Japan

   

Launch!

I’m happy to be launching a new blog that documents a new research effort just getting under way, a follow on to some of the work that I have been doing with the MacArthur Foundation Digltal Media and Learning initiative. After completing three years of ethnographic research on youth new media practice with an extended research team, I am taking a step back and trying to get a better sense of what has been happening in the field while I’ve been deeply immersed in the empirical work. I’ll be among a really great international group of researchers, who will be taking a few months to do reading on research and practice in the area of new media and learning, and also to visit different institutions and projects in the US and elsewhere that are innovating in this space. Along the way, we will be using this blog as a way to share some of what we are learning, and to solicit feedback on our work in progress. We will be posting book and article reviews and reports from our visits to various sites and conferences.

This work is one small piece of the broader effort of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning initiative and its many partners to support the growth of a field of new media and learning. Our ambition its to help grow a field of research and practice that is grounded in deep knowledge of the changing landscape of new media, as well as in an understanding of innovation in educational and design practice. Just as we hope our earlier research on youth new media practice can inform the research community as well as practitioners in education and technology development, so we hope this review of work in the field can help inform a wide range of stakeholders in this field.

     

Interview with Naoki Ueno

I visited the Musashi Institute of Technology Yokohama Campus on a blistering hot summer day. The draw for the day was a panel discussion on “Akiba-kei Culture.” The panelists included Arisa, a popular maid at the renowned maid café, Mai:lish, the three members of an Akiba-kei idol group “Mug Cup,” and a group of three geek boys who are well-known on Twitter Japan and Hatena bookmarks. This event was part of an open campus day, designed to showcase the different university research groups to prospective students and other interested parties. The organizer who put together this event, an unusual one for a university campus, is Naoki Ueno at the Environmental Media Department. Mimi Ito and I attended the group dinner following the panel discussion, and interviewed Naoki over seared bits of Korean barbeque and kim-chee.

Naoki has made a career out of introducing situated learning theory and activity theory to Japanese scholars, and has conducted his own research on the design of educational and workplace environments. He was one of my mentors during graduate school, and was Mimi’s sponsoring researcher during her postdoctoral work in Japan, and is part of an international network of scholars who work at the intersection of technology studies, ethnomethodology, and sociocultural learning theory.

In 2007, he began a new project, funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Titled, “A Base for City-Making Using ICT.” The project aims to create an educational environment tied to urban design and ICTs. The goal of the work is not simply to develop technology or physical infrastructure. Instead, Naoki’s team conducts fieldwork on people’s everyday practice and the information and symbols that flow through certain urban areas, and design ICTs based on this research.  By taking this bottom-up approach to ICT design, Naoki is developing a form of information system design education that is tied to the specifics of social practice.

Naoki’s choice of field sites is also unique. One of his colleague, Ishu Rakusai, developed a browser-based system, NOTA, where NPOs and schools can easily upload records of their activity, such as text and images. They have piloted this system with in the Kohoku New Town area near the university. In addition to this work with the local community, Naoki’s lab has also been engaged with the support of subcultural communities. For example, another student, Tsuyoshi Furusawa, conducted research on graffiti culture in Shibuya. This project is a collaboration with the NPO, Konposition, which is working to reduce illegal graffiti by creating a legal graffiti wall. Konposition was looking for a way of representing their practice of erasing illegal graffiti or painting over it with legal graffiti. Tsuyoshi developed a system where the participants could upload images and locational information about graffiti via mobile phones.

Another example is the work of Koji Sawada, who is developing a web site where fans and minor musicians who are part of the live house scene can connect with one another. By integrating the system design with existing social practice, the goal is to develop a learning environment that exceeds the existing framework of activity.  Naoki explains that the development effort is directed at creating social institutions, resources, and occasions that support access to new practices. In Japan, as elsewhere, Naoki feels that most education about information system design focuses on technology, rather than looking at the concrete contexts in which these systems will be used. By contrast, his team engages directly with end users such as NPO groups and live house participants in order to understand their everyday practice. The students walk the city with these community members and conduct interviews that get at the underlying issues they are grappling with. By experiencing this kind of social research and technology development, the students can integrate both technical and social perspectives on design.

Naoki describes how his biggest challenge has been the coordination between various community groups, local government, university labs, and students. Drawing relationships between these diverse groups, whether they are from the local community or subcultures of geeks, musicians, or otaku, Naoki seems to relish the juxtaposition of different social groups and cultures. This is one the talents that has served him well as a scholarly emissary between Japan and Euro-American intellectual communities that engage in socicultural learning theory. Now he has brought these interests to bear on the education of a new generation of information designers who are building hybrids that cross the boundaries of social and technical systems.

     

Social network sites in an international context

Last week, I spent two days attending the Media at LSE - Fifth Anniversary Conference of the Media Studies program at the London School of Economics. The conference had five tracks packed into two days. One of these was titled “Media and New Media Literacies” and there were a number of talks and papers that are relevant to our research efforts. This post is going to go into some depth about the very first session, which was a fascinating set of talks coming from people outside of the United States researching social network sites. (But scroll down to the bottom to see a few other presentations I really enjoyed.)

The first of these talks about social network sites in an global context concerned the use of mobile phones and social network sites in Japan [1]. Toshie Takahashi, from Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, presented the results of two studies . The first were video interviews of Japanese youth on the streets of Tokyo. These interviews showed some of the passion that interviewees had for their mobile phones and how essential they felt they were to their day to day life. But most of the time in the talk and in the paper concerns the second study a comparison of Japanese young people’s take up of Japanese SNS Mixi with their use of MySpace. According to Takahashi, Mixi launched in Japan in 2004 and now has 15 million members. MySpace Japan launched only two years later, in 2006, and currently has 1.2 million users. Takahashi argued that the use of Mixi and MySpace reflected the tension in Japanese culture between the notion of Uchi and Soto. As she puts it in the paper, “Uchi (inside, us)...exists in the belonging of people to social groups linked by close interpersonal relationships.” This social intimacy is linked to strong social obligations. Soto corresponds to “outside, them” and is about an outward-facing presentation.

The details of her study are fascinating and I cannot cover many here (though the paper is online ). Takahashi shows how people’s use of their MySpace accounts and their Mixi accounts are quite different in how they connect (or opt not to) with their friends and how they present themselves. There seems to be a different emotional valence in their use of each site, strongly connected with this tension between Uchi and Soto. Mixi opens up opportunities to be members of multiple Uchis (previously not thought possible), but this comes with significant social obligations to others. Use of MySpace, on the other hand, corresponds with the notion of Soto and people sometimes refuse connections to people they already know and rather present a radically different image of themselves as they connect to outside-Japan popular culture.

Takahashi concludes that contrary to the way a Senior Vice President at Viacom International Japan argued that Mixi is about “us” while MySpace Japan is really about “me, me, me,” both are about “me” and “them.” But Mixi is about “me and them” in Japan and involves a process of “re-Japanisation” while MySpace is about “me and them” in the global world and involves a romanticized process of self-creation and “de-Japanisation.”

Following Takahshi, Fiona Lennox of the UK’s Office of Communication, or Ofcom [2], presented a synthesis of various studies the organization conducted which social networking data was gathered:

One of the more interesting things about the studies, however, is the fact that they have data from both kids and adults and find that there are similarities as well as differences. Both groups primarily use these sites as their communication hubs. Issues of safety and security were not major concerns. Finally, there was a gap between what parents knew about what their kids were up to when they went online.

Another aspect of the studies I found interesting had to do with the way Ofcom created profiles of social network site users, dividing them into “alpha socializers,” “attention seekers,” “followers,” “faithfuls,” and “functional users.” I had trouble understanding the differences at times (and was surprised to hear that “Alpha Socializers” were more male than female in the UK...does this term mean what I assumed it to mean? Perhaps not!).  I also wondered how these user-types may contrast with the way that those of us associated with the Digital Youth research here in the United States tried to purposely move away from grouping people in this way and rather groups practices into various categories. I think one of the things we’ll have to consider going forward are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

The final talk of the session was a presentation by Naeema Farooqi of Dar Al-Hekma College in Saudi Arabia of her ongoing research on Facebook practices in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. She and colleagues gathered the results of questionnaires of college students at their respective institutions and followed some of them up with more in-depth interviews. She also mentioned that a number of Pakistani youth are on Orkut, an older social network site. Unfortunately, Farooqi’s paper is not yet online and my notes on the talk are unintelligible. I would love to hear more from her (and am making an attempt to do so). Despite my lack of details here, I still felt that pointing people towards her work and research would be a great starting point for building connections and the possibilities of comparative work.

I just wanted to conclude this review of these three talks with one meta-comment. Had I not been an attendee at the conference, I don’t know if I ever would have heard of the work of Takashi and Farooqi. More importantly I don’t think I would have gone looking under “media literacy” to find them, though I understand why they were there if one thinks of any literacies as highly contextual, embedded in practices that aren’t easy to abstract from their socio-cultural contexts. I think it shows how tricky it can be to connect researchers who are interested in common phenomena, but are in different fields and disciplines. I wonder if moving between global fields or disciplines is trickier than moving between global regions?

More from the conference

A few other things to check out from the conference:

Finally, you may want to see the final conference program , abstracts , and full papers, all on the conference website.

[1] Actually, the first talk was YouTube, Digital Literacy, and the Growth of Knowledge by John Hartley.  It was more of a theoretical piece on the nature of certain kinds of storytelling and the structuring of this storytelling that go on on YouTube. I am not going to give a recap here though the paper is online and is worth a read for those interested in the development of sites that open up opportunities for media sharing and distribution. Also, the paper mentions a pre-YouTube action research project from Hartley’s research group at the Queensland University of Technology (in Australia) called the Youth Internet Radio Network that is an interesting bit of history.

[2] According the their website, Ofcom is the “the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, with responsibilities across television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications services.” Ofcom was established by the Communications Act of 2003 and has been charged with the promotion of media literacy in the UK, where media literacy is defined by as “the ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts.” See their publications and research page for reports.

     

New Media Practices in Japan, Part 1: An Introduction

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Photo of Tokyo by Joi Ito under CC-BY

Japan has long been depicted as a country of gadget-fetishists that are continuously pushing the latest in digital culture, particularly of the marginal and miniaturized variety. Whether it is WIRED magazine’s Japanese Schoolgirl Watch, Time Asia’s feature on Gizmo Japan, or curiosity about Japan’s robot love, Western observers have often focused on technology as defining of Japan’s cultural identity.

These depictions of Japanese culture as both familiar and strange have been a common theme throughout the history of Japan’s intimate relationship with the West. While there are reasons to question the “techno-orientalism” (Morley and Robbins 1995) entailed in some of these depictions of technology exoticism, this image of Japan has been co-constructed by both Japan and its international interlocutors. As we saw in the case of Korea, Japan has worked to develop an identity as a tech-savvy nation, home to cutting-edge technology innovation and digital culture.

In the past decade, with the move towards mobile and networked digital media, Japan’s identity on the international stage has been undergoing a variety of shifts. Since the late nineties, Japan has become known for it’s heavy reliance on mobile media, with the majority of Japanese relying more heavily on wireless, handheld access than PC-based access. Japan is also unique in having a longstanding tradition of certain forms of media, gaming, and technology geek youth cultures that have blossomed with the advent of digital and networked media. Because of these characteristics, more than any other non-Western country, Japan has had a profile as a new media cultural exporter to other parts of the world. These topics will be covered in greater depth in upcoming posts. In this introductory post, we provide some background on the Japan context that has produced these distinctive technology cultures.

Japanese Technoculture in Context

In the decades after becoming an economic superpower in the seventies and beyond, Japan has become increasingly interconnected with transnational cultural and economic flows. Yet most Japanese still consider themselves part of an “island nation” that is racially and culturally distinctive and relatively homogeneous. In the contemporary era, Japan has continuously navigated a complicated identity as having a postmodern culture and one of the most “advanced” economies of the world, while also holding onto an identity as a “traditional” Eastern nation (Ivy 1995). Although 98.5% of Japanese citizens are ethnically Japanese (CIA World Factbook 2008), urban areas in Japan, particularly Tokyo, are increasingly international in character. Further, we have seen the growing exportation of Japanese cultural products overseas, first through video games, and more recently through pop art, anime and manga. In a widely cited article in Foreign Policy, Douglas McGray (2002) dubbed this a rise of Japan’s soft power and “gross national cool.”

In other words, urban Japan is highly cosmopolitan, and porous to international influence, while also being home to a distinctive cultural and technological imprint that is often successfully imported overseas. Over the years, the Japanese government and industries have made efforts to internationalize, with various degrees of success. Japan has been a dominant player in electronic gaming for decades, particularly in the console and handheld game markets. Japanese industries continue to dominate internationally in digital hardware such as cameras and displays, but has fared less well in online content and services. Although J-pop, anime and manga have become highly visible in international youth cultures, they still represent subcultural niche products that are not major export industries for Japan (Ministry of International Affairs 2008). Commentators have described this state of affairs a a “Galapagos effect” where Japan has developed advanced technologies and distinctive content in many areas that are unique to the Japanese ecosystem. Japanese mobile phones and services and much of the gaming industry are cited as examples of this Galapagos effect (NRI 2008).

Demographics and Technology Uptake

As of 2008, Japan has a population of 127 million, of which about 25% live in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Japan has a very high literacy rate of 99.8% with school enrollment at practically 100% (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication 2008). These statistics are one indicator of a national culture that is highly media savvy, which is guided by the cultural trends of the urban capital. Although youth culture is at the center of contemporary cultural trends in Japan, particularly those centered on media and technology, Japan’s is an aging population. As of 2008, 23.5% of the population is under 25 years of age, with 13.8% of the population under 15 years of age. In 1980, the number of those under 15 was 23.5%, one indicator of the rapidly aging population of Japan (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication 2008).

After the US and China, Japan is the third largest broadband country in the word, with 27.7 million broadband lines at the end of 2007 (shivya 2008a). The penetration rate for computers per household was at 85% in 2007. This number represents a substantial increase from the 2005 percentage of 36.2% (Internet Association Japan 2007). Internet access in 2008 was at 73.8% (Internet World Stats 2008). What is most distinctive about Japan from an Internet perspective, however, is the proportion of the population that accesses the Internet primarily from a handheld device. Ever since deployment of mobile Internet in Japan in the late nineties, Japan has led the world in the adoption of IP phones and 3G services . As of 2006, the majority of Japanese the handheld device as their primary way of accessing the Internet (shivya 2008b).

In the blog posts to follow over the next few weeks, Daisuke Okabe and I will provide more detail on these various dimensions of Japanese new media adoption. We look forward to your input and feedback!

References

CIA. 2008. World Factbook: Japan.

Hornyak, Timothy. 2006. Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots. Tokyo: Kodansha International.

Internet Association Japan. 2007. Internet White Paper 2007.

Ivy, Marilyn. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McGray, Douglas. 2002. ”Japan’s Gross National Cool.” Foreign Policy. May/June.

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

Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication. 2009. ”Popuation Estimates”

Morley, David and Robbins, Kevin. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. New York: Routledge.

NRI (野村総研). 2008. ガラパゴス化する日本.

Shivya. 2008a. “Japan: Internet Landscape.” Digital Media Across Asia.

Shivya. 2008b. “Japan: Mobile Landscape”. Digital Media Across Asia.

     

New Media Practices in Japan Part II: The Internet

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).

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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.

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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.

     

New Media Practices in Japan Part III: Mobile

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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

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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.

     

New Media Practices in Japan Part IV: New Media Production

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.

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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).

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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.

     

New Media Practices in Japan Part V: Gaming

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

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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

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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

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