000/W-CDMA is most dominant technological standard, NTT DoCoMo and Softbank have adopted W-CDMA, KDDI have adopted CDMA2000. The cell phone market is led by NTT DoCoMo, with 49.1%, followed by Softbank 18.1%, KDDI 27.7% and PHS 5.1% (TCA 2008).

Selective Sociality and the Full-Time Intimate Community

The use of the mobile communications in Japan has centered on text message exchange. This is tied to the history of mobile communications, which originated with pager messaging, as well as cultural and infrastructural conditions. Given the density of the urban environment, particularly in public transportation, Japan has strong social norms against behavior that disrupts public space. The use of voice calls in public transportation and restaurants has been strongly discouraged, particularly after the uptake of keitai by young people, and this has been a major factor in the predominance of text communication (Okabe and Ito 2005).

The long history of mobile text exchange in Japan has resulted in a robust set of shared social practices that were initially centered on youth, but have now become pervasive across generations in Japan. Much of the research on text messaging has focused on youth practices, as they were the population that popularized these new forms of communication. In response to concerns that text communication was leading to more superficial kinds of social relationships, Misa Matsuda (2000, 2005b) has argued that one the contrary, these forms of communication result in what she calls “selective sociality” in relationships. Youth are able to develop different categories of social relationships and mobilize them selectively, building personal networks that are not as dependent on the contingencies of particular institutions or locales. For example, with the advent of keitai communication, more youth are able to keep in touch with friends who have moved on to different schools of localities.

Most studies that have looked empirically at youth text message exchange have focused on the dominant mode of social interaction, which is with a close, intimate group. Studying the initial practices of youth adoption, Ichiro Nakajima, Keichi Himeno, and Hiroaki Yoshii (1999) described the social relations supported by text exchanges as a “full-time intimate community” where youth are in constant, lightweight contact with one another. In a similar vein, Ichiyo Habuchi (2005) has described these relations as a “telecocoon” that results in a kind of “accelerated reflexivity” about close social relationships. In later work, Ito and Okabe (2005) analyzed teens’ text message logs and the “ambient virtual co-presence” that youth experienced through the exchange of text that shared the senders’ status to their close friends, family, and romantic partners. This kind of co-presence is one of a set of different “technosocial situations” that Okabe and Ito describe, where youth are building new kinds of social contexts by hybridizing the contexts of the social, physical, and technological. Far from being a technology for “any place, any time” communication, text message use is highly structured by specific social norms, practices, and the contingencies of particular locales.

Moral Panics and Controversies

Photo by Jan Chipchase

Ever since youth adopted mobile communications in large numbers in the late nineties, there have been public concerns over various aspects of the use of mobile media. As is typical when youth adopt a new media form, public media voiced a range of moral panics, ranging from issues about the disruption of public space, the use of keitai for youth prostitution, and the association between keitai use and crime. Matsuda (2005a) has written about the history of these concerns, and how they were tied to adult anxieties over youth culture more than real threats that were being posed by the technology. For example, Matsuda (2005a) and Hjorth (2008) describe the cultures of kogyaru, street savvy teenage girls who took up keitai as an icon, and challenged existing cultures of cute and passive femininity.

Perhaps the practices that came under the most sustained attack were those associated with deai-kei sites (encounter sites) which enabled keitai users to connect with those that they did not already know.  Although these sites have been among the most profitable and prolific sites on the keitai Internet, they have been widely stigmatized. One reason for the stigma is that they were associated with the practice of enjo kousai where teenage girls would date older men for money. In addition to being associated with enjo kousai, deai-kei sites were also promulgating a wide range of problematic practices, such as phishing, spamming, and fraud of various kinds. Deai-kei sites were first established on the PC Internet in the mid to late nineties. Eventually, these concerns led to new legislation, passed in 2003, the “Legal Plan to Address Entrapment of Children through Internet Dating Industries.” This legislation criminalized the use of online sites to arrange for dates with minors, and even enabled authorities to go after minors who engaged in liaisons with adults. Subsequently, further legislation was passed that required age verification through an ID or credit card for participation in deai-kei sites. This legislation had an immediate chilling effect on all online sites that enabled youth to build new relationships online, and in particular, mobile Internet providers removed all sites in this vein from their official menus of online options (Tomita 2005).  Todd Holden and Takako Tsuruki (2003) have argued that the stigmatization of these sites was unfortunate, because they potentially provide way for developing new kinds of relationships and forms of self-expression that are often limited in modern Japan. Today, as various kinds of Web 2.0 and social network sites are becoming popular on both the PC and mobile Internet in Japan, the discourse of risk around online meet-ups is changing once again. The more interest-centered space of the PC Internet and the intimate space of the mobile Internet are merging, and we have not seen the same kind of moral panic over teen use of these sites as we saw in the heyday of mobile deai-kei sites.

Although in today’s Japan keitai are pervasive and taken for granted, there continues to be writing that raises concerns about the downsides of a keitai-saturated society. For example, a bestselling book by Nobuo Masataka (2003) called Monkeys with Mobile Phones argues that young people’s text message exchange is identical to the “coo calls” that monkeys make to confirm that their group members are nearby. He sees these social practices as an indication that youth are devolving into monkey-like behavior, where they feel uneasy if they are not able to maintain this kind of ongoing contact with their peers. Kensuke Suzuki (2008) also writes about this need that young people have to be reassured of their connection to their peers. He is not critical in the same way that Masataka is, drawing from a survey he conducted on youth keitai use. He sees young people navigating a dilemma, where they feel they need to be connected to others in order to avoid social isolation. Yet these expanded connections through the keitai also mean that they need to constantly affirm those connections, and youth experience a sense of anxiety over not being able to maintain those relationships.

Other Facets of Mobile Media

Since keitai and mobile media are such a central part of new media use in Japan, we will be covering different facets of these media in subsequent blog posts. Here we conclude with just a few other dimensions of portable media use that will not be taken up elsewhere.

One strand of research that has been around since the early years of keitai research has been the issue of the relation between keitai and urban space. When keitai became popular in the late nineties, there was widespread public concern about the disruption of public space with voice calls (Matsuda 2005a, Tomita 2002). Since then, public transportation agencies made a concerted effort through signage and announcements to limit voice calls in public space, and to encourage people to use text messaging instead. Okabe and Ito (2005) have described how in addition to these measures taken by public transit agencies, passengers have also regulated one another in more subtle ways. Based on observations in trains and subways, Okabe and Ito describe how passengers rely on bodily position and gaze in order to maintain manners on public transportation. When they do take voice calls on a train, people will keep them to a minimum, often turning away from others are shielding their phone. When passengers violate this norm, other passengers will respond with negative gazes.

More recently, Okabe, Ito, and Anderson (2009) have documented the “mobile kits” of urbanites in Tokyo, and how they utilize a wide variety of portable media to navigate everyday life in the city. Expanding the focus out from keitai, they document the use of media players, digital cash cards, keys, PDAs, and wallets. These forms of portable media enable people to interface with urban infrastructures and appropriate public spaces for personal uses. For example, people will “cocoon” with media such as books and ipods, particularly in public transportation. They might also “camp” in restaurants and cafes by adding laptops and other work technologies to their mobile kit. Studies that examine work and more instrumental uses of mobile technologies are relatively rare, with the bulk of research to date focusing on social communication, particularly by teens. One exception is the work of Eriko Tamara and Naoki Ueno (2005), where they studied the use of the keitai by copier service engineers. They found that the use of an online system that enabled engineers to keep tabs on each others’ made the workspace visible to one another in new ways, facilitating coordinated action and help between the engineers. The relative lack of these kinds of studies of workplace use of portable media points to an important gap and bias in the existing body of research on Japanese keitai use.

References

Fitzpatrick, Michael. 2007. ”Why Mobile Japan Leads the World.” The Guardian. September 27, 2007.

Fujimoto, Kenichi. 2005. “The Third-Stage Paradigm: Territory Machines from the Girls’ Pager Revolution to Mobile Aesthetics.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hjorth, Larissa. 2008. Mobile Phone Culture in the Asia Pacific: The Art of Being Mobile. New York: Routledge.

Habuchi, Ichiyo. 2005. “Accelerating Reflexivity” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Holden, Todd Joseph Miles and Takako Tsuruki. 2003. “Deai-kei: Japna’s New Culture of Encounter.” In Japanese Cybercultures. Edited by Nanette Gottlieb and Mark McLelland. New York: Routledge.

Ito, Mizuko. 2004. ”Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Lessons from Japanese Mobile Phone Use.” A paper presented at Mobile Communication and Social Change, the 2004 International Conference on Mobile Communication in Seoul, Korea, October 18-19.

Ito, Mizuko and Daisuke Okabe. 2005. “Technosocial situations: Emergent structurings of mobile email use.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Masataka, Nobuo (正高信夫). 2003.『ケータイを持ったサル』中公新書

Matsuda, Misa (松田美佐). 2000.「若者の友人関係と携帯電話利用—関係希薄化論から選択的関係論へ」『社会情報学研究』　第4号

Matsuda, Misa. 2009. “Mobile Media and the Transformation of the Family.” In Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media. Edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth. New York: Routledge.

Matsuda, Misa. 2005a. “Discourses of Keitai in Japan.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Matsuda, Misa. 2005b. “Mobile Communication and Selective Sociality.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Nakajima, Ichiro (仲島一郎), Keiichi Himeno(姫野桂一) and Hiroaki Yoshii(吉井博明). 1999. 移動電話の普及とその社会的意味，情報通信学会誌，16（3），pp79-92.

Okabe, Daisuke, and Mizuko Ito. 2005. “Keitai in Public Transportation.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Okada, Tomoyuki. 2005. “Youth Culture and the Shaping of Japanese Mobile Media: Personalization and the Keitai Internet as Multimedia.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Shivya. 2008. “Japan: Mobile Landscape”

Suzuki, Kensuke (鈴木謙介). 2008.「なぜケータイにはまるのか」南田・辻編『文化社会学の視座』ミネルヴァ書房

Tamaru, Eriko and Naoki Ueno. 2005. “Visualization of the Work Space of Service Engineers by Keitai Technology and Its Designs.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Telecommunications Carriers Association (TCA). 携帯電話/IP接続サービス(携帯)/PHS/無線呼出し契約数.

Tomita, Hidenori. 2005. “Keitai and the Intimate Stranger.” In Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Edited by M. Ito, D, Okabe, and Matsuda, M. Matsuda. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hidenori Tomita(2002) 「ケータイと人間関係」岡田朋之・松田美佐編『ケータイ学入門』有斐閣選書

Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe and Ken Anderson. 2009. “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Spaces.” In The Reconstruction of Space and Time through Mobile Communication Practices Edited by R. Ling and S. Campbell. Edison, NJ: Transaction Publishers.