Twitter in Japan

Twitter is quickly increasing its presence in Japan nowadays.

**Facts**

According to Nielson Online/NetRatings, Twitter users within Japan surpassed 2million. UU which was 520 thousand as of April increased to 1.26 million in July, 2.57 million in September, dropped to 2.07 million in October. PV was 6.64 million in April, 29.52 million in July, 63.82 million in October according to an article [ja]on IT Media.

Twitter's UU and PV in Japan (orange=1000 users, blue=1000 PV)


Celebrities such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Yoko Ono, Kohmi Hirose [ja], Kazuyo Katsuma [ja] , etc started using Twitter.

Nikkei MJ (newspaper) announced [ja] its hit product ranking of 2009 and the winners were eco-car and cheap jeans, and Twitter won one of the awards (komusubi award).

DIME (magazine) announced [ja] its hit product ranking as well, and the winner was again 990yen jeans (10 dollar jeans), and Twitter won one of the entertainment awards.

FYI, some other award winning products from DIME is as follows:
■Business and Technology division
『LED light bulb DL-L601L』（Sharp）
『CELL REGZA TV 55X1』（Toshiba）
『Prius』（Toyota）
『Windows 7』（Microsoft）

■Entertainment division
『OLYMPUS PEN E-P1』（Olympus）
『Highball』boom（Suntory）
『Dragon Quest IX　Protectors of the Starry Sky』（Square Enix）
『Twitter』（Twitter Inc）

**Media coverage**

Twitter was covered in various national TVs recently including Fuji TV.

Various books on Twitter are sold in the bookstores.


Photo via Kawai's Tumblr

I am the co-author of one of those books - Twitter Marketing :)


**Twitter Conference**


On 12/5, a full day event called Twitter Conference (Twitter研究会) was held in Keio University SFC campus.

Presenters from various fields presented at the conference from 10AM to 6PM, ranging from instructions on Twitter APIs, Twitter bots and Twitter bot competition, examples of how universities and university students are using Twitter, etc.

Update 12/20:
As you know, Japan is a mobile society, and at Twitter Conference @fshin2000, creator of the most popular Twitter mobile web client "Movatwitter [ja]" announced that it is reaching 100 million pageview per month, and he is going to quit his company to focus on further development of Movatwitter. Movatwitter won Best Mobile Based Twitter App award at Mashable's Open Web Awards .

You can see the whole time table and the presentation slides here [ja] and the uStream archive here [ja] and archive of the tweets using #twitterconf here [ja] (although everything is in Japanese)

The audience in the venue as well as those watching the streaming was twittering so hard that we (#twitterconf) were ranked 5th place of the Trending topics of Twitter (although the scerenshot was taken a bit before that :P )



I was one of the speakers - I talked about Twitter outside Japan. I was also on the panel discussion talking about present and future of Twitter in Japan.

Twitter

View more documents from Fumi Yamazaki.

I talked a bit about Twitter and SXSW. SXSW2007 was where all the buzz started- everyone was tweeting about the sessions, parties, where to meet, interviews, etc and Twitter can be seen on the screens in the venue everywhere. A stranger came up to me when I was waiting to enter one of the parties and said "Will you let me in your umbrella? I need to Tweet!" You probably remember what happened at the keynote speech of SXSW 2008 where we all realized the power of the twittering voices of the audience. In SXSW2009, people were using Twitter too much that CNet wrote an article stating that SXSW attendees were confronting Twitter saturation.

I also spoke about how Twitter can serve for different areas / people / entities / circumstances. For example, in places like Tokyo and SF where there are lots of Twitter users, if you say you want to hold a Tweetup you'll get lots of attendees right away, but if you tweet you are "in Tokyo" such tweet will probably be ignored. On the other hand, in places like Cusco which barely has Twitter users, if you tweet you are in Cusco, then someone might call out to hold a Tweetup. Many of the politicians, celebrities and media use Twitter but at the same time, many ordinary citizens use Twiter too. Large companies can utilize Twitter for branding, PR, sales etc whereas small shops can use Twitter to make announcements to the locals.

Another topic I mentioned was how Twitter is used to convey information in emergency and to spread political messages. In China, Twitter (as well as other social media) helped to let the world know about the earthquake which helped to accelerate the donations to reach them faster. In Munbai (India), the news on the terrorist attack spread quickly via Twitter. In Moldova and Iran, the citizens are using Twitter to let the world know about their message and what is going on.

In Japan, some politicians started to use Twitter and LDP's PR dept announced [ja] that all of the LDP politicians should use Twitter, but compared to US which has more than 140 politicians who Tweet, the number is still very small. In the U.S., because there are so many politicians using Twitter, Obama administration could open such site as "Tweet you Senator" which enables the citizens to tweet to their senator just by entering their zipcode. I also expressed my expectations for the ministries and government agencies to start using Twitter- in the U.S., various agencies are using Twitter and other social media to communicate with the citizens directly.

**Competition**

There are various competitors for Twitter in Japan. The newest one is "Ameba Now [ja]" which just launched last week. The strength of Ameba is that they have existing user base (they are one of the largest blog ASP providers) and celebrities (they host many celebrity blogs and they asked those celebrities to start using Ameba Now). Mixi [ja]- the largest SNS in Japan launched Twitter cloan mixi voice, GREE [ja] - the second largest SNS in Japan did a site renewal this October and its top page looks exactly like Twitter now. Mobage-town [ja], the largest mobile gaming site launched its Twitter cloan service called Otakebi... and there's many more such as Timelog [ja], Wassr [ja], etc.

Update 12/27
Adding some more charts from Google Trends (I know it is not the best data- a bulk of Twitter's traffic comes from apps not the web, mixi and gree's traffic are mostly mobile which is not included in Google Trends' data) but as a comparison...:

Worldwide comparison of unique visitors for Facebook / MySpace / Twitter / mixi / gree is that Facebook is HUGE, MySpace is losing its users and others are all very small.



In Japan, mixi is HUGE and the others are small.



Some more breakdowns:

Twitter has twice as large unique visitor than mixi from the worldwide data- and this chart shows that mixi's Unique visitor was larger than Twitter a year ago. Lower section shows that Twitter's top usage is in U.S. and second is Japan, followed by Brasil, Indonesia and U.K.



Same chart limited the region to Japan and we can see that the unique visitors of mixi far outweighs that of Twitter which is steadily growing.



Twitter / Facebook / Myspace comparison with worldwide data. Facebook is huge, MySpace is quickly losing its visitors, Twitter still small but growing...



Twitter / Facebook / Myspace comparison with data limited to U.S. The same tendency as above, but the impact of MySpace losing its users looks bigger- it had almost the same unique visitors as Facebook a year ago and quickly dropped during the course of a year.



Twitter / Facebook / Myspace comparison with data limited to Japan. You can see the growth of Twitter which has twice as large unique visitors than Facebook.



Facebook was said to be struggling in Japan localization (they launched the Japanese version in May) but above data shows it has doubled since a year ago. According to NetRatings (article on IT Media [ja]), their unique users as of November is 1.39 million which is 4 times larger than that of a year ago.

Change of Power

I'm visiting Washington D.C. now, interviewing various people here on e-government / Government2.0 / IT&web utilization by the government, etc. Why am I doing this? Because I think it is a crucial time for Japan to change, (including opening up the data / information, getting web / IT into the system, etc) and there are so many things we can learn from the U.S..

Change of Power (LDP to DPJ)

In Japan, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had been the ruling party for more than 50 years. Now people want change. The results of the lower house election that took place on 8/30 clearly shows that demand. LDP lost the election and Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) became the ruling party. Mr. Yukio Hatoyama, head of DPJ became the prime minister of Japan. DPJ was a party that had been insisting in making the government open and making change.

Opening Up Press Conferences

One example was opening up press conferences to freelance journalists and foreign journalists. During the LDP years, only the limited main stream media that joins the Press Club were able to join government press conferences. Press Club has a room inside the government building (for free), and hence when the government decides to hold a press conference "5 minutes from now", the press are already there. Journalists who were not in the Press Club were not allowed to join the press conferences in the first place, but even if they were allowed it would've been impossible for them to arrive in 5 minutes.

When DPJ was still the opposition party, they were opening up their press conferences to journalists who are not in the Press Club, and one of their campaign promises was to open up the press conferences to non-Press Club journalists. Believe it or not, this promise was broken on day 1. The press conference by the new Prime Minister Mr. Hatoyama was only open to the Press Club members, despite the fact that before the election, DPJ officially promised it at least 3 times (former leader Mr. Ozawa and current leader Mr. Hatoyama was asked whether they will open up the press conference when they become ruling party and they did confirm that they will). Freelance journalists and bloggers went MAD. They criticized DPJ for not keeping their campaign promises. On 9/18, Foreign Minister Mr. Okada announced that the Foreign Ministry will allow non-Press Club journalists to join the press conferences held by Foreign Minister and Vice-Foreign Minister, and on 9/29 their promise became true. Mr. Okada held a press conference letting the the freelance and foreign journalists join, and streamed it live on the Internet. Some call it a "historical day" for Japanese journalism. Other ministries -namely Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Environment are considering to follow this, although it is not officially approved or announced.

Power of Main Stream Media in the Japanese Politics

What was the reaction of the Press Club (and the main stream media companies behind this)? This article [jp] on Livedoor news states that there were lots of pressure by the MSM to Mr. Hatoyama and DPJ- management of a major newspaper company called up Mr. Hatoyama directly as well as reporters called up secretaries and politicians to keep the press conferences only to Press Clubs. They were said to be uniformly giving pressure that "if DPJ is going to be the enemy of media such as newspaper and TV stations, your government will not last long!"

I have to admit: Japanese people are known to be largely influenced by the main stream media. Before the election of 8/30, newspapers and TVs were discussing so much about DPJ's victory and there you go. Many people states that DPJ's election victory was not the victory of DPJ itself, but it was the victory of the media. And they know it. That is why their pressure has some reality and threat. We need to face the reality, but we can't turn around- we need to find a way to cope with such changes. It's not simply about the Press Club - we're thinking more about transparancy, openness, fairness and trustworthiness by keeping the campaign promises of the new government.

Fixing Public Offices Election Act

I have covered in this post about the Public Offices Election Act prohibiting Japanese politicians to use the Internet during the election period. DPJ was insisting that they will change this. This is a video (Japanese) of the Prime Minister Mr. Hatoyama saying that DPJ will enable Internet election (meaning enabling to use Internet during election period).



In fact, DPJ had submitted this fix 4 times already in the past. Now that they became the ruling party, we really expect this change to happen.


Revealing the "hidden information" from the LDP and bureaucrats

DPJ had a campaign pledge stating that they will make highways free of charge. According to this article [ja] in Asahi.com, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism repeatedly stated in the Diet that they had NOT calculated the impact of that policy - although it was later revealed that they knew that such calculation existed as of April 2008. The Ministry announced that they did have such calculations on 9/10. The result was astonishing- the economic impact of the policy is estimated to be 2.7 trillion yen (approximately 27 billion USD) . Although I am personally against this policy and understand that LDP and various industries are really against this, it does not mean you can hide data from the public and the opposition party and get away with it. LDP and the bureaucrats had been doing that and now the nation knows - which I think is a good thing.

This article [ja] on Nikkei Business Online states that when the same political party is ruling for a long time, bureaucrats and ruling party starts to share the interest. Quote: "Bureaucrats' mistake becomes the ruling party's mistake which will affect the support rate, so they tend to hide those mistakes. Because of the change of political power, such mistakes will be revealed as well as there will be incentive to check mistakes."

Japanese Politics are said to be led by the Bureaucrats

It is said that currently Japan is not really led by politicians- it is led and run by bureaucrats. Politicians are supposded to be "lawmakers" but the people who were "really" making the laws (bills) during the LDP ages were the bureaucrats. So the bureaucrats makes the laws, and enforces it.

The good news - the bureaucrats in Japan are said to be very smart people and even if the new ruling party is not experienced and have glitches, the bureaucrats will be able to run the country without a problem. The bad news - bureaucrats knows that they are leading and running the policies, so it might be difficult for DPJ to push new policies. Well- still, they have to do it. It's their job.

The good news - as DPJ had been the opposition party and they had more time, DPJ's politicians had been making bills themselves to oppose to the former government. The better news - not only do they have the ability to draft bills, now that they became the ruling party, they'd also be able to have the bureaucrats help them make the bills! Well- maybe not so simple as that. We'll see.

Is the Change coming?

Anyways, yes we expect changes to happen in Japan. I am not in Japan right now and can't really feel the change, but read this tweet by LDP politician Kotaro Tamura: "DPJ is doing great! They don't have the Diet Backers (族議員) and the governments will be cooperative to them. Many of these things are what we proposed within LDP and was turned down by the Diet Backers and old politicians... but those old politicians are still ruling LDP... Why do we have to get tired of internal fights even before fighting against DPJ? (cry)"

Given these changes, I was thinking about what I can do. The Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009 in U.S. according to Anil Dash is "the government". I've been looking into the Gov 2.0 conference contents, etc and realized that there are so much we can learn from what is happening in Washington D.C., and much of these practices are not known to the Japanese public, so that's what I'm gonna try and do. After arriving in D.C., I started to learn about activities here- from FCC, Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of State and many more. I'm learning everyday, which I will try to write articles in the near future!

TokyoMango's 10 Favorite Blogs and Sites to Find Cool Japanese Things

I'm sorry for not posting much recently- today I found out this blog was selected as one of
TokyoMango's 10 Favorite Blogs and Sites to Find Cool Japanese Things. It's my great honor- thanks Lisa! TokyoMango blog is here:

Other blogs and sites are:
Americurry (Food blog)
Asiajin (Japanese web services and tech culture)
Boing Boing (Directory of wonderful things ;) )
Danny Choo (Otaku culture and figurines)
Gizmodo (gadgets)
NotCot (artsy community site)
Pink Tentacle (technological breakthroughs and art)
Spoon & Tamago (art and design blog)
Yanko Design (design web site)

Tokyo Prefectural Election 2009

Tokyo Prefectural Election was held on Sunday, 7/12 2009.

There are 10.6 million registered voters in Tokyo and the turnout was 54.5% (up 10.50points from last election in 2005). They were to elect the 127 Assembly members in 42 electoral districts.

The following is the election result.




This election was seen by many as a "test" for the prime minister Taro Aso and the ruling party the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). It was also a "test" to check how much support the largest opposition party Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) is going to achieve.

The result:
DPJ gained 20 seats, 54 of their 58 candidates were elected.
LDP lost 10 seats, 38 of their 58 candidates were elected.
The ruling coalition (LDP and Komeito) was unable to gain absolute majority which was 64 seats, nor was DPJ to gain absolute majority. It is the first time for LDP to lose its status as strongest party in the Metropolitan Assembly since 1965.

Does this "landslide victory" by DPJ mean people really support DPJ? Not necessarily. People were obviously dissatisfied with the ruling parties, and there weren't any alternative for the voters except for DPJ.

BTW, all of the DPJ's leaders (supreme advisors, party leader, deputy chief) are exLDP.
-Supreme advisors Tsutomu Hata (exLDP) Hirohisa Fujii(exLDP) Kozo Watanabe (exLDP)
-Party leader Yukio Hatoyama (exLDP)
-Deputy chief Ichiro Ozawa(exLDP) Azuma Koshiishi (exLDP) Naoto Kan (exLDP)

An interesting analysis about the votes by a blog "Igarashi Jin no Tensei Jingo" (Note that the numbers slightly differ from above as the above data is a comparison between "before the election and after the election" whereas the following data is a comparison between "the election result of 2005 and 2009")

DPJ　　+19　　＋1,171,000
LDP　　-10 　　-99,000
Komei 　　0 　　-64,000
Communist -5 　　+14,000
Other　　-4 　　-91,000

From the data above, you can see that a large number of votes went to DPJ- larger than what LDP lost - which can probably be explained that a large number of voters that did not go to election last time voted for DPJ. Judging from the number of the seats, LDP and communist party lost. However, actually Communist party had increased the number of votes. Communist party's votes were dispersed whereas the New Komeito had an election strategy to limit their candidates to 23 and get ALL of the 23 candidates elected despite the fact that they have lost 64,000 votes overall compared to last election. Komeito is a political party backed up by the religious organization Soka Gakkai.

What people really wants is "CHANGE", as they have distrust in politics. The next month and a half will be important for both parties to show to the nation what changes they can expect. The national election for the House of Representatives will be held on 8/30.

Mobile Usage in Japan

I wrote this post last year about mobile usage in Japan here, this is a follow up post to dig in more about actual usage.


==Media access (survey result)==

To start off, let's take a look at a recent survey "Media Periodic Research 2009" conducted by the Environment Laboratory of Hakuhodo DY Media Partners and was reported by CNet Japan. The research was conducted with male/female 15-69 years of age, living in Tokyo, Osaka and Kouchi prefecture. (Tokyo and Osaka are the cities, Kouchi is rural area of Japan.) Research method was by traditional mail with the 1,919 samples.

Tokyo research report shows that the total media access (including TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, PC and mobile Internet) had the average of 5hours 24minutes per day which is slightly longer than last year despite the recent tendency of the numbers going down. It is suspected that because of the depression, people are staying at home accessing the medeia.

TV 163.5min Radio 31.1min Newspaper 26.0min Magazines 17.6min PC Internet 67.6min Mobile Internet 18.1min. As for the male in their twenties, TV was 110.9min whereas PC Internet was 116.1min- it was the first time Internet usage exceeded TV. Also notable is that the teenage female uses mobile Internet 98.4min whereas female in their twenties uses only 26.2min which shows a clear difference by the generation.

Media access hours per day （comparison by gender/age）




==Overview of Japanese Mobile Makert==

Next, let me introduce the presentation file of an overview of Japanese Mobile Makert by Mr. Gen Miyazawa presented at an event called Geeks on a Plane. Background and keypoints, quote from an article on TechCrunch.

* Japan boasts 100 million 3G users (size of the population: 127 million).
* 3G penetration rate: 96% (3.5G penetration rate: 35%).
* iPhone is doing relatively well in Japan, but it’s not killing.
* Japan’s mobile web traffic still grows faster than the PC traffic.
* Size of the mobile e-commerce market: around $1.2 billion (data from July 2008).
* Biggest players in the mobile web only-field: Mobagetown (13 million members) and GREE (10 million members).

Japanese Mobile Market Overview

View more Microsoft Word documents from Geeks on a Plane.

==How long do the children use mobile phones?==

According to a survey by Benesse Corporation (November 2008, 5th grader to 2nd year of high school, traditional mail, 8017 samples) the average length of the children using mobile phones each day is as follows.


Data source:Benesse via an article on IMPRESS

You can see how the usage jumps up when they enter high schools.

==SNS usage in Japan is largely mobile==

Japan's largest SNS is mixi[ja] with 16.83 million users, their monthly PV[ja] of mobile is more than double of that of PC as of end of March 2009.

mobile(orange) 11.1 billion PV/month
PC(pink) 4.25 billion PV/month
total 15.36billion PV/month




GREE[ja] is the second largest SNS in Japan, with 10million users and 12.18 billion PV per month. Mixi's domination of the market was so strong that they changed their strategy to focus on mobile and their PVs[ja] looks like this. Most of their PV is mobile (blue) not PC(pink).




==Mobile website users' demographics==

This is a chart that shows the ratio of "heavy users(more than once a day)" of Mobile Internet, data from an article on Markezine.

Ratio of "heavy users(more than once a day)" of Mobile Internet
(datasource: "Keitai 2009 edition" by Video Research Interactive)



More than half of the teenagers and the twenties are heavy users whereas people over 30 years have a different tendency.


Further looking into the data and extracting the people who uses Internet only via mobile is interesting(upper column). Breakdown by gender is as follows. Male teenagers and all of the female except fifties exceeds the total data(lower column). Heavy mobile users can be said to be younger generation and women in Japan.

Mobile Internet Users' demographics
(datasource: "Keitai 2009 edition" by Video Research Interactive)



This is a chart that shows "where" people are using mobile phones to check out mobile websites, from article on Markezine[ja].

Venues for Mobile Internet
(datasource: "Keitai 2009 edition" by Video Research Interactive)



"PC heavy users (blue)" refers to mobile Internet users who use PC Internet everyday, and "PC light users (red)" refers to mobile Internet users who does not use PC Internet everyday. PC site heavy users use mobile Internet outside of the house more whereas light users uses more at their houses.

In what situation do people use mobile Internet in their houses?


PC light users' usage of mobile Internet at home
(datasource: "Keitai 2009 edition" by Video Research Interactive)



The usage with higher scores are while they are "relaxing" and "before going to bed".

Then what are people doing with mobile phones outside of their houses? Research company ishare conducted a survey on their panel (internet users) at the age of 20-49 (687samples) and there was an article in CNet[ja] on this survey. Note that this survey does not include teenagers.

When asked whether they use mobile phones outside other than voice calls, 23.3％ answered often, 39.9％ answered they use it sometimes. In total 63.2％ answered they have used it, the breakdowns being 68.1％ with female which was 8.9points higher than male. The higher the age is the higher ratio of the users.

When asked what exactly they are doing, the replies were "mail"(65.9％） "watch news"（55.3％）. Female's top was "mail"（76.3％） and male was "watch news"（63.2％）. Games were scored 3rd with the higher ratio with the respondants in their twenties.




==Location Games==

As for the specific sites that are used, following is the data (a bit old- data on 08/11/12 from Nikkei IT PLUS[ja]) and mobile website with the largest PV is casual gaming site Mobage-Town which is majorly targeting the younger generation.



Recently, Location-based games for adults are getting attraction. Article on Nikkei IT Plus [ja]. For example, a free mobile game "Colony Life Plus" (Colopla) is one of them. Users of Colopla would exist in a "colony space" and create their own "town" where they build buildings and secure water and food and make the town evolve. It might sound similar to Sim City, but the difference is that in order to proceed with the game, the users has to physically MOVE.

Users pay "Pla" (in-game currency) to buy land and buildings. The more the user moves, the more "Pla" they can gain- which is calculated by GPS function.

There are around 5,000 in-game items, and there are "rare items" which only the people who went to specific places can get.

According to an article on CNet Japan[ja], there are 200,000 players of Colopla and monthly PV is 280million as of May. 70% of their users are 20-49 years of age (which is very rare for mobile game demographic in Japan). Their major revenue source is donation from the users (which is another rare case), they also have affiliate ads and sponsorships. They do not acquire users' personal information (which is very rare too)- no username, no nickname, no email address, nothing.


Another example of location game is "Keitai Kunitori Gassen" which is provided by Mapion, a map service company. CNet Japan has an article[ja] on this. Japan is divided into 600 "countries" and the users will register to each country and start conquering countries by visiting those areas (like stamp rally). The more conquers, the more status you get in-game. There are also quiz about history and if you have good scores you can get in-game currency called "koban" which enables you to buy avatar items.

Some users even visits small islands far away. There are more than 60 users who conquered all of the 600 countries.

There are 230,000 users as of June. Active rate (logged in within 1 week) is 60%. Male 60% Female 40%, 33% of the total is over 35 years of age, and only less than 4% is under 19 years old. 50% are employees, and 33% of the users lives in Tokyo. As you have to travel around the country, you need to be wealthy enough to travel around. Users seems to enjoy the game while they travel around for business.

Both Colopla and Keitai Kunitori Gassen is trying to get corporate partnerships with various companies. Colopla is partnering with traditional shops so that the users would visit them, Keitai Kunitori Gassen is partnering with JR (Japan Railways) and Gurunavi (a large gourmet site).

Honda and So-net(SONY) launched location based games as well.


==What will happen to our privacy?==

Aoyama Gakuin University announced that they will distribute iPhone 3G to all of the 550 freshmen and Sophomores majoring in Social Information. They will 1) use iPhone 3G to use mail system, groupwares and distribute documents and text materials, check attendance, conduct minitests, and distribute recordings of the lectures 2) Students in the earlier years are expected to find useful applications from App store and propose a new lifestyle 3) Students in the later years are expected to develop websites and application systems. They expect those ideas and developments will be usable with iPhone 3G and be distributed in the global market.

Source: Cnet Japan[ja]

According to an [ja] article on Sankei Newspaper, one of the aims of this project is to use the location information function and prevent them from pretending that they are attending the classes (some people ask their friends to reply to the professor on their behalf).

Hmm personally I'd rather not have anyone else know about where I am etc...

According to a blogger - Oquno[ja], when he was a highschool student, teachers handed them cellphones during school trips and they were told that the teacher were keeping track of the location data via that phone later on.

This is even more creepy. Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is trying to start an experiment from this Autumn to avoid pandemic using GPS function of the cell phones to keep track of the users. They plan to get 2,000 monitors and log their location data on the database. If any of the monitor gets infected by disease, they will check all of the monitor's historical location data. They can check who was on the same train or bus and might have been infected of the disease and inform them by emails.

Source: Asahi.com

NTT DoCoMo has started a B2B service called "Wellness Support". NTT Docomo will collect vital data from pedometer of the cellphones and bloodpressure gauge etc of the employees when their employer registers to Welness Support service. The employees will be able to receive advice from health nurses and nutritionists.

So this means NTT DoCoMo is going to keep the logs of those personal data in their servers.


==No Mobile for children?==

There had been lots of issues around childrens' bullying using mobile phones. One example is that children writes bad things about a specific child on the "underground school site", another is "3 minute rule" which forces the children to reply to emails within 3 minutes, etc. Some of the children even committed suicide because of such bullies.

As I have written in my previous post, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has requested elementary and junior highschools all over Japan to prohibit the children from bringing in cell phones to schools, and highschools to prohibit usage of cell phones in schools.

In Ishikawa prefecture, a local government regulations to prohibit the elementary school and junior highschool students to purchase and own cell phones has passed the local government on 6/29. The parents are obliged to make necessary efforts to keep this regulation.

On the other hand, a private school called Suma Gakuen[ja] (junior high and highschool) in Kobe City is planning to provide a "school cellphone (just like school uniforms)" to their students- starting 2010 at the earliest.

According to a survey conducted by Suma Gakuen to their students, 92% of them own mobile phones, and the school decided that "as it is natural that the children owns cellphones nowadays, it is better to teach them rules and manners rather than prohibiting them to own it." Suma Gakuen will provide children cellphones that has special settings that the children cannot access harmful sites. They will not only prohibit access to certain sites, but will add English education programs using audio and other education materials so that the mobile phone will be beneficial for school education. Usage in the schools other than classes are going to be prohibited. They say in case of emergency, they can check the email history via the server that the school sets up, and use GPS-based location system if the students and/or parents wishes to utilize.

According to a questionnaire towards the students, 39% of the students replied they need cell phones for their school life, 31% replied they don't want to use cell phones provided by the school (as they feel they will be managed by the school).

Source: AsahiNewspaper, CNet blog

Internet Usage by Politicians

Using the Internet for politicians is somewhat complicated in Japan, and they are prohibited to do things like what President Obama did with his political campaign, so this post is about that topic.


Definitions


There are 2 important terms in this matter.

Political Campaign 【選挙運動】
Political Campaign is an action to persuade to vote for specific candidate for a specific election during the election period. (特定の選挙に、特定の候補者の当選をはかること又は当選させないことを目的に投票行為を勧めること。)

In Japan, the election period is 12 days before the election for the House of Representatives and 17 days for the House of Councilors. Election period is the only period that persuasion for voting is allowed. This makes a big difference with the elections in US where you spend a long long period of time for political campaigns. The reason for this limit in the period is to minimize the cost that is required for political campaigns.

-Political Activity 【政治活動】
Political Activity is all of the political activities EXCEPT Political Campaigns.
　政治上の目的をもって行われるいっさいの活動から、選挙運動にわたる行為を除いたもの。

Internet can be used for "Political Activity", so political parties and politicians has their websites and blogs.

-Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP, ruling party) website
-Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) website

There are lots of blogs by politicians at ele-log[ja], and many others has their[ja] own[ja] blogs[ja]. Yahoo has a List of blogs by Members of the House of Representatives[ja] and a list of blogs by Members of the House of Councilors[ja].


However, Internet is prohibited to use for "Political Campaigns" based on Public Offices Election Act (公職選挙法） clause 142 which prohibits to "distribute documents, graphics and pictures" 「文書図画の頒布」 for the political campaigns. Updating websites, blogs and sending mail magazines are defined as one of these "documents, graphics and pictures".

There had been hot debates on this in the year 2005 when DPJ updated their website and sent mail magazine during the election period, LDP filed a complaint about it and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) called DPJ referring to this action as a violation of Public Offices Election Act. DPJ complained in return that LDP updated their website with news articles as well, and MIC called LDP as well. You can see some of the documents here[ja] (document from DPJ to MIC questioning the action by LDP, answer from MIC to DPJ) .


In 2007, both LDP and DPJ updated their website and neither filed any complaint so I think this issue has been taken care of in a very Japanese way- keep the grey things grey.


Some politicians were updating their podcasts saying "audio is none of the "documents, graphics and pictures" so it should be OK.


When Takafumi Horie -Ex-CEO of internet company Livedoor- became a candidate for election, Livedoor (the portal site) stopped updating[ja] political articles except the news articles that were provided from other news sources.

By the way, the Act regulates not only the political parties/politicians but EVERYONE (何人も) to "distribute documents, graphics and pictures" to "persuade voting for certain candidate on certain election", so if you are a blogger and write on your blog "hey you should vote for candidate A", then strictly speaking you are violating the Public Offices Election Act, but in reality nothing would probably happen.


NicoNicoDouga


NicoNicoDouga - a popular video sharing site in Japan - has gained interesting position with the politicians.

One day, one of the users uploaded a video of the politicians debating in the diet, and the viewers started to get interested and spread the word and started commenting on the video. It is said that the users of NicoNicoDouga are youngsters, and those generation does not watch TV, are not very interested in politics so they were the clusters that the politicians were having a hard time reaching out. But in that video, what Kazuo Shii- head of the Communist Party- was saying made a lot of sense to them, and people started to listen and support him. The Communist Party started uploading more videos after that. NicoNicoDouga has become one of the avenues for the politicians to reach out to the younger generation.

So when NicoNicoDouga started a new service called "NicoNicoChannel" where users/companies/organizations can create landing pages, political parties and politicians rushed in.

Political parties' channels (LDP, DPJ and Communist party)




Politicians' channels (Mizuho Fukushima, Yoshiro Mori, and Yuriko Koike)




Also when NicoNicoDouga started another new service called "NicoNicoNamaHousou" which is a live streaming service (like Ustream), politicians started using them too. During NicoNicoNamaHousou, viewers can write comments on the screen, and if the politicians so wish they can read the comments while streaming and reply to them (not everyone wants to do that). This is NicoNama of Ichiro Ozawa (was the head of DPJ then). Today, Kazuo Shii (head of Communist Party) was on NicoNama.



(update 6/19)
Prime Minister Taro Asou's speech in Akihabara was on NicoNama too, and you can still see the video here.

Also, LDP proposed a program to invite 200 people to visit the Parliament building and their headquarter and do a NicoNama answering their questions which attracted 5000 viewers. You can see the video here.

NicoNicoDouga has another service called NicoWariEnquete which is like online survey that can be conducted with NicoNicoDouga viewers. NicoNicoDouga did a NicoWariEnquete asking the viewers what they'd like to ask the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister took his time to answer the questions that were raised and you can see his video here.




Lots of the users of NicoNicoDouga are kids and some are very rude, and I thought politicians wouldn't like that environment as they are used to being looked up to- but so far it looks like it hasn't been a problem to them.


Changing the Public Offices Election Act


There had been lots of debates about this issue, for example DPJ issued a draft for amending the Public Offices Election Act (1998/06/18
インターネット選挙を解禁する公職選挙法改正案の提出について[ja]) to enable the use of Internet during election period back in 1998, but the situation stays the same today. Quote from the draft "By reinforcing this amendment and enabling Election Campaigns on the Internet, we can realize conversation with constituents on policies. この公職選挙法改正で、インターネットのホームページでの選挙運動が可能になることによって、政策本位の有権者との対話が実現する。"

I think this one sentence that was written back in 1998 proves they understood 2 important points. 1) to have conversation with the constituents 2) those conversations should be centered on policy.

What we learned from Obama Campaign was that he was trying to gain understanding and conversation and trying to be as interactive as possible. At the "Change Government" site, people could write expectations and ideas for Obama when he becomes the president and others could vote on those ideas, the policy team were sharing new ideas where people can write feedbacks, people could submit questions which were answered by House Press Secretary. This enabled the Obama team to understand what people wants/expects, and people could understand what Obama team was up to and give them their opinions and feedbacks, and strengthened the understanding, conversation and interaction. People were able to discuss about specific policies here.

DPJ submitted another draft[ja] to amend the Public Offices Election Act and enable the usage of Internet in 2006 for the 4th time. The Act has not changed yet- as of June 2009.


Twitter


2 Japanese politicians -Mr. Seiji Ohsaka of DPJ and Mr. Gaku Hashimoto of LDP - started using Twitter recently, and are commenting about the policy issues and/or writing about the details of what's being discussed during the diet. Seiji Ohsaka tweeted[ja] yesterday about the debate among party leaders while watching it on TV including his comments in realtime.

For example, this is one of his posts while watching the party leader debate:
First sentence is reporting what the Prime Minister said, and the second sentence with brackets is his opinion.



"(Prime Minister Aso) Not all of the budget was waste
(Of course, but you need to prove it and therefore you should publicize the details) "

7/18 Update:
On 6/30, we held a workshop on "Twitter and Politics" which I was one of the panelists with LDP politician Mr. Gaku Hashimoto, IT journalist Mr. Daisuke Tsuda and Mr. Masahiko Shoji of GLOCOM. Since then, the number of politicians that uses Twitter increased[ja] to 20 (!) and a website called "Politter"[ja] which has updates of all the Twitter-politicians' tweets.




Seiji Ohsaka submitted his questions regarding Twitter and political activities to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and posted the reply he got on his blog [ja]

（ツイッターを使用して選挙運動を行うことについて）
　公職選挙法第１４２条第１項は、選挙運動のために使用する文書図面について、同条に規定する通常葉書又はビラのほかは、頒布することができないと規定しています。
　コンピューター等のディスプレイ上に表示された文字等の意識の表示は文書図画に該当するものですが、同条の規定により選挙運動のために頒布することができる文書図画ではないことから、現在、お尋ねのツイッターは選挙運動のために使用することができません。

"About the usage of Twitter- Public Offices Election Act 142-1 prohibits the distribution of documents, graphics and pictures used for Political Campaigns other than postcards and leaflets that are specified in the article. Letters displayed on the computer are considered as one of those documents/graphics/pictures, and therefore Twitter cannot be used for Political Campaigns."


Twitter (and websites and weblogs and mailmagazines etc) usage for Political Campaigns are banned in Japan, but it can be used for Political Activities, and we are able to read and enjoy the opinions, comments and thoughts of some of the politicians in real-time. I think it's a big step.

Updated: Copyright Law amendment

Did you know that running a search engine index server in Japan is illegal in Japan right now (as of June 2009)?

On 6/12 the amendment bill for the Japanese copyright law passed the Diet and in January 2010, the amendments will be put into effect. You can read the whole amendment documents here [ja].

There are several clauses, but the 2 big issues are "illegal download" and "search engine cache issue".


1) DOWNLOADING illegal contents will be ILLEGAL

UPLOADING illegal contents to the internet is illegal even now (and many people including Mr. Kaneko the creator of P2P software Winny had been arrested), but the new amendment will outlaw individuals who DOWNLOAD contents if they knew it is illegal contents.

There had been lots of debate on this topic- as this issue inherently has various problems such as "How do you prove you actually knew it was illegal?" "The way internet works is that if you are viewing some website, you are actually downloading it even if you are not pressing a download button or anything." There were strong oppositions against this bill, and I wrote last year about a Japanese Internet activist group MIAU and their activities against this bill. After a long debate, the way this ended up is that although downloading illegal contents is going to be illegal, there is no punishment clause on this (and that is why the efficacy of this law is questioned). Streaming is not covered in this bill, and just looking at illegal videos on YouTube and Nico Nico Douga will not be illegal either.

Chris Salzberg had been covering this issue at Global Voices blog in the past:
Japan: Economics of the “Illegal” Download
Japan: The Illegal Download Explained, on 2-Channel


2) Search engine cache (and data backup cache, streaming cache) will be LEGAL after the bill is put into effect.

Search engine caches were considered illegal in the Japanese copyright law, as "copying copyrighted contents without permission from the copyright holder is illegal" and "search engine caches are copying copyrighted materials" (and there is no way search engine companies can get permission of each and every content they index, moreover there is no fair use in Japan). Therefore search engines in Japan such as Google and Yahoo inevitably kept their servers outside of Japan.

After next January, Japanese search engines can legally build their cache servers in Japan.


Other clauses include: selling pirated DVDs in the internet auctions knowing it is illegal product will be punished (5 years in prison or penalty under 5 million yen), electronic archives of books in the National Diet Library, a system to reuse contents whose authors are unclear, etc.


======================================================================

UPDATE October, 2012

3 years have passed since I wrote this article and there are a bunch of updates, but I'm sure you are interested in the copyright law amendment that took place on October 1st, 2012.

The law penalizes people who knowingly download illegally uploaded music or movie files. When music or video is sold or is getting paid-distribution online, and if you knew those contents are distributed illegally, and you downloaded those illegal contents from the internet, you are subject to punishment.

High level summary:

- Uploading illegal contents online had been illegal from before, and the punishment was maximum of 10 years in prison and/or a fine of up to 10 million yen.

- From 2010/1/1, downloading illegal contents online became illegal without punishment. Despite this law, many people download illegal contents, and the copyright amendment bill passed in June 2012.

- From 2012/10/1, even if it is for your personal use, 1) if the contents is sold or is getting paid-distribution online 2) you knew those contents are distributed illegally 3) you downloaded those illegal contents from the internet, you are subject to punishment- maximum of 2 years in prison and/or a fine of up to 2 million yen.

- From 2012/10/1, ripping DVD contents with copy protect functions will be illegal without punishment, even if it is ripped for your personal use. Creating or giving programs that enables to break those copy protection function will be illegal and is subject to punishment- maximum of 3 years in prison and/or a fine of up to 3 million yen. (Most music CDs do not have copy protect function, so as long as it is personal use, copying music from CD to your personal computers or personal music player are generally not illegal.

- In the past, when famous characters happened to be in the background of photos uploaded to blogs etc, it was illegal. The new amendment will make this legal from 2013/1/1.

- From 2013/1/1, the National Diet Library will be able to electronically distribute out-of-print books to public libraries nationwide.

Resources and links:

Government's PR site [ja]
Website of Agency for Cultural Affairs on this copyright amendment [ja]
Amendment bill (summary) [ja]
Amendment bill [ja]
Amendment bill (comparison of the old and new bill) [ja]
Japan Times: Copyright law with teeth leaves download masses puzzled


Q&A from website of Agency for Cultural Affairs:

Q – Is it illegal to view illegal contents online?
A – Viewing illegal video or listening to illegal music is not online, unless you record the contents.

Q – Is it illegal to view contents on video sharing sites like YouTube since it creates cache?
A – No, caching made from viewing videos of video sharing sites are not illegal.

Q – Is it illegal to download online photos or copy and paste test for my private use?
A – No, downloading online photos or copy and pasting text is not illegal as long as it is for private use. Downloading music and video is illegal.

Q – Is it illegal to download online illegal TV dramas that are broadcasted on TVs for free?
A – Even if TV programs were broadcasted for free, it is illegal download the contents if you knew it was illegal distribution. Moreover, if that TV program is sold (either as DVD or online), if you download knowing both the fact that it is sold product as well as illegal, you are subject to punishment.  

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki