How is blogging impacting Japanese culture?
This is a very tough question. You are focusing on business people blogging. When Japanese people start blogging, they usually do it personally, not as business people. Japanese people are different at work than they are at home. At home, they behave as individuals and are informal. It’s different when they are business people at the office. When you leave the office, you can easily become very personal. The interesting part is the business blog. Most business blogs in Japan are very personal. They are talking to customers—selling to people— as if they were friends or family. This is different from companies where the tone is very formal. To companies, blogs are a new way to talk to customers, less formal than webpages or brochures. Take, for example, Nissan’s blog [written by a product manager and promoting a new city car]. Rather than taking a formal corporate tone, it shows a personal character—a Nissan person. It is interesting to see people talking personally to customers as if th
