PREFACE TO JAPANESE CYBERCULTURES

Japanese Cybercultures is a book edited by Nanette Gottlieb and Mark McLelland, published by Routledge in 2002. This is the preface they asked me to write - which summarises some key interesting parts of the book. So it's a quick way to learn something about the surprisingly different ways in which the internet has been taken up in Japan.

When I was asked to write the preface for a book called Japanese Cybercultures, I was not sure that I could do it: as a Western academic with an interest in the internet and its users, I was already aware of, and embarrassed about, my lack of detailed knowledge about non-Western cybercultures. But the editors assured me that I cannot be alone: this is, in fact, the first English-language book dedicated to life on the non-English-language internet, even though, on today's internet, only two-fifths of the content is in English. Happily, when I came to read this fascinating collection, I found it to be an excellent remedy for (part of) my ignorance.

Popular media gives us, in the West, a particular image of this topic: the Japanese are a super-technological people, fascinated or even obsessed with the latest computers and gadgets. We imagine, perhaps, that their homes are gleaming temples to the latest cool technologies, and we might expect that they would have embraced and wholly mastered the internet some time ago. This book shows that this vision is not really true to the everyday lives of most Japanese people (apart, perhaps, from the interest in little gadgets). Indeed, as Nanette Gottlieb and Mark McLelland point out in their introduction, even by 2000, Japanese take-up of the internet in the home was less than half that of countries such as Canada, Iceland, and Sweden.

This relatively slow adoption of the internet on PCs in Japanese households perhaps explains why a book such as this has been so long in coming. But it could also reflect the complacency of Western scholars: we assume that people in other countries, using other languages, are probably doing things with internet technology that are pretty similar to those applications we are familiar with. This book shows how wrong that assumption is in many ways. Most striking, for me, was the way in which Japan has embraced the mobile internet. The WAP protocol for mobile phones - which enabled users to access ultra-basic versions of websites, which had to be prepared especially, and which were too small and too slow to be much use - has already been pretty much discarded in the West, having enjoyed a brief period as the much-touted 'next big thing' in the run-up to the Christmas of 1999. In Japan, however, a variation of this technology has been wholly embraced and is being put to a fascinating range of uses, creating another kind of cyberculture which - by virtue of both its reach and its complexity - is entirely unique.

As Brian McVeigh shows in this book, the internet-enabled mobile phones which young people use - to interact with friends via email, and to arrange their lives using online friendship sites, timetables, and information services - are not faceless machines for accessing data, but take on considerable amounts of personal meaning. The devices are used to express the self and to connect with others in new ways. This occurs in the virtual space, in written messages and 'cute' graphics, and also in the real-world space in which the physical shell of the mobile phone is adorned with stickers, decorative straps, trinkets, dolls and other personalised ornamentation. This 'culture of cute' is discussed in Larissa Hjorth's chapter, where we see traditional gender roles changing as both men and women embrace the cute kitties and traditionally 'feminine', fluffy and fun forms of electronic greeting.

McVeigh shows that some students even considered the mobile phone to be at the heart of the transformation and detraditionalisation of Japanese society. The mobile tends to foster an ever-more busy social life, whilst at the same time making it much easier to rearrange or cancel appointments. The act of writing thoughts and feelings down seems to offer another discrete avenue for self-expression, McVeigh notes, and email communication (via mobile phones) creates a new private virtual space where young people can interact without the scrutiny of their elders. This picture is reinforced in the chapter by Holden and Tsuruki, who discuss internet sites for meeting people and dating (again, often accessed by mobile phone), where the self is constructed, presented to others, and explored through text. Here, as well as young people, other marginalised groups such as divorced people find a community to be a part of, and a place to express themselves. It is ironic that, since Japanese people seem to have adopted mobiles in such a unique way, McVeigh's study found that many Japanese students subscribed to a common downbeat view that Japan merely copies these pop-culture developments from other countries.

This book's coverage of online activists provides another healthy challenge to the Western view of a conformist Japan where everyone accepts the status quo. At the same time, however, the contributors show that the activists tend to be technically conservative, and are also constrained by internal hierarchies where the high-status activists are older people unfamiliar with the technological possibilities and opportunities, and unwilling to seek help from younger campaigners. Thus in Japan (as elsewhere, but in different ways), the 'digital divide' takes on a generational dimension as well. Meanwhile, the internet activists discussed in different chapters of this book seem to have created a few online spectacles and impressive petitions, but not to have had much impact on actual policy. This situation is similar to that in other parts of the world, where we are finding that, although the theoretical possibilities of internet activists meeting big business and governments on the 'level playing field' of cyberspace sound exciting, they are not matched with many clear-cut victories. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the internet has been an extremely valuable tool for organisation, and sharing information, for many activists around the world.

Japanese Cybercultures considers whether, in the words of the editors, 'internet use really improves communication or just facilitates the flow of information' (p.[14]). It is perhaps unfair to expect either of these always to be the case. What we do see, in this volume, are many instances of both. There are a range of ways in which the internet opens up new forms of communication which can be valuable or beneficial in certain contexts - for example, allowing users the opportunity to meet new people; or fostering activist activity; or enabling gay people to access a new world of social and sexual arrangements; or allowing people with certain conditions to share their experiences (such as the HIV+ patients discussed in Cullinane's chapter, for whom the internet was invaluable for connecting them with this 'hidden' community of otherwise isolated and stigmatised individuals). The internet also, clearly, is of considerable value as an information service alone. Fans of Foucault's power/resistance correlation will be pleased to note that more than one chapter in this book shows that whenever one voice promotes something online, another voice appears to resist it. For example, Kienle and Staemmler show that Japanese Jehovah's Witnesses (the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society) are cautious about promoting their own web presence, since interested parties might also stumble across vitriolic websites set up by opponents of the religion, including the children of Jehovah's Witnesses who feel that the experience was far from being a blessing. Similarly, Gottlieb's chapter on the Burakumin minority shows that, although the internet has given Burakumin groups the opportunity to organise, and to challenge stereotypes, the positive Burakumin sites are outnumbered two-to-one by racist hate sites reviling this group.

The internet cannot always be expected to 'improve' communication, then: as an illustration of this, Gottlieb and McLelland point to Ducke's finding that posts on campaign bulletin boards are often too polemical to be of use to the campaign organisations. However, the fact the people have taken the opportunity to engage with a particular issue, and express their feelings about it in a public forum, is of some value in itself, and cannot simply be dismissed as 'useless' communication. Similarly, in their chapter on the 'noise' scene - a genre of not-necessarily-musical music - Caspary and Manzenreiter conclude that the Web has not made the community more strong or more rich, and may have contributed to its fragmentation. However, one could say on the contrary that this fragmentation is perhaps just a consequence of the opportunities offered by the internet: the chance to create and distribute new works in a purely digital form, without need for offline distribution networks or clubs or fanzines, and also the heightened interest and discussions about the 'noise' scene which the internet has fostered, which have led to more diversification.

In the case of women's consciousness-raising - to use a phrase from Western feminism of the 1970s - Junko Onosaka shows that the internet has clearly played an important role, not just as a provider of information, but as a space where liberating discussions can take place, freed from the gender and status-related conventions which may traditionally constrain communications for Japanese women. Here, the internet's potential for 'self-expression' - which in the sphere of personal homepages or dating sites can sometimes just mean personal vanity - takes on a more serious and socially important role, allowing women to share intimate experiences and problems which previously were buried in the undiscussable 'private sphere'. Of course, as Dasgupa notes in his chapter, the net can offer the same opportunities for anonymous discussions about personal matters to men as well, further reinforcing the theme found in various chapters in this book that the internet is contributing to the general transformation of gender roles in Japan.

One more often-overlooked issue which Japanese Cybercultures plants onto the agenda is that of language. The internet is always spoken of as a 'global' phenomenon, but there is not a global language through which all users can communicate (except in the sense that a Hello Kitty animation, based on a site in Tokyo, can be enjoyed from around the world). Japanese sites are generally in the Japanese language and are mostly visited by people in Japan, so global accessibility is less important in these studies than the local context and meanings.

Far from being 'just another' book about the internet, this volume offers a valuable opportunity for students of cyberculture - and anyone else interested in media culture, popular culture, and politics - to rethink some of their assumptions. As a valuable guide to the ways in which internet use has emerged in Japan, it reminds us that human creativity is always diverse, interesting, and able to surprise.

David Gauntlett, September 2002