Internet in Japan provides high quality services to more than 90% of the population and almost 100% of medium to large businesses, with mobile Internet on devices like smartphones being the most popular type of service. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) oversees the telecommunications, Internet, and broadcast sectors, but regulation of Japan's Internet industry is largely through voluntary self-regulation. There is little or no explicit censorship or restriction of Internet content, with the government respecting laws for freedom of speech and of the press, but there are concerns that the government indirectly encourages self-censorship practices. The Internet in Japan is not a singular medium and affects Japanese culture in a variety of ways as diverse groups of Japanese people interact online.
Statistics
Internet users: 116.8 million users, 91.3% of the population, 7th in the world (January 2020). Household penetration: 92% (2019). Business penetration: 99.6% (2019). Fixed Broadband: 32.2% (2019). Mobile Broadband: 133.2%, 8th in the world (2017). Internet hosts: 78.2 million, 2nd in the world (2017)."Distributions by Top-Level Domain Name (by hostcount)", Internet Systems Corporation, January 2017. Retrieved 16 April 2018. Mobile social media penetration: 65% (January 2020).
Regulation
Self-regulation plays an important role among Japanese Internet service providers (ISPs), as Japan lacks an independent regulatory commission. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) oversees the telecommunications, Internet, and broadcast sectors with a hands-off approach. Law enforcement is more proactive in regulation of the internet and has made arrests with mixed results on the basis of online activity. Non-profit organizations such as the Broadcasting Ethics & Program Improvement Organization have been formed to help regulate the Internet.
Japan has three major mobile operators—au by KDDI, NTT's DoCoMo, and Softbank. NTT, while considered a privatized and reorganized ex-state monopoly, remains dominant in practice due to the expense of switching providers, the inconvenience of changing contact information, and other causes tying customers to dominant operators. While the market is open, the NTT group remains dominant and the Japanese government is still the mandated largest shareholder of NTT. The government owns a third of the company, enough to control the vote at shareholder meetings. The government has not exercised this power to manage the company and may have little incentive to challenge NTT's market dominance and push for more competition because of the returns it gets from being a shareholder. No major foreign firms have successfully entered the market, with the exception of smartphones by Apple and Samsung.
History
In September 1984, Jun Murai connected Keio University and Tokyo Institute of Technology with a 300 bit/s line using a telephone line instead of the physical delivery of tape media. In October of the same year, the University of Tokyo was connected and expanded to JUNET, which became the basis of the internet in Japan.
In Japan, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) planned a step-up process from dialup 56 kbit/s ISDN 64 kbit/s, to fiber to the premises (FTTP). Under this plan, NTT had been selling ISDN products primarily toward home users while corporate customers sometimes skipped ISDN entirely and immediately upgraded to the still-expensive fiber to the home (FTTH) service. In the late 1990s, cable television operators began offering their own cable broadband products, but relatively high initial installation costs and cheaper alternatives limited its spread.
In 1999, NTT DoCoMo pioneered the world's first large-scale mobile Internet service, iMode. It was at this time that the Japanese public began to take interest in the Internet. Notably, this means that the Japanese public started with mobile Internet services rather than Internet through personal computers. It is argued that the complexity of the Japanese scripts largely contributes to the lesser popularity of PC Internet. Today, typing in Japanese often involves typing a series of characters and converting them into Kanji (Chinese characters), which can be a slow process. Therefore, typing on a computer would not result in a significant speed advantage over mobile devices, taking away an important feature of computers. Those against this view claim that it is complicated by the popularity of word processors in Japan, which would have the same issue as computer keyboards. By 1993, 37.8% of Japanese households owned stand-alone word processors, while only 11.9% of households owned personal computers. Alternatively, it is suggested that Internet through personal computers is less popular due to the presence of substitutes for popular computer functions: word processors for documentation, cell phones with iMode mobile Internet for communication, game consoles for entertainment.Kang, Inkyu. Media, Technology, and Social Practice: The Shaping of the Internet in Korea and Japan. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2009.
Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) services were started by a venture company, Tokyo Metallic in 1999. After this NTT started and some other companies followed. In 2001, SoftBank started a 12 Mbit/s ADSL service. It was a shocking event because the price was around only 3,000¥ (30US$), which was half the cost of other companies. This, coupled with aggressive marketing campaigns led to their capturing of large shares of the market. Competitors and Softbank each dropped prices in a price war and repeatedly readied higher-speed services to entice customers (12 Mbit/s/s 24 Mbit/s/s, 50 Mbit/s). In 2004, Japan had the best cost to performance ADSL service in the world (50 Mbit/s, 35US$) which it held on to in the successive years.
At the same time, NTT and electric power companies expanded FTTP areas. In most urban areas, people can use FTTP (100 Mbit/s, 50US$), but ADSL is still mainstream. However, large discounts and free installation have boosted FTTP adoption. Many new apartments are built to accommodate this service with little or no wiring. In 2005, Kansai Electric Power launched a 1 Gbit/s FTTH service at 8700yen (90US$).
In 2000, the Japanese government ordered Nippon Telegraph and Telephone to unbundle its local loop, which encouraged the emergence of several competing service providers. In the fiscal year of 2004, partial unbundling rates were 120¥ per month and 1,300¥ per month for total unbundling. The price was fixed considering the line costs were covered by voice telephony. Alternative operators could only support incremental costs linked with newly offered functions.
In 2000, rules for operators co-location inside NTT facilities and line delivery terms were established. In 2001, NTT were required to unbundle their interconnection optical fiber links between exchange points. Finally, it was forbidden for NTT East and NTT West to offer Internet access services.
Softbank, a major Japanese ISP, launched a digital subscriber line (DSL) service in 2001 by "Yahoo! Broadband." Massively investing in DSL technology, Softbank became the largest DSL operator by 2003 — larger than even NTT.
In 2004, 52.1% of households had Internet access, with more than half of these households using broadband.
In March 2005, DSL had more than 13.6 million customers. The concurrence of FTTH was increasingly stronger, with the arrival of operators like the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), allied to KDDI and NTT. Three million customers were wired with FTTP in March 2005 and according to Yano Research it was on track to supplant DSL by 2007.
The Japanese model of optical fiber deployment is difficult to compare to other markets. The last kilometer is often done on lattice towers, shared between operators, even cable operators. This distribution technique reduces the vulnerability to earthquakes and lowers costs dramatically.
The prevalence of FTTH can be explained by the Japanese government's forced local loop unbundling of NTT and very low charges to connect for new ISPs, leading to new ISPs connecting DSL with low cost and being able to charge cheaper prices due to having a smaller scale operation to challenge the incumbent NTT into using its greater finances to lay fiber to the home to distinguish itself from the competition with higher speeds and also incentivizing some other ISPs to explore fiber to the home, although it remained the dominant fiber provider.
The unique problem facing Japan's broadband situation is due to the popularity of high-speed FTTP. Operators struggle to maintain enough bandwidth to allow maximum usage of the service by customers. Even the largest operators have capacities in the region of tens of gigabits while customers with 1 gigabit FTTP services (or higher) may number in the thousands. This problem is further compounded by limits caused by internal router bandwidth. Estimates of traffic based on data collected in May 2007 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications set total network usage at approximately 720 Gbit/s combined. The report further states that by May 2008, total traffic will exceed 1 Tbit/s.
In April 2018, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (the major provider) said it will block access in Japan to three websites where manga and animations are illegally uploaded as an emergency measure until a bill on manga and anime content protection is put in place.
Internet censorship and surveillance
According to the United States Department of State, Japanese law provides for freedom of speech and of the press, and the government respects these rights in practice. These freedoms extend to speech and expression on the Internet. An independent press, an effective judiciary and a functioning democratic political system combine to ensure these rights. The government does not restrict or disrupt access to the Internet or censor online content, and there were no credible reports that the government monitors private online communications without appropriate legal authority. The Internet is widely accessible and used. While there is little or no overt censorship or restriction of content, there are concerns that the government indirectly encourages self-censorship practices. A Reporters Without Borders survey concluded that media self-censorship has risen in response to legal changes and government criticism."2016 Human Rights Report: Japan", Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State. Retrieved 15 April 2018.
Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2017 reports that "Internet access is not restricted" in Japan. Their Freedom on the Net reports have rated Japan's "Internet freedom status" as "free" every year since 2013 with scores of 22 each year except for 2017 when the score was 23 (where 0 is most free and 100 is least free). The slight decline in Internet freedom in 2017 was due to changes in the surveillance environment. The 2001 Provider Liability Limitation Act directed ISPs to establish a self-regulatory framework to govern take-down requests involving illegal or objectionable content, defamation, privacy violations, and copyright infringement. Industry associations produced guidelines where anyone can report material that infringes directly on their personal rights to the service provider, either to have it removed or to find out who posted it. No third party can do so. The provider notifies the individual who posted the content, and either fulfills the request with their permission or removes the content without the authors' approval if they fail to respond within two weeks. If the poster refuses permission, the service provider is authorized to assess the complaint for themselves, and comply if they believe it is legitimate.