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Japan's Bloggers: Humble Giants of the Web
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Who's Blogging  |
In all the blog entries she has composed at home and in cybercafes over the years, Kenetsuna has never written a discouraging word -- not a single critical reference to bad food, lousy service or rip-off prices, she said. Such harshness, in her view, would be improper and offensive.
"If I think the food stinks, I don't write it," said Kenetsuna, 43, who makes a living writing advertising copy for a weekly newspaper for female office workers in Tokyo. "There is a part of me that feels sorry for the restaurant, if it were to lose business because of what I write," she said. "I don't want to influence the diners."
About 300 people occasionally read her blog, most of them friends. She gets almost no online comments or feedback from any of them, although she had hoped she might.
Still, Kenetsuna does not want to overexcite her readers or provoke comments that would hurt her feelings. "Because my blog may be read by people I don't know, I am cautious about revealing my inner thoughts," she said. "I don't want to be criticized for what I write."
To keep her profile low, Kenetsuna blogs anonymously.
None of this surprises Robert Pickard, North Asia president of the Edelman public relations firm, which has collaborated with Technorati to survey Japanese blogging behavior and compare it with that of English speakers. "There is no question that in this culture the nail that sticks out gets hammered in," Pickard said.
His company's surveys have found that speakers of English and Japanese have markedly different motivations for blogging.
About 40 percent of English-language bloggers said their primary goal was "to raise visibility as an authority in my field." Only 5 percent of Japanese bloggers said that was their primary motivation. Instead, they said they blog to create a record of their thoughts and of information they have collected.
The Japanese are about five times as likely as Americans, the British or the French to read a blog every week, but far less likely to act on what they read, according to Edelman's surveys.
"Private opinions are there, but public activism is not," said Pickard. "The Japanese read blogs more often, but do less about it."
To understand what the Japanese are up to when they blog, it is useful to understand why they bother -- and how technology in Japan makes it so easy to blog at home, on the train or walking down the street.
Before blogging became popular here in 2002 and '03, the Japanese had used personal computers to keep electronic diaries.
