Where do Japanese people socialize on the internet?

September 6, 2021 9:46 PM

I'm an advanced Japanese language student looking to get more exposure to Japanese as it is used online (as well as just general cultural etc exposure). But not sure where to look!

More or less what it says on the tin! In English, there are places like discord, reddit, metafilter, among many others where people "socialize in public" in English. I'm curious what sorts of communities exist like this in Japanese.

There are some Japanese subreddits, but I haven't found one that's terribly active.

I asked around about Japanese use of discord, but it seems like there are a lot less big public servers, and a lot more smaller private servers.

I don't really need to be an active participant, I'm happy to lurk (I'm still a bit shy about my Japanese and as a non-Japanese person I don't want to "invade" Japanese spaces), but I think twitter, for example, is a bit too anonymous (I do follow a lot of Japanese people on twitter though). I'd love to find things more on the reddit, discord, metafilter etc side of the spectrum if possible. Curious if there is anything out there that fits!

I'm open to more or less anything, but specific interests include: electronic music, movies+tv, anime+manga, news, lefty politics+social justice, lgbt issues, fantasy+sci fi, reading...pretty broad.

posted by wooh to Society & Culture (5 answers total)

Response by poster: Oh and it's probably worth clarifying that I'm not interested in spaces intended for language learners, especially not discord servers (I guess unless the vast majority of people are Japanese and the vast majority of conversation is in Japanese, which has not been my experience...maybe a discord server for Japanese people who want to learn Spanish or Chinese haha, both of which I speak at a more advanced level than Japanese)
posted by wooh at 9:57 PM on September 6, 2021

Have you looked aニコニコ?

It's essentially a Japanese youtube, but it seems to have more content. It has a pretty strong social component, but likely not at the length you are looking for.
posted by AlexiaSky at 1:57 AM on September 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

searching for "top 100 websites jp" finds a few indices of links: similarweb - top 50 websites - japan and btrax - top 10 most popular websites in japan (2019)
posted by are-coral-made at 2:05 AM on September 7, 2021

This may have changed recently, but as of 2 or 3 years ago the LINE app was very popular in Japan and seems to be where most native speakers hang out. I think anyone can join if you speak the language.
posted by JZig at 8:43 AM on September 7, 2021

Response by poster: re: LINE, afaik it's mainly used in the way say whatsapp is, 1:1 chatting or group chats, but it's not really used for larger scale "social media" type socializing. I could be wrong, I am definitely not a LINE power user!
posted by wooh at 10:03 PM on September 7, 2021