Japan's Internet coolness

 The NHK program "Cool Japan" has celebrated its 10th year since it started airing.
 The theme of the program that day was "Internet communication". 
◯CJ represents the discussion points made by Cool Japan, whereas ● represents the comments that I made on the program.

◯CJ: What are the special characteristics of Internet communication in Japan?

●People from all over the world are using the Internet via their smartphones now, but Japan achieved that much earlier, with connections between mobile phones and the Internet being made in Japan 15 years ago. From that point onwards, it has always been on the vanguard of the world in developing ways to use the Internet.

◯CJ: In Japan, 90% of students currently use Twitter, and 75% of the general public currently use Facebook. Although we can see that the Japanese regularly use them, foreigners find the following points strange about Japan.
• Japanese people frequently post photos of food. All 3 of their meals.
• They post either anonymously or under nicknames.
• They are highly prolific on the Internet, although they do not speak much when they are face to face.

●According to government data, 5% of Japanese people write things online using their real name. 95% of them write either anonymously or with an on-screen name.
I believe that there are 2 factors contributing to why we love anonymity. Firstly, we are poor at asserting ourselves. After all, showing off one's knowledge and intelligence to humiliate another party by cold reasoning is contrary to what is perceived as good virtues.
Another factor is the separation of one's "public self" and "private self" in Japan. We have always been living in a world where only our "public selves" were expressed. Although we can express our "private selves" on the Internet, even then we are unable to do so without first concealing our identity.
However, the more important thing is that the Internet has finally allowed us to gain a method for us to express our "private selves", albeit on the condition of anonymity. As such, we now communicate information of the highest quality in the world. I believe that it is exactly because we formerly lived in a world of our "public selves" that there was a high incentive to communicate over the Internet in Japan.

◯CJ: Please have a look at LINE. Parents, children, and friends are communicating through stamps. Could this have been spurred by manga and anime culture, or the so-called "kanji culture"?

●Even in the age of mobile phones before the rise of smartphones, people in Japan have loved to send pictures via the mail client Deco-mail, and have always been creating smileys and emoticons not seen elsewhere in the world.
Japan is a country where the expression of data through means other than words is common. We have symbols like that on family quests, and we use onomatopoeic words as well as mimetic words in our speech, so we are experts at non-rational communication. Hence, we tend to want to use stamps and smileys as means to complement our words.