Social, Digital and Mobile in Japan

by Simon Kemp in News on 21 December 2011 at 14:51

It’s time for another one of the bigger reports in our Social, Digital and Mobile in Asia series now, as we explore the landscape in Japan:

Japan has been at the forefront of technological innovation for many years now, but the country’s level of digital sophistication doesn’t get as much attention in the West as we believe it deserves.

This may be partly due to the language barrier, because the majority of tech news in the country is reported solely in Japanese.

This is a real shame though – many digital developments that would get the average US tech blog in a flutter already seem old news in Japan:

  • 77% of the Japanese population already regularly uses a mobile browser or app, compared to just 47% of people in the USA;
  • Only 1 person in a hundred in Japan doesn’t have a 3G-enabled phone;
  • 99% of the country’s internet users have web access via their mobile devices.

As we’ve seen across many other Asian countries in this series, while the numbers themselves are pretty impressive, it’s the context behind these figures that is most revealing.

Much has been said about Japan’s ageing population – almost one quarter of the country’s population is over the age of 65 – but the country’s demographic balance has some particularly interesting implications for the country’s digital landscape and behaviour.

The ‘senior skew’ is even reflected in social media: more than 70% of Japanese Facebook users are over the age of 25%, in stark contrast to the situation in Indonesia where the same proportion is below the age of 25. 14% of the platform’s users in Japan are aged 45+.

The Japanese are particularly fond of blogs, and their combined blog reading adds up to around 6 million years every year.

Mobile phones in Japan have had email functionality for years, and this means that almost every phone in the country is data-enabled. Email is still the most widespread data-driven mobile activity, although younger Japanese internet users are shifting increasingly towards social networks for their day-to-day communications.

Mixi still rules the Japanese social landscape in terms of registered users, but Twitter seems to be the platform of choice amongst the country’s more active social media users.

Microblogging came to the fore during the events surrounding the country’s tsunami earlier this year, when a quarter of all worldwide tweets originated from Japan. Twitter has continued to grow ever since, and roughly 6% of the platform’s total global tweets are now in Japanese.

Meanwhile, the shift towards smartphones is another particularly interesting trend.

While almost all Japanese cell phones are already sophisticated even by Western standards, until recently, their text-oriented interfaces have hindered a ‘full’ web experience.

However, this looks set to change dramatically during the course of 2012. Nearly half of all phones sold in Japan in the last quarter were smartphones, and we predict a new wave of innovation in the mobile internet landscape in Japan in 2012.

The future looks exciting.

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  • http://goo.gl/Tp6h8 Leon

    Hi! Thanks for the great presentation.

    Linkedin just opened its first office in Japan (as well as other countries in Asia). How do you see this market developing and what the major competitors for Linkedin do you think?

    You mention that much of the tech news in Japan is in Japanese. I just started a Google+ page on which I post news from Japan, partly translated: http://goo.gl/Tp6h8

    Please follow me and let me know what you think of it.

  • Simon Kemp

    Thanks Leon! Yes, LinkedIn is expanding quite quickly in Asia – they have an office in Singapore too. We’ve tried to include LinkedIn figures for each of the markets we’re covering, so check the other country reports too if that’s of particular interest.

    In terms of how the market will develop, I think the shift towards smartphones will have the most interesting effect in 2012; as we say in the post above, the Japanese have been used to sophisticated mobile technology for years now, but as access to a complete mobile web experience becomes more prevalent, we believe it will inspire some interesting developments in the way people consume digital media and interact with other people.

    As for professional social networks in particular, I think the most interesting challenge for LinkedIn in Japan in 2012 will come from twitter. The network is still growing fast in the country, and it’s already proving its worth as a recruitment channel all over the world.

    We’d love to get your take as well though – which platforms do you think will come to the fore in Japan over the coming months? Do you think we’ll see existing platforms adapt to new technologies or competitors?

  • http://twitter.com/david_z David Zienowicz

    Thanks for the helpful report. Just one thing that seems odd, if your showing top facebook pages, I’d also like to see top twitter pages, mixi pages, and google+ pages. Here’s one site that aggregates that data: http://mixipage.userlocal.jp/
    Cheers.

  • Simon Kemp

    Thanks David – great resource! We’ll use that for the next report, which should be out in a few months.

    The reason we included Facebook Pages is purely to help benchmark across other Asia countries as part of our series of SDMA reports – SocialBakers aggregates this info for every country in the region except Myanmar, so it allows us to compare and contrast habits and tastes by nation. We know this is sometimes less representative (as in Japan and China), but it’s still interesting.

    FYI, you can find the other countries in the SDMA series here: http://wearesocial.sg/blog/tag/sdma/

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  • Evelyn Hovee

    Love this article! But could you cite some sources? I would love to quote you…I’m especially interested in where these figures are coming from:
    77% of the Japanese population already regularly uses a mobile browser or app, compared to just 47% of people in the USA;Only 1 person in a hundred in Japan doesn’t have a 3G-enabled phone;99% of the country’s internet users have web access via their mobile devices.Thanks!