receiver magazine      #22 | Seizing the moment

Sven Kilian-Nakamura is the CEO of CScout Japan, based in Tokyo. He is a well-known expert in Japanese trend and market research and can look back on a long and very successful involvement in bringing foreign and Japanese companies together. Michael Keferl came to Japan with a degree in Telecommunications & Media from Ohio University after several years in radio production. CScout benefits from his profound knowledge of the multiple cultures within contemporary Japan and of the country's local markets. Both teamed up for a report on how, in Japan, mobiles are no longer used to waste time while commuting but are used as creative tools: to blog and comment on videos and even to write stories or create drawings. Read along for a glimpse into the future of Japanese mobile culture and the here-and-now feeling of mobile-born, user generated content.

Website: http://www.cscoutjapan.com
http://mobile.trendpool.com

Illustration by Jaro Gielens ...........................................................................................................................................................................

With the internet boom and subsequent mobile revolution, creators around the globe have harnessed the new 'connected world' to make and share their work in constantly evolving ways. While digital innovation has progressed beyond our wildest dreams, we're still quite tethered to the PC as our means for digital self-expression, creation and distribution.

Japan, on the other hand, joined the digital revolution from a position very different from the rest of the world, generally by-passing the PC and embracing a mobile culture that is just beginning to evolve elsewhere. Devices are becoming more functional, computers are getting smaller and the mobile has outgrown its telephone origins by a long way.

While the West rooted itself in the internet from the PC side, for most Japanese the mobile handset was the original gateway to the web, a mindset that generated the most unique, mobile-crazy culture in the world. Since voice functions are among the least utilized by the mobile generation, to call a mobile handset a 'phone' is a tremendous understatement. Most prefer to communicate through mobile email and make their first email addresses not with Yahoo or Gmail, but through their mobile carriers.

Both psychologically and physically, young Japanese are never too far from their handsets and the connections to the world that come with the devices. For them, a mobile device is a constant companion, time-killer, game machine, television, organizer, wallet, music player and communicator. In short, it's not terribly necessary to own a PC to be connected digitally, so when the creative urge strikes, the mobile generation uses the tool most comfortable to them: their handsets.

Japan, particularly in the big cities, is a place where daily downtime is a fact of life. Whether braving a long commute from the suburbs or simply waiting in line, downtime that was once exclusively filled by reading material or nothing at all, can easily be converted into productive communication and creation, through one tiny device.



Blogging

Blog services can be found everywhere, from within popular Social Networking Services (SNS) like Mixi, to standalone blogging services such as FC2. Even Rakuten, Japan's largest on-line shopping portal, launched a blogging service that turned out to be quite a success.

Worldwide, blogging is clearly the default method for sharing written content with the world but its origins are clearly web-based, with mobile features added later on, as a blogging platform gains popularity. In Japan, of course, mobile is never an afterthought. The press frequently cites various numbers showing that Japanese is one of the world's most-blogged languages, but whether it is or not doesn't matter as much as how they are blogging.

The self-hosted blog is rare in the Japanese web, with users preferring the security and ease of platforms created just for them and, by default, supporting mobile devices for both creation and distribution. Just as bloggers can easily add content in words and photos, readers are assured a smooth experience with pages nicely formatted for the mobile web.

The beauty of these ready-made platforms is that they're immediately ready for mobile interaction and going through various blogs shows this trait immediately. Not only does the writing style reflect that of mobile mails but so do the topics. Because the tools for blogging are always in the hands of creators, blog posts are often reflecting the here-and-now feeling of writing a post on the train or in a restaurant. It goes without saying that in a country where food is the star of many television shows and handset cameras are of good quality, meals are well-documented material in the Japanese blogosphere.

The average blogger typically chooses (or is by default forced) to remain semi or completely anonymous, represented by a nickname and avatar of their choosing. For Mobage Town, Japan's largest mobile SNS, anonymity is part of the business model, as they derive most of their revenue from selling accessories for avatars. In general, blogs don't feature the author as the star in the way many American blogs do but are rather an insight into their world, with the camera as their eyes. Either way, in true Japanese style, some of the most popular personal Japanese blogs are written by celebrities documenting their own meals, pets and weekend trips.

Mobile novels

Much has been written lately about the tremendous popularity of mobile novels in Japan, especially focusing on those that have been popularly adapted from their digital form to print by publishing houses. Despite being available free on-line, the top printed mobile novels have sold in quantities that make any publisher in this day and age green with envy.

Before we explore too deeply, it's important to note that a mobile novel (keitai shousetsu in Japanese) is not an ebook, nor is it a full-length novel adapted to the mobile platform. To qualify as a real mobile novel by Japanese standards, means that the book is written entirely on the device itself, primarily through one of the many free (and anonymous) SNS catering to aspiring authors.

Mobile novel SNS such as Mahou no Island (Magic Island), Mobage Town, and No Ichigo (Wild Strawberry) generate, cumulatively, billions of page views per month as authors, fans and critics work from their personal handheld studios to create and share together. As a result, a large number of users have emotional attachments to novels, a connection that also creates buzz and can translate into big sales numbers from this 80 to 90% female user base.

The first printed mobile novel came from an unlikely place and person, in the form of Deep Love written by Yoshi, an author in his forties, writing about teen girl angst, inspired by his life as a cram-school teacher. The four-part series went on to sell 2.7 million paper copies to an eager audience and subsequent works by Yoshi have sold from 490,000 to over one million copies each.

The novel boom was fully certified with Koizora, a saga of teen love and drama, written by an anonymous teenage girl named Mika. After being adopted by Starts Publishing for print, the book went on to sell over two million print copies and generated even more cross-media revenue in the form of a movie, television drama, and manga comic adaptations.

Much of the mobile novel subculture is often misrepresented by the foreign press, attributing its success to an implied Japanese 'otherness' that compels them to write on a tiny screen, rather than on a computer monitor. In fact, having grown up in a mobile-centric culture, they are simply using the tool that is most comfortable for them and gives them the greatest freedom to connect with others on their own terms.

In addition, the novels are written through specific services on the Japanese mobile web that cater to aspiring authors such as Mika, with a strong user community that helps writers create, problem-solve and finish their novels. In fact, it is this community aspect that has been the most reliable gauge for popularity outside of the service.

Mobile novels aren't just about providing a new medium for writers but are also about capturing the writing style and culture of a generation fully fixed on their handsets. Years of writing mails to their friends has made the 'thumb generation' highly proficient with a keypad and the books are printed to look the same way on paper as they would on the screen, to maintain realism. The short sentences, slang and abbreviations may not lend themselves well to traditional literature but they very much reflect the real lives of the authors and their audiences.

In the land of fast-paced change and innovation, printed mobile novels may well be passé at this point (and the publishing companies admit as much) but the trend goes much deeper than book sales. Young people with some time at lunch, between classes, or on the train can (and do) share their feelings and experiences through what just may be the most personal device that they own.



Videos

The backstory of Nico Nico Douga, Japan's most popular video sharing service, is interesting enough to command an entire series of articles tracking its incredible success. After all, any internet service that can attract a million registered users within seventy-two days of launch, is surely doing something unique.

Nico Nico Douga (smile video) has never had the spontaneous, guy-with-a-webcam, videoblog style that sparked YouTube's global success. Instead, most videos are taken from other media, uploaded through content partnerships, or are mash-ups and original content created by users (but not usually starring users). What's interesting is that the video content is less important than how it's presented. Nico Nico Douga's creative base shines in its unique commenting system, which is a tool for user creation in its own right.

Using an overlay, comments made on Nico Nico Douga are placed on the video timeline by users and literally race across the screen from right to left as the video plays beneath. This allows users to do useful things like writing subtitles, but also communicate with one another asynchronously and enhance the videos by adding written content that all can see. To someone unaccustomed to this kind of communication it seems chaotic and random, but the comments are actually improving the videos by adding another layer of entertainment and interaction.

Right now, the mobile users of Nico Nico Douga can watch and comment just as they can on a PC, but the service's parent company Dwango has bigger plans down the line. While Japanese mobile handsets have been well-equipped with quality cameras for years, there's a notable lack of services for users to upload directly through their data connections. Dwango's ultimate goal is complete convergence between the PC and mobile versions of the service, meaning that uploads via mobile aren't too far away, with the potential to then encourage users to create more original content directly from their own lives via their handsets. Of course, whether they want to put themselves into the spotlight for rapid-fire commenting from the masses is another question.

Social drawing on the upswing

One segment of UGC that hasn't been fully adopted into mobile handsets is drawing but there are several up-and-coming services that show promise for aspiring artists who want to create digitally away from a computer.

In Japan's formerly underground world of manga and anime fanatics, there's already a strong community of doujinshi creators, talented artists and authors who create and self-publish their own anime and manga in print or digital form on-line. Since this has meant using real writing implements or expensive PC accessories, the creative base has been small but hardcore. However, digital technology has brought doujinshi out from niche, real world trading events, to the masses and has brought attention to artists who previously had little in the way of public exposure.

Web-based 'social drawing' services such as the Pixiv (http://www.pixiv.net/index.php) SNS are leading the way for artists to both create and share on-line, a new SNS feature that is catching on. While Pixiv is purely for sharing all kinds of drawn art, its sub-site Drawr (www.drawr.net) is a platform for drawing on-line with digital tools, hosting the results and sharing it all with the world by embedding them, like YouTube videos. As with mobile novels, other users can watch the creation process unfold, this time stroke-by-stroke into a finished work, just by pushing the play button.

While it's just beginning, mobile social drawing is appearing both on standard phones as well as in Japan's equally important mobile gaming world. As far as handsets are concerned, the Sony Computer Science Lab (Sony CSL) has been home to the creation of 12Pixels, an interface for drawing that uses the keypad to fill in a 12-pixel grid to eventually create pixilated artwork. The current monochrome version is available for all Japanese phones but will become full-color, once testing is complete.

In the mobile gaming space, Nintendo and the on-line social bookmarking and blogging portal Hatena, have recently begun to tackle the area of social drawing with a free application called Ugoku Memo Chou (moving memo pad). The Nintendo DSi-compatible software allows artists to draw on the screen with the stylus, add photos and sounds with the embedded camera and microphone, and create an animation to be shared on-line at the Hatena site.

Over one hundred thousand members signed up for Ugoku Memo Chou in its first month of service and the creations so far are quite amazing, given the screen-size limitation.



UGC in japan just beginning

As Japan and the rest of the world begin to converge even more, the things that we're doing on our devices will seem much less different. Even US teenagers now are many times more comfortable writing on their mobile handsets than their twenty-something counterparts and so may be writing full-length novels in no time. But will it come as naturally to them as to Japanese teenagers, who get their phones at an increasingly younger age?

What will surely happen more and more, especially as Japan's mobile carriers open up, is that our definitions of phones, handsets, game players etc will all be completely useless. All around the world, devices are getting smaller and containing more and the younger generation is getting used to using them in new ways. To draw and animate a picture on a mobile is no different than sketching in a notebook's margins, except now it's possible to share it all with the world.



This article was written for receiver.