Sociological research on information and communication technologies in Japan

Abstract

This review of the Japanese sociological literature on information and communication technologies showcases some of the best studies in the field published in Japan since 2005. It provides an overview with a special focus on the internet, the computer, the mobile phone and other devices, and social media. Two events during the period covered in this review spurred research on public consequences: the East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and the 2013 Amendment of Public Offices Election Act. Long-term structural issues such as inequalities of various kinds and labor relations also influence researchers’ interests.

Keywords

Communication information internet media sociology in Japan

Introduction

This review of the Japanese sociological literature on information and communication technologies showcases some of the best studies in the field published in Japan since 2005. This review is also an invitation, with hopefully useful leads to some studies worth paying attention to. If the reader herself does not read Japanese but found some of the studies relevant, she is encouraged to work with a research assistant or colleague who does to learn more about them.

In addition to language barriers, there are several reasons why good studies published in Japanese receive less attention than they may merit. First, there are organizational aspects. Japanese scholars routinely publish their work in both university-run in-house publications and journals run by academic associations. With typically a small reviewer pool if any, in-house publications are mixed bags, containing papers that range in quality from unsalvageable to excellent, and their circulation tends to be small in the order of several hundred to a couple of thousand. Japanese academic publishers, meanwhile, are rarely equipped with qualified acquisition editors and exercise limited gatekeeping functions. As a result, their publications in the social sciences and related fields also struggle to meet global standards of rigor, with the expected results.

Second, because of their limited use of meta-data, Japanese publication citations are not widely accessible to scholars working in other languages. Japanese database services such as CiNii, J-Stage, and NDL-OPAC may therefore not be very useful. Cross-reference capabilities are limited in these databases. For example, it is impossible to compile a list of Japanese publications citing a particular non-Japanese source, or even another Japanese source.¹ So even works of good quality that manage to shine through the sub-optimal review and publication process will struggle to make their existence felt in broader scholarly spheres.

As a result of these structural issues, an existing intellectual effect is exacerbated. Japanese scholarship, already somewhat restricted by language issues, is often inward-focused theoretically and empirically, building on and referencing its own history, data and debates, and not giving more than pro-forma attention to the broader global debates to which it could conceivably contribute. Scholarly ‘cliques’, in the best sense of the term, may form around individuals rather than research questions. The interaction between the previously-mentioned publication issues and the nature of scholarly output has been circular and mutually reinforcing. This review is thus a partial attempt to compensate for those problems and point non-Japan-experts toward studies worth close reading.

This review provides an overview of sociological research on information and communication technologies with a special focus on the internet, the computer, the mobile phone and other devices, and social media due to the fact that the years in the scope of the review are the age that has witnessed the proliferation of these technologies. But studies on older media such as magazines and TV are referenced where appropriate. It classifies the literature into three broad categories of access, use and user characteristics, and public consequences. It examines studies with sociological implications regardless of the authors’ disciplinary self-identification. In the text I mention certain well-known publications in English as signposts to establish theoretical and empirical connections to Japanese publications.

Access

Access to information and communication technologies is a multifaceted and cumulative process. It is a key topic of digital inequality research. Van Dijk distinguished motivational access, material access, skills access, and usage access (Van Dijk, 2006). Drawing on the cumulative conceptualization of access, Akiyoshi et al. (2013a) confirmed that uneven distribution of cultural capital accounts for differential access and use of broadband services in Japan. Affordable broadband internet services were available by the 2010s and yet adoption remained stagnant partly because those with limited cultural capital were not aware of applications made available by broadband services, while those with higher levels of cultural capital became omnivorous users of multiple services.

Several empirical analyses of digital inequality in Japan have been published in English (Akiyoshi and Ono, 2008; Akiyoshi et al., 2013b; Nishida et al., 2014; Ono and Zavodny, 2007). Akiyoshi and Ono (2008) showed the presence of users who access the internet exclusively via the mobile phone in Japan. The study was done before the mass adoption of smartphones and so mobile-only (i.e., feature phone) users’ online capabilities were substantially limited. Women and those with lower socioeconomic status were disproportionately overrepresented among those mobile-only users. Ono and Zavodny (2007) compared the US, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore and found that differences in information technology usage across demographic and socioeconomic dimensions were more pronounced in the three Asian societies. Nishida et al. (2014) conducted a multivariate and spatial analysis of regional digital divide across Japan and found that regional demographic, economic, and innovation factors account for observed levels of digital inequality at the prefectural level. The conclusion leads to a recommendation of region-specific policies.

While digital inequality research is concerned with users’ traits at various levels – individual, regional, and national – accessibility studies examine the service side of issues that hinder access. They evaluate websites’ accessibility for individuals with special needs. Tanaka et al. (2015) assessed 47 national hospitals’ websites for visually impaired using text-to-voice software and low-vision simulation software. They concluded that those hospital websites left much to be desired due to the lack of understanding of HTML on the part of web designers.

Fukuda (2015) reached a similar conclusion in studying accessibility of library websites for senior citizens and the visually or audibly impaired. According to his analysis, library websites specifically designed for individuals with special needs failed to pass a W3C validation check, which means that they contained HTML grammatical errors and were not useful for individuals with impairments. Some problems got worse over time: the average number of links and lines per page increased between 2009 and 2014, making some pages harder to navigate for those who use text-to-voice software. Fukuda (2015) gave an example of a library website page with too much information; an overloaded website took 19 minutes per page to be read aloud by software. On some pages, software encountered grammatical errors and aborted. Okamoto et al. (2018) pointed out that available learning management systems used for higher education do not meet the need of visually impaired learners and proposed a more accessible system.

Accessibility research in Japan is conducted by library scientists, medical researchers, and educational software developers, but their interests and findings are relevant to sociological understanding of information and communication technologies. Yoshimi et al. (2011) is an example of a study that fruitfully integrates accessibility and disability issues to raise intriguing sociological questions. They investigated factors that make it difficult for employers to hire workers with disabilities to have them work from home. They interviewed six non-profit organizations that hired such workers. They found that even though working from home appears a great option for workers with disabilities, it did not take root in Japanese workplaces primarily because of the stringent eligibility criteria for subsidies provided by a government program to support workers with disabilities and their employers.

Use and user characteristics

Beyond access to information and communication studies, some studies are concerned with users’ profiles and use outcomes. Drawing on the tradition of uses and gratifications research, Kotera (2019) found negative effects of TV viewing for elderly citizens. Other media use showed little to no effect on morale as defined in gerontology research, or positive feeling about aging. Kukimoto (2013), on the other hand, confirmed positive effects of mobile email and social networking services for mothers with young children in the Tokyo area. The identified benefits of using those communication tools were both practical and psychological.

Harihara (2014) analyzed use and satisfaction of the social media apps mixi and Twitter.² She hypothesized that among Japanese there existed groups that match a standard ‘Japanese’ cultural profile and those who have more ‘American’ values. Broadly speaking, the former were associated with conformism and group-oriented values while the latter were linked to individualistic values. She then measured respondents’ perception of cultural values of their friends and Japanese people in general. Her analysis revealed that respondents’ own values and values they perceive to be held by their friends and Japanese in general affect the choice and use satisfaction of social media. Respondents with collectivistic values preferred mixi, a service that promotes mutually approved ties while individualistic respondents were happier on Twitter, in which ties can be asymmetrical.

Ogawa et al. (2012) also compared users’ profiles with their online behavior. Specifically, they analyzed the association of network structure and attitudes on the use of nuclear energy of a sample of Twitter users. They measured the number of followers, tweets, retweets, and mentions, the proportion of symmetrical ties, cluster coefficient, trust in information about nuclear accidents obtained on the internet, and attitudes toward the use of nuclear power of 1,276 Twitter users. The question regarding nuclear power distinguished supporters of future use of nuclear power and its opponents, as well as the strength of their opinions. The authors found that more tweets come from those who exhibit higher trust in information on the internet, are more opinionated about nuclear energy policy, and are more confident that they belong to the majority in the debate, confirming a bandwagon effect.

Kuto and Ozaki (2018) studied friendship styles of female college students and found that personal networks of avid social media users tend to show greater network diversity than those of less active users. But the direction of causality remains ambiguous because they also argue that the former group tends to be more sociable. The social media use frequency may thus be a spurious cause of network diversity that simply mediates sociability that is the real producer of network diversity. Fukaya et al. (2016) showed that network size controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables has positive effects on the frequency of email among elderly citizens.

Some studies focused on challenges posed by going online such as excessive and addictive use of the internet, various kinds of potential harms to which minors could be exposed, and privacy issues. Kotera (2014) conducted a meta-study of research on internet addiction by reviewing 53 papers published in Japanese. He argued that the concept is ill-defined in that literature. Twenty-eight studies provided no definition of internet addiction. Some gave only cursory definitions such as overuse or ‘unreasonable’ use. He also found that only two papers used measurement scales derived from the DSM-IV, while some used measurement scales of questionable validity.

Kato and Aoki (2019) studied about 2,000 children ranging from 5th grade to middle school 2nd grade (equivalent to 8th grade in the K-12 system) and found that having tablets or smartphones leads to fewer sleep hours. The quality of parent–child relationship was also statistically significant. Akiyoshi (2016) and Chiba et al. (2014) investigate how parents mediate, monitor, and control children’s internet use. Chiba et al. (2014) found the likelihood of meeting strangers online is not explained by rules and preventive measures implemented by guardians.

Privacy protection practices are analyzed by Nishimura (2017) and Sato and Tabata (2016). Again, the seemingly relevant factor of perceived risk of using social media had little to do with actual privacy protection measures, but presumed privacy norms shared by friends and the general public did matter (Nishimura, 2017). The explanatory power of perceived privacy norms was suggested by Utz and Krämer (2009) and Nishimura’s analysis confirmed it for Japanese data.

Some of the consequences of using network media may become apparent only in the long run. Furushima (2015) investigated the relationship between the onset of sexual behavior and mobile phone use among high school students. Those who received their first mobile phone while in elementary school are more likely to have had their first sexual relations by the time they were in high school, compared to those who didn’t have a mobile phone until high school. Frequency and duration of mobile phone use per day also accelerated the onset of sexual behavior. Again, more research needs to be done to establish the mechanism and causality, but sexual behavior and the use of network media is an important topic as illustrated by the surge in research interest in the role of media in the mediation of romantic relationships (Christakis and Fowler, 2009).

A series of studies explored structural aspects of the social order emerging with the proliferation of network media (Koide et al., 2013; Ogawa et al., 2012). The process through which links are built is explicable by users’ values, preferences, and friendship style. At the same time, online networks keep adding, breaking, and activating ties old and new while attaining a life of their own that cannot be reduced to or explained away by the aggregate of users’ traits. Tsumita (2017) asked how collaboration and adjustment are possible in the open environment of online communities in which individuals are free to enter or exit and yet often work together to produce high-quality information goods. Through a detailed case study of Japanese Wikipedia, he discovered that participants use multiple means such as the use of hierarchical organization, explicit rules, and fine-tuning of shared information to facilitate collaboration (Tsumita, 2017).

Toriumi and Yamamoto (2012) also investigated the evolution of cooperation on social media. They regarded posts on social media as a kind of public goods game and examined why participants contribute in the absence of a mechanism that enforces punishment for defectors. This is a classic formulation of the question of cooperation in evolutionary game theory (Rand and Nowak, 2013). Evolutionary game theory proposes some interrelated mechanism for cooperation without visible means of enforcement. According to Rand and Nowak, these mechanisms include direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, spatial selection, multi-level selection, and kin selection. Toriumi and Yamamoto (2012) introduced the notion of meta-reward to account for cooperation on social media. The idea is compatible with the mechanism of indirect reciprocity in which reputation earned by cooperation is valuable for participants.

Public consequences

The group of studies subsumed under the heading of public consequences investigates how information and communication technologies are integrated into the collective production of the symbolic order (Gusfield, 1984) or societalization of social problems (Alexander, 2018). Put differently, while access and use research discussed in the previous sections addresses motives and consequences at the level of the individual, this body of work explores social, economic, and political implications of the proliferation of network media. In particular, two watershed events during the period covered in this review spurred sociologically relevant research of this kind: the East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and the 2013 Amendment of Public Offices Election Act.

The 2011 Earthquake disrupted communications networks nationwide: mobile phone voice capabilities were rendered useless by base station outages and the blackout that followed the Fukushima power plant accident. The earthquake, tsunami, and power plant failure led to the evacuation of 470,000 individuals in the Tohoku region and beyond. Traditional media such as TV and newspapers could not supply the kind of detailed information on food, shelter, medical services, and other basic necessities that victims needed. Under these extreme circumstances, Twitter and other social media became alternate channels of communication, which in turn spurred research on the topic of disaster and risk communication. In disaster-prone Japan, the urgency of this topic was reinforced by another major earthquake in Kumamoto in 2016, and Typhoon Hagibis, which killed 86 in 2019.

As for the 2013 Election Act Amendment, prior to it there was confusion about the use of the internet for electoral campaigns. The original Election Act (1950) prohibited the distribution of ‘unauthorized materials’ during campaigns, and some experts and law enforcement agencies had interpreted this to include online content. Consequently, candidates were cautious about using the internet for campaigning. The 2013 Amendment authorized candidates and supporters for the first time to do so, with some restrictions. Scholarly interest in the relationship between political processes and media followed, taking advantage of new tools for data collection and analysis.

In addition to these visible events, there are less dramatic yet equally crucial underlying factors that researchers on Japan’s mediascape are sensitive to. One has to do with social inequalities of various kinds. Both at home and in the workplace, gender inequality permeates Japanese society despite the implementation of the Equal Employment Act in 1986 and its multiple amendments (Yamaguchi, 2019). In the realm of ethnic relations, racial discrimination and hostile attitudes toward non-Japanese, especially those with Chinese and Korean backgrounds, are visibly present if not prevalent (Higuchi, 2016 [2014]).

Another factor has to do with labor relations. Work in Japan has long been marked by seniority-based rather than performance-based promotion, lack of meritocratic values, long working hours, and extreme labor market segmentation based on gender, age, and other demographic characteristics (Yamaguchi, 2019). The 2000s saw these features impose a rising cost on Japanese society: deaths due to overwork, low productivity, and inability of companies to retain the best and brightest. Since 2018, the Abe administration has urged employers and workers to cut down on hours and focus more on efficiency and productivity (Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, 2020).

These long-term structural issues influence researchers’ interests in a score of studies that address natural disasters, the Fukushima nuclear accident, and elections after the Election Act reform as their empirical cases.

The East Japan Earthquake first posed possibilities and challenges of working from home in the wake of a major disaster (Yoshimi and Fujita, 2012). As of this writing in May 2020, Japan is in the midst of the global Covid-19 outbreak, with renewed interest in the role of telecommuting as a response to disaster. It is too early to discuss the impact of the outbreak on remote working based on scholarly work. But already news outlets are turning a critical eye on Japan’s work culture, which does not allow an easy transition to working from home. Recent headlines read, ‘Work from home, they said. In Japan, it’s not easy’ (Denyer, 2020), or ‘Low-tech Japan challenged in working from home amid pandemic’ (Kageyama, 2020).

Working from home or other remote locations is also examined as a means to achieve better work–life balance (Fukahori, 2017). While some studies conducted outside Japan explore the blurred boundaries between work and private life, the Japanese policy community and some researchers conceptualize working from home as a way to achieve better work–life balance and greater gender equality while acknowledging the boundary issues (Adachi, 2010). They are not much concerned with the fundamental transformation of workers’ and organizational ties and work practices that Rainie and Wellman (2014) investigated. Instead their focus is the integration of new means of communication into existing work routines. Beyond the question of technology adoption, it remains to be investigated whether and how the shift from traditional ‘fishbowl’ workgroups to ‘switchboard’ networked individuals (Rainie and Wellman, 2014) will take place in Japan.

The mediascape not only reflects power relationships ‘out there’, it often becomes the arena in which various forms of inequality are enacted, challenged, deconstructed, and reconstructed discursively. Against the backdrop of a relative lack of paternal involvement in childcare, Tendo and Takahashi (2011) conducted a content analysis of magazines for fathers that have emerged since 2005. Their analysis revealed that these magazines invented the role of a good home educator for fathers, and while encouraging fathers’ greater involvement in childcare, they reinforced gender stereotypes by claiming that sons and daughter have to be reared differently.

As for research on ethnic relations and media discourse, Taguchi (2017) pointed out that public policy, media, and academic discourses attach shifting meanings to the so-called ‘mixed-blood’ Japanese of the postwar period, while relegating them to a residual category that is neither Japanese nor foreigner. Higuchi (2016 [2014]) chronicled the process through which individuals with ultra-rightwing and xenophobic values reaffirm their views by meeting like-minded people on YouTube, internet radio, and other services and get involved in exclusionist movements. He concluded that those who advocate for the expulsion of Chinese and Koreans from Japan were not the most marginalized and underprivileged as is often imagined in popular discourse; they are often well-educated, well-adjusted individuals with conservative values.

Cho (2018) examined tweets that falsely claimed that some Koreans threw poison in a well after the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake. This is an exact repeat of disinformation that circulated after the 1923 Kanto Earthquake. Cho demonstrates through quantitative analysis that Koreans, among other foreign nationals, are singled out as criminals. At the same time, corrective tweets outnumbered the tweets with the false claim.

Responses to earthquakes and other disasters motivate research on the diffusion of disinformation. Ogasawara et al. (2018) studied the role of mass media in suppressing disinformation on Twitter during the time of the East Japan Earthquake. It used one story that was widely retweeted but turned out to be false: an explosion of liquefied petroleum gas in a Chiba oil refinery had released toxic chemicals that would fall back to earth with rain, and local residents must evacuate immediately. The explosion really happened on 11 March 2011 and video of the refinery in flames was shown live on TV. But the toxic emission part was a fabrication. Ogasawara et al. (2018) conducted a chronological comparison of news stories and the spread of the disinformation on Twitter. They found that Twitter disinformation diffusion was initially impervious to the accurate reporting by a public broadcasting corporation, by other media outlets, and by the refinery’s own statement on their website. When news sources simply denied the toxic emission, Twitter users rarely retweeted those statements. It was only after those sources explicitly discredited the false tweets that Twitter users started retweeting tweets from trustworthy sources that contained accurate information.³ Similarly, Yasuda (2013) tracked the spread of the oil refinery disinformation and concluded that hub accounts with many followers but little relevant expertise, such as fashion models and TV personalities, contributed to the rapid spread of disinformation.

Arai (2013) conducted text mining of Twitter data after the Fukushima power plant accident that followed the earthquake. His analysis gauged the tweeted sentiments of individuals living in areas that were several hundred kilometers away from Fukushima and yet registered increased radiation levels. The accident and the fact that their communities far from the plant had become radiation hotspots sensitized some Twitter users to nuclear power policies.

Some seminal studies on the relationship between political processes and online activities reveal intriguing findings. Nasuno et al. (2015) drew on the literature on election outcomes using social media data and developed indicators of aspects of constituency to predict the outcome of general elections. Their indicators measured three aspects: expected numbers of Twitter users that can possibly receive a candidate’s tweets by retweeting, diversity of supporters as measured by the proportion of asymmetrical ties, and the narrowness or exclusivity of supporters’ tweets, i.e., whether the supporters single-mindedly tweet about a particular candidate they support or mention other candidates. They found these indicators successfully predict the outcome of the 2013 House of Councilors election.

Yoshimi (2017) studied candidates’ tweeting before and during the 2014 House of Representatives election. He concludes that during the official campaign period, candidates invest more time and effort on rallies and other face-to-face encounters than on social media. Shirasaki (2019) used propensity scores to compare internet users who express their political views on social media and those who do not around the time of the House of Councilors election in 2016. His analysis found that those who posted their political views and reacted to views of others on the internet became more interested in signing petitions and taking part in future political activities. The results implied that online engagement serves as a catalyst for subsequent political activities.

Conclusion

This brief review provided a bird’s eye view of sociological research on information and communication technologies from 2005 to the present in the three broad areas of access, use, and public consequences. It shows that the studies reviewed engage with current debates on various topics regarding the role of media technologies often dealing with go-to issues of their research site: Japan. Because of multiple reasons such as language, publishing conventions, and meta-data issues, quality studies published in Japanese could go unnoticed for years. The situation is a loss not only for the author but for the discipline. This review hopefully provides some motivation for the reader working in other research settings to follow the literature.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Mito Akiyoshi is Professor of Sociology at Senshu University. Her most recent publication is ‘Busy, happy, and withdrawn: Japanese women’s constrained leisure choices’, in Beyond the Gender Gap in Japan (edited by Gill Steel; University of Michigan Press, 2019). She received her PhD from the University of Chicago for her dissertation on the diffusion of the internet in Japan.

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