The Digital Face of Japan: National Dimensions of the Internet Revolution

Abstract

For most Internet users, Japan’s digital face is a muddled mess. Without the proper character software downloaded onto the computer, Japanese web-sites appear on the screen as chaotic, illiterate gibberish. And, for most non-Japanese, even when they can receive the information in Japanese, they can make little sense of it. Only a tiny number of non-Japanese people can read the language well enough to make sense of a Japanese website. And despite the heavy promotion of translation software, there are still no widely accessible applications which make the content and services on Japanese web-sites available for general use. For some Japanese sites, there is an escape: many official web-pages have an ‘English’ button and a minuscule portion offer one or more other languages. The vast majority of e-visitors, having wandered through digital space to Japan, abandon all hope of making sense of the meaningless computer images and scurry back to linguistic safety. As a consequence, Japan’s digital face is largely exclusive to the Japanese, with only glimpses provided to non-Japanese readers.