Japanese Twitter users are second only to the Dutch in activity on Twitter, and Japanese is the most tweeted language after English.
Now this: news that the most tweeted moment in history is not a sporting event, nor a celebrity pregnancy, nor a political election–no, the most tweeted moment ever correlates to the explosion of a cartoon castle on Japanese TV.
“Japan is weird,” is how Slate’s Will Oremus reacted. To Western eyes, Japanese tweeting behavior looks bizarre (surely the otaku tweeters would be glad to know we think so). But the story raises deeper questions about why Twitter suits the Japanese–and why, based on Western Facebook narcissism, many Japanese might say the same thing about us.
Twitter vs. Facebook: The Race For Japan
Japan friended Twitter as soon as they met in 2008. But Facebook has fought an often losing battle against local social media sites in Japan since it arrived. The social juggernaut finally caught up with Japan’s homegrown Mixi a year ago, but it since shows signs of losing ground. Why? What’s different about what the Japanese want from their social media?
Twitter lets users self-efface, some have suggested, while Facebook is about the humblebrag–a major offense in traditional Japanese culture. When Japanese social networkers can enthuse about things that interest them–anime, games, music–without drawing attention to themselves, they seem glad to engage the broader world. But they are often uncomfortable being forced to broadcast their name and face. Homegrown Asian cyber social spaces have known this for years; Western ones might do well to understand.
Japanese Twitter: Setting Records Faraway, In A Language Few Can Read
This month, Twitter announced the latest record set by Japan: During the August 2 airing of the 1986 film Laputa: Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki on Japanese TV, the movie’s climax became the most tweeted moment of all time.
The 143,199 tweets posted in sync with the (spoiler alert) magic word “barusu” (バルス) as it destroyed the flying castle, also exploded the previous Twitter record of 33,388 tweets per second. The old Twitter record had been set at the moment of New Year’s Eve, 2013–not in Times Square, but in Tokyo. The trend of spamming the word “barusu” in sync with Castle in the Sky‘s finale began in March 2003, on Japan’s message board service 2channel, during the annual broadcast of the anime classic. The events are called “barusu matsuri” (バルス祭り), or “destruction festivals.”