4. Additional Reasons why Facebook Goes Against Japanese Culture
(These are my personal observations and thoughts)
a) Japanese culture values harmony (remember the first sentence from each international marketing book about Japan (the nail that sticks out get hammered down). This makes it difficult to:
Switch to Facebook if the majority is not using it
Post forth an honest opinion that criticizes something or someone
Reject a friendship request or delete a member who is not active any more (e.g. it would be extremely rude in Japan if a new employee rejects his superiors Facebook friendship request)
(これらは、私の個人的な見解と意見です)
a) 日本文化は調和を重要視します。 (国際マーケティングの本で日本について書いてあるものの最初の一文を思い出してみてください。「出る杭は打たれる」と書いてありますね。) これによって、下記が難しくなります。
- もし大多数が使っていない場合、Facebookに移ること
- 何か、または誰かについて批判するような正直な意見を掲載すること
- 友人追加のリクエストを拒む、またはもうアクティブではないメンバーを削除すること (例えば、日本社会では、新しい社員が上司からの Facebookの友人追加リクエストを拒むことは、大変失礼だとされています。)
b) Japan has the highest risk avoiding culture. This makes it difficult to:
Disclose personal information (posts, photos, videos, event organizing, user location). Less sharing means less page views, and that means less revenue for Facebook.
Make friends on online social networks
c) There is high power distance in Japan. This makes it difficult to
Share the same messages with senior co-workers, younger friends, close friends, acquaintances, and relatives at the same time.
d) Japan has a high need for escapism. This makes it difficult to:
Communicate on Facebook facing real people, real names.
e) Japan has a high-context culture. The Japanese traditionally prefer face to face communication as online conversing might cause more misunderstandings. Although 95% of Japanese ages 18-49s had access to the internet in the past 10 years, Mixi (or any other social network) membership has always been about 25%. In other words, unlike foreigners, the Japanese do not have a burning desire to maintain relationships online regardless of their friends’ geographic proximity.
Other possible indications
a) Currently there are about 700 monthly searches for “how to quit Facebook ” on Google (Source: Google Ad-words). Having 700 of such searches in Japanese isn’t too cool, especially when we have such a small group of Facebook users.
b) Although currently there are about 3.7 million Facebook users in Japan, the number of active users is expected to be lower than that:
There are two million registered foreigners who live in Japan which means only about 1.7 million of them are assumed to be on Facebook.
The Japanese have smaller friend networks and do not share much information, which we can assume they do not have to log in as frequently as the U.S counterparts. (source/more reading: 1 )
Many quitters do not cancel their Facebook account, for instance in our study 17 out of 18 users had kept their Facebook accounts even though they always used Mixi and did not like Facebook)
Conclusions
It seems clear that Facebook is not likely to pass a 10% user ratio (similar to Korea) because of the reasons explained above. However, this is still a pretty profitable situation for Facebook as the current 3.4 million Japanese users can bring substantial advertising dollars given that the total advertising expenditure is high in Japan.
Also, remember that last year Twitter made about three million dollars in Japan despite its lackluster financial performance in the U.S. On the other hand losing in Japan has some symbolic ramifications, since Japan would be the place where the astronomic FB growth would stop just like how the Ottomans stopped in Vienna or Alexander the Great got defeated in Egypt. In both cases the empires started to shrink…
