Futures of Learning

The early history of Japan’s Internet adoption followed the US model in many ways. Beginning with early experiments in university and research settings on one hand, and geek-centered BBSs on the other, Japan eventually developed a commercial Internet in the mid nineties. Despite this early history, the Internet was slow to be taken up by the general population, lagging behind countries such as the US, many European countries, Australia, Singapore, and Korea (Aizu 1998, Gottlieb and McLelland 2003). During the nineties, outside of the geek core, Internet use was largely restricted to surfing home pages and exchanging email (Tsuji 1997).

Source: Kiko-Net. 2002. White Paper on the Internet in Japan

After the year 2000, Japanese Internet adoption increased dramatically, and usage patterns became more differentiated. Internet adoption increased from 37.1% of the population in 2000 to 73.8% in 2008 (Internet World Stats 2008). Tech savvy users began flocking to anonymous online forums such as Ayashii World (strangeworld) which grew out of earlier BBS and geek culture. Ayashii World is considered the origin of various online communication cultures, idioms, and ascii art such as the “giko-neko” that continue to characterize Japanese online geek culture.

Giko-Neko ascii art

During this period, companies such as eBay, Infoseek, Excite, and Yahoo! that were pioneering the US commercial Internet began establishing a presence in Japan, leading more mainstream forms of Internet adoption that centered on search and e-commerce. Yahoo! Japan was founded in 2002 and is the top search engine in Japan today. Although Yahoo!, Wikipedia, and other US-origin sites are successful, Japan has also developed local search and portal sites such as goo which rivals Google for second place (Ministry of Internal Affairs 2008). Rakuten, Japan’s largest online shopping site, was founded in 1997, and saw rapid growth through the early 2000s, becoming one of the largest Internet companies in the world. In addition to the geek-centered BBS culture of the early Japanese Internet, Japan also developed some unique Internet cultural forms in the more mainstream space, such as merumaga (mail magazines). Starting in the late nineties, net users started developing a practice of emailing personal zines to friends, and sites such as Magumagu emerged as clearinghouses. Politicians and celebrities started adopting the merumaga format as well, until eventually these were overshadowed by blogs and social network sites.

Growing out of this rich and varied history, today’s Japanese Internet use reflects Japan’s position in the international media and communications scene. While many of the popular online sites and uses have been adopted from the US model, Japan has also developed online communication patterns and sites that are distinctive to the Japanese “Galapagos effect.” The distinctiveness of Japanese Internet use is most evident in the mobile Internet, which will be the subject of a later post. In this post, we review research on two key categories of Japanese PC-centered Internet use: geek-centered forums and the more mainstream blogs and SNS sites.

Otaku Online

The early years of the Japanese Internet were, as in the US, dominated by academic and geek users, and there continues to be a geek, otaku-centered core that congregates online. Although Ayashii World was the first massive anonymous online geek forum, it was eventually overtaken by 2Chan (Channel 2). Founded in 1999, 2chan is the most dynamic web forum in the country, where participants discuss a wide range of topics, reminiscent of the Usenet years in the US, but with anonymity as the default standard. 2chan is a hotbed of geek and hacker culture, but also takes up topics such as gossip on specific workplaces, schools, media criticism, and fan culture of various kinds. It even has a US imitator, 4Chan. Given its central place in Japanese Internet culture, a number of researchers have studied and written about different dimensions of the site.

Cultural theorist Akihiro Kitada (2005) suggests that it is not the topics of conversation that are important on the Internet, and on 2chan in particular, but rather that it provides a new site of social connection. Hiroki Azuma (2007), by contrast looks at the content of the narratives that are played out on 2chan, focusing specifically on the story of “Train Man” who turned to his 2chan community to support a budding romance. Another body of work around 2chan looks at 2chan festivals and meet-ups. Kensuke Suzuki (2002) has looked at 2chan events as a kind of festival. Masaaki Ito (2005, 2006) has studied events that 2channelers have organized that mix online and offline components. He has looked specifically at a case where 2channelers followed the activities of participants in a 24 hour marathon, conducting surveillance even when they were off the air. In another study, Ito (2005) examined how 2channelers staged an event where they were all show up at Yoshinoya and order the same thing at the same time. All of these events represent a layering of the realities of mass media, online media, and real life social action.

Another online site that grows out of 2Chan geek culture NicoNicoDouga (Smiley Smiley Video), a video sharing site that allows participants to annotate videos by adding comments that are layered on top of the video in real time. The site was founded by the same person that founded 2chan, and has a similar underground appeal (Katayama 2008). Satoshi Hamano (2008) has looked at the unique dymanics of Nicodou communication, where participants share an experience of watching and commenting on video together, as a kind of live viewing experience. Even though the video is not actually being viewed collectively in real time, the architecture of the site promotes a kind of “pseudo-realtime” experience, that can be replayed by anyone accessing the video.

Lisa Katayama describes NicoNico Douga for WIRED Magazine

Blogs and SNSs

The period from 2004 to 2006 saw a dramatic growth in Japanese adoption of blogs and social network sites. Prior to that time, online communication was dominated by online forums, journals, and merumaga. In the mid-2000s, however, a number various free blog sites became popular, software such as Movable Type was localized for Japan, and blogs sites were optimized for the mobile Internet. The Japanese social network sites, Gree and Mixi were both launched in 2004. This confluence of factors led to rapid adoption of these platforms, which have now become central features of the Japanese Internet. In March 2006, the number of blog users jumped to almost 8.7 million, from 4.7 million in September 2005. SNS users saw a similar jump in the same period to 7.2 million from 4 million. (Iwamoto 2006). In December 2008, GREE had 8 million users and Mixi was up to 16.3 million. The majority of users access these sites via mobile Internet. For example, in the case of Mixi, the numbers at the end of 2008 indicate that page views from a PC totaled 4.17 billion and from mobile the number was more than double that amount at over a trillion views (Narumi 2009).

In the span of the past five years, Japan has developed a vibrant and unique blogging and SNS culture. In the State of the Blogsphere 2006, David Sifry reports that Japanese takes the top spot among blogging languages worldwide, with 31% of posts, higher than the 25% spot occupied by English. In a report later that year, English gained a slight edge on Japanese, but Japanese continues to be one of the dominant blogging languages, and regained the top spot in 2007. One reason for the high number of Japanese posts has to do with Japanese blogging styles, which tend to have short frequent posts. This is particularly true of mobile blogging. In research on heavy Internet users, Shingo Dobashi (2006) describes how Japanese blog and social network use centers less on professional identities and more on collective social connections. He describes the shared approach for both blogs and SNSs as “tending toward fragmentary thoughts and feelings streamed on the web in the moment.” This approach to blogging has roots in the early practices of keeping web diaries (Miura and Yamashita 2004).

The primary social network site is Mixi, founded in the spring of 2004. Satoshi Hamano (2008) has analyzed Mixi as a unique sort of social network site that differs from sites like MySpace and Facebook in that it is grounded in an invitational format. He describes how Mixi emerged as an alternative to the more shady, anonymous and underground culture of 2chan by relying on invitations by known others, and technical features like “footprinting” that allowed people to see exactly who had looked at their profiles. In this way, Mixi has functioned as a kind of gated community of known other grounded in a sense of trust and familiarity. According to Yuta and Fujisawa (2005), Mixi users average 20.29 people in their circle of Mixi connections (known as “my-miku"). Of these, however approximately half of Mixi users have four our less people in their my-miku, and only 4.8% have over 41 people. In other words, the dominant use of Mixi is for very small-scale intimate communication. Looking at the more heavily networked Mixi users, scholars have studied the kinds of festivals and meetups that have been facilitated by Mixi. Kaname Tanimura (2008) has looked at how fans of the anime Suzumiya Haruhi organized a street dance performance through Mixi. The online network has facilitated connections between a specific fan-based interest group, as well as made their activities more visible to an undefined open audience.

References

Aizu, Izumi. 1998. “Internet in Japan in Asian Context.”

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

Azuma, Hiroki (東浩紀). 2007. ゲーム的リアリズムの誕生~動物化するポストモダン2. 講談社現代新書.

Dobashi, Shingo (土橋臣吾). 2006.「インターネットを使い倒す：集合体としてのユーザーとヘビーユースというふるまい」上野直樹・土橋臣吾編 科学技術実践のフィールドワーク：ハイブリッドのデザイン, pp212-231.

Gottlieb, Nanette and Mark McLelland. 2003. “The Internet in Japan.” In Nanette Gottlieb and Mark McLelland Eds., Japanese Cybercultures. New York: Routledge, 1-16.

Ito, Masaaki (伊藤昌亮).2005.「ネットに媒介される儀礼的パフォーマンス―2ちゃんねる・吉野家 祭りをめぐるメディア人. 類学的研究」マス・コミュニケーション研究 66号.

Ito, Masaaki (伊藤昌亮).2006.「オンラインメディアイベントとマスメディア ―2ちゃんねる・24時間 マラソン監視オフの内容分析から―」社会情報学研究 10(2): 9-23 .

Iwamoto, Yuhei. 2006. 3月末のブロガー868万人、SNSユーザーは716万人. CNET Japan. April 13, 2006.

Katayama, Lisa. 2008. “Meet Hiroyuki Nishimura, the Bad Boy of the Japanese Internet.” Wired. May 19, 2008.

Kiko-Net. 2002. White Paper on the Internet in Japan.

Kitada, Akihiro (北田暁大). 2007. 嗤う日本のナショナリズム

Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication. 2008. Information and Communications in Japan.

Miura, Asako and Kiyomi Yamashita (三浦麻子・山下清美). 2004. 人はなぜウェブ日記・ウェブログを書き続けるのか.

Narumi, Atsuyoshi (鳴海淳義). 2009. ミクシィ、第3四半期決算は増収増益--コスト削減で通期利益を上方修正.

Sifry, David. 2006a. State of the Blogosphere, April 2006, Part 2.

Sifry, David. 2006b. State of the Blogosphere, August 2006.

Sifry, David. 2007. State of the Live Web, April 2007.

Suzuki, Kensuke (鈴木謙介). 2002. カーニヴァル化する社会. 講談社現代新書

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

Tsuji, Daisuke (辻大介). 1997. 「”マスメディア”としてのインターネット」マスコミュニケーション研究,　50号, pp168-181.

Yuta, Kikuo and Yoshihisa Fujiwara (湯田聴夫•藤原義久). 2005. ＳＮＳにおける人のネットワーク構造.