According to an American blog survey company, Japanese became the most common language used in blog messages between October and December of 2006, accounting for 37 percent, and doing better than English with 36 percent. This figure is all the more remarkable when one considers that Japanese is spoken by only 1.8 percent of the world7s population and that Japanese accounts for 7.1 percent of the global online population. Japan’s blogging culture has developed in a very different manner from that of other nations. Seventy-five percent of Japanese blog content is diaries or stories about everyday events. By way of contrast, many American and European blogs are like newspaper writings with an emphasis on opinion.
Kiyomi Yamashita, a professor of cognitive psychology, says Japan’s one-thousand-year-old diary culture has a tremendous influence on blogging. “The Japanese use diaries as a medium for writing down things like changes of season and natural phenomena. This is linked to modern blogging culture,” she said.
Japanese diary culture can be traced back to the Heian period, when women expressed their personal feelings in kana characters and wrote about royal lifestyles and romances. Another form of diary was used more by court noblemen for keeping records of true events in kanji characters. Another traditional element linked to Japanese blogging is to hide one’s identity when participating in a creative activity. According to Yuji Wada, head researcher at the Institute for Future Technology, the classical poetic form of renga is similar to Japanese blogs and communication on networks. For example, in Kasagi renga, a type of linked verse practiced for many hundreds of years, anyone, regardless of rank, can add a new lines while hiding his or her face with a hat. “It’s widely believed that the Internet has introduced a community where anyone can participate freely regardless of their social standing without using their names, but japan has had a tradition for centuries,” Wada said.
According to major Internet service provider Rakuten Inc., women account for 66.2 percent of those using its blogs services. Yamashita said women use more detailed and complicated expressions than men when remembering events. The tend to have a stronger desire to write about and reveal their feelings. This probably encourages women to write about their daily lives on their blogs. “In the same way Heian people developed kana from kanji introduced from China, Japan adopted the Internet, which developed in America, to create its own blogging style,” Wada said. “Blogging in Japan has grown with a characteristically female style of expressing oneself.”
