本文粗略小结了与日本网上政治传播，特别是网络政治宣传、动员（political campaigning）相关的现有中英文文献。欢迎讨论与批评。
According to the Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, political communication is a process of “making sense of symbolic exchanges about the shared exercise of power, and the presentation and interpretation of information, messages or signals with potential consequences for the exercise of shared power” (Jamieson & Kenski, 2017, p. 5). As a technology that has revolutionized the exchange, presentation, and interpretation practices of humans, the Internet and the accompanying digital transformation have the potential to reform the traditional paradigm of political communication. This essay explores scholarly works on Japanese political communication in the Internet era. It first provides an overview of online political communication in general and then goes on to discuss research related to Japan in detail.
Online Political Communication as A Whole
The widespread usage of Internet-based social networking sites brings new possibilities to modern political campaigning. According to Dimitrova and Matthes (2018, p. 333) and Statista (2022), over 2.6 billion people around the world were using social media in 2018, and two years later, the number has increased to 3.6 billion. In 2025, the data is expected to reach 4.4 billion. The rapid development of social media profoundly influences how political communication works in the Internet era. Kobayashi (2018) summarizes four impacts of social media: 1) facilitating incidental exposure of individuals to political information; 2) expanding individuals’ readings beyond “journalistic content” of traditional mass media to “subjective opinions” of other individuals; 3) enabling people to digest information from politicians directly without being mediated by news agencies; and 4) promoting political participation by homogenizing an information environment (p. 118-119). Yet, the empirical evidence for these influences is still insufficient, and even if such influences are substantial, the mechanism of these influences is also under debate. The type of social media, the characteristics of the audience group (such as age, income, and prior political leaning), the way of using social media (informational or expressive), and the background of the political campaign have all been recognized as factors that have impacts on social media’s role in political communication (Dimitrova & Matthes, 2018, p. 334). For example, Speakman (2015) finds that people with a higher income and a higher level of education are slightly more active in commenting on social media compared to those with a relatively moderate income and level of education. Meanwhile, the same study indicates that those willing to talk about politics with others face-to-face or respond to political news on traditional media are also more likely to react to political issues online (p. 136-137). This conclusion seems to cast doubt on the agency of social media, regarding them as solely another form of delivering messages while emphasizing the people’s own choices/activities. However, the study also admits that the number of people who are never involved in online political discussions is decreasing significantly: a decline of 9% from 2008 to 2012 (Speakman, 2015, p. 138). This may signal a growth in the political influence of the Internet. In general, some research places more importance on human agency while others are more technologically deterministic. More evidence is needed to reach a convincing conclusion as well as for theory building.
Japanese Political Communication in the Internet Era
Japan, like any other country in the world, has its specific features in political communication practices. Unfortunately, compared with the US, the UK, and other western countries, Japan’s, as well as other Asian countries’, online political communication activities are often overlooked by researchers (Kiyohara, 2018, p. 56). In accordance with the global trend, the percentage of Japanese who use the Internet on a daily basis has increased from 21% in 2001 to 49% in 2013 (Taniguchi, 2018, p. 130). This gradual penetration calls for a transformation in the paradigm of political communication practices in Japan. However, the development of online political communication in Japan has been full of twists and turns. Japan has a tradition of strong control over political campaigning on media, and the Public Official Election Law (Kōshoku senkyo-hō) explicitly states these restrictions. Before the 1995 House of Councillors election, about 40 Japanese politicians had created campaign websites, which was a remarkable number compared to elections in other countries at the time (Tkach-Kawasaki, 2003, p. 110-111). However, in October 1996, the Japanese government issued a statement, making clear that “any updates made by political parties or candidates to their websites during the official campaign activities period would be regarded as infringing the Public Official Election Law” (Tkach-Kawasaki, 2003, p. 112). Online political communication in Japan, therefore, became at least partially illegal.
Tkach-Kawasaki (2003) conducted one of the earliest scholarly works on online political communication in Japan, and her research remains in the “illegal era” of utilizing the Internet for political campaigning. This study investigates how Japan’s long one-party rule (the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since 1955) and comparatively strict media control have influenced politicians’ and parties’ online political activities. Through observing political parties’ online activities and performing content analysis of their websites during the 2000 and 2001 national elections, Tkach-Kawasaki examines the dynamics of party politics swaying between the attraction of new technologies and the restrictions of existing regulations. Despite the threat of the Public Official Election Law, the number of politicians with websites has still grown from 40 in 1995 to more than 200 in 2000. The two largest opposition parties (Democratic Party of Japan and New Komeito) were both active explorers of the Internet, while politicians of the LDP were among the slowest in adopting online political communication (Tkach-Kawasaki, 2003, p. 115). When comparing political party website in the 2000 House of Representatives election, many similarities can be seen in their contents: party organization, policies, candidates, and contact information (email address). One year later, in the 2001 House of Councillors election, featuring party leaders on websites became a new trend (Tkach-Kawasaki, 2003, p. 115-117). Meanwhile, the Public Official Election Law does not seem to have effectively suppressed the use of the Internet for political campaigning: hardly any of the sites of major parties remained entirely static during the election period (Tkach-Kawasaki, 2003, p. 118). The Law merely slowed the pace of the spread of online political communication in Japan. Overall, this article believes that the Internet has provided significant opportunities to small parties and may intensify party competition. Appeals for legislative reform can also be enhanced due to the Internet. The agency of the Internet in transforming the political environment is therefore asserted (Tkach-Kawasaki, 2003, p. 118-119).
The year 2013 is a milestone for political communication in Japan. In April of that year, a revision of the Public Official Election Law legalized online electoral campaigns. The Internet soon became an important field for competing for public support, and many related research emerged after this year. Yet, Kiyohara (2018) noticed that, due to the lack of primaries, the short campaign periods, and relatively more restrictions on online political practices, Japan’s Internet electoral campaigns are still struggling with a lack of vibrancy (p. 56). For example, the campaign period for federal elections in the US is typically over a year. While in Japan, the period is strictly limited to 12 days (for House of Representatives elections) and 17 days (for House of Councillors elections), leaving little time for online political activities (Kiyahara, 2018, p. 62-64). Thus, there is little possibility to see the lengthy Internet canvass with ups and downs in Japan. Also, the Public Official Election Law defines a limit on campaign expenditures, which is also not the case for the US (Kiyahara, 2018, p. 64-68). This fact further restricts the candidates’ capability to conduct online campaigns. In general, “almost no regulatory burden was adopted as the principal concept for regulating campaign Internet activities in the US” (Kiyahara, 2018, p. 69). In Japan, however, “only political parties and candidates can send campaign e-mails, and only political parties are allowed to display banner ads which link to their campaign websites on paid Internet advertisements” (Kiyahara, 2018, p. 72). The Japanese Communist Party’s Kakusan bu example and the Komeito’s komejo case introduced later in this essay were also very careful to avoid violating these regulations. They only promoted certain political ideas rather than directly calling for voting. As opposed to newspaper, TV, and radio political advertisements, which receive some government funds (a sign of moderate support), Internet campaigns, though legalized, are still strongly restricted (Kiyahara, 2018, p. 72-73).
Although harsh rules have been set to limit Internet-based political campaigns, the effects of Japanese online political communication are non-negligible. Ogasahara (2014) confirms with survey data that online information dissemination activities had an impact on voters’ attitudes and perceptions during the 2013 House of Councillors election. Kobayashi and Ichifuji (2015) designed an experiment to more especially examine Twitter’s influence on people’s attitudes about politicians during the same election. A majority of social media-related research relies on observational data, which makes causal inference difficult. Therefore, in this study, the researchers chose to conduct a controlled experiment so as to uncover the causal relationship between social media exposure and political affects (Kobayashi & Ichifuji, 2015, p. 574). Also, the authors used field experiments instead of laboratory experiments to analyze the real situation. They recruited two groups of subjects. One was assigned to follow two placebos and Hashimoto Tōru, the mayor of Osaka and a leader of Japan Restoration Party, on Twitter. In comparison, the other was required only to follow the two placebos’ Twitter accounts. After one month of exposure, it has been reported that people in the first group tend to hold a favorable attitude about Hashimoto, though no evidence was found on whether this difference in attitude influences voting behavior. However, the experimental design of this study is still worth re-examining. First, Hashimoto enjoyed the “largest number of Twitter followers among Japanese politicians”, which exceeded the number of his supporters (Kobayashi & Ichifuji, 2015, p. 574, 578), and is therefore perhaps not a representative figure for Japanese politicians. His popularity online has somehow proved his ability to use social media to attract people. In this sense, this experiment is simply a repetition of reality. To draw convincing conclusions, a diversification of target politicians is necessary for this experiment. Second, the exposure treatment does not meet the principle of controlling variables. One group was asked to follow three persons while the other was required to follow two. Since it remains unclear whether the number of followed politicians or placebos has an effect on the attitude of the user, it would be better to expose both groups to the same number of politicians. Albeit suffering from potential methodological flaws, this study leads the way into field experiments in understanding social media in Japanese political communication and offers insightful conclusions on the relationship between social media exposure, political attitude, and voting behavior.
Although causal relationships are difficult to infer, social media observational data, if utilized properly, can produce meaningful results. In later research, Kobayashi (2018) employed propensity score matching, a statistical tool designed to process observational data with no random assignment, to accomplish causal inference among social media use, political efficacy, and voting behavior in Japan. The author used survey data that were collected from nationally representative Japanese adults immediately after the 2013 House of Councillors election and separated those who had used social media for political purposes (though to different degrees, from engaging in political interaction to reading political posts) from those who had not. Frequency of Internet use, social media use, and exposure to newspaper and TV news were all recorded (Kobayashi, 2018, p. 123-126). Political efficacy was measured by two questions in the survey asking whether it made a difference who is in power and whether it made a difference for whom people voted. And voting behavior was also obtained through the self-reporting voting decision of the people (Kobayashi, 2018, p. 124). The result shows that, compared with those who did not use social media for political purposes, users who participated in political communication on social media during the election period have higher political efficacy and an increased likelihood of voting of 11% (Kobayashi, 2018, p. 129). Therefore, the author argues that, although the political use of social media is restricted and remains somehow unpopular in Japan, its impact is substantial (Kobayashi, 2018, p. 130-131). This study offers concrete evidence on the influence of social media usage on political efficacy and voting behavior, leaving space for further investigations on the hidden mechanism of this influence.
The Internet’s function as an echo chamber or public sphere is another interesting topic for quantitative researchers in online political communication. Takikawa and Nagayoshi (2017) try addressing this issue with a network and topic analysis on Twitter data. Three months of Japanese language tweets were collected from March to May 2017 using the Twitter REST API, and the target users were those who 1) followed at least two Japanese party leaders and 2) actively sent tweets (Takikawa & Nagayoshi, 2017, p. 3145). Reciprocal following networks of the target users was constructed for exploring potential groups of echo chambers with a community detection technique called the Louvain method. Then, Latent Dirichlet Allocation was applied to analyze the topics in the collected Twitter corpus (Takikawa & Nagayoshi, 2017, p. 3146). Results show that many communities paid a large proportion of their attention to specific topics. For example, the right-wing community talked much about xenophobia while the left-wing community focused on the Moritomo Gakuen scandal. Other prominent communities include Abe-following and Renho-following communities, whose topics are found to be more evenly distributed among diverse issues (Takikawa & Nagayoshi, 2017, p. 3148). It was also demonstrated that topics discussed in different communities seldom overlap with each other, and people from the radical right (right-wing) community accounted for a much more significant proportion of opinion leaders than previously recognized. In conclusion, this study supports the idea that more extreme and more conservative people are more likely to be in a homogeneous online space (echo chamber), with one exclusive topic circulating within it, than those who are more liberal and moderate (Takikawa and Nagayoshi, 2017, p. 3149).
On the other hand, qualitative research can also make interesting contributions to understanding Japanese political communication. For example, Zhao (2016) notices that the use of lovely cartoon characters has become a prominent feature in Japanese online political communication (p. 89-91). Partly as an effort to encourage the participation of young people in politics, the legalization of Internet political campaigns in Japan was marked by a tendency to cater to younger generations from the very beginning. The Japanese Communist Party was among the first to promote such cartoon characters, with eight different figures (Kakusan bu) representing the party’s core political propositions. Related cultural products were simultaneously designed and sold in the market (Zhao, 2016, p. 89). In 2015, Komeito also released its cartoon family komejo. Every member of the family has been given complete background information and personal characteristics, and the party utilizes stories that happened around komejo to illustrate political claims (Zhao, 2016, p. 89-90). Furthermore, the Japanese government is employing cartoon characters and manga to explain policies to teenagers and children (Zhao, 2016, p. 90-91). These actions may have narrowed people’s sense of distance from politics and aroused young people’s interest in participating in political affairs.
Discussion
Contrary to the flourishing of research on the influence of social media on political communication, Taniguchi (2018) points out that even after the legalization of the use of the Internet for political campaigns, the number of people who chose online methods to acquire election-related information remained much less than those who used traditional ways such as TV and newspapers (p. 132). For example, Despite declining somewhat, Japan’s newspapers have maintained a circulation rate much greater than other major Western countries (Taniguchi, 2018, p. 133). Therefore, the political influence of the Internet is more limited in Japan, even though it has been shown to be critical for a relatively small number of active users. Therefore, it is worth observing whether online political engagement and campaigns will continue growing in Japan. As Japanese politicians gradually acknowledge that the value brought by the Internet outweighs its drawbacks (Taniguchi, 2018, p. 131), further research is expected to trace the development of Japanese online political communication.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic may have served as a catalyzer for promoting online political communication in Japan. Tkach-Kawasaki (2021) acknowledges the critical role of the Internet in delivering official and up-to-date information about the pandemic to the public and facilitating “social commentary, publicity and criticism” on the issue, especially in an atmosphere of crisis and distrust/dissatisfaction for governmental institutions (p. 50-51). It is noticed that Internet use increased substantially during the first half-year after the outbreak of the pandemic (Tkach-Kawasaki, 2021, p. 50). Meanwhile, such reliance on the Internet is exploited by online disinformation and misinformation, causing consequences including panic-buying and improper preventive actions (Tkach-Kawasaki, 2021, p. 52). Online political communication during emergencies is a new challenge for both academia and political practitioners.
For future studies, it is imperative to develop methods for accurately measuring social media exposure, replacing the self-reporting data, which is often no more than a rough estimation (Dimitrova & Matthes, 2018, p. 336). Also, more studies are expected to explore how contexts shape online political communication. When discussing social media’s impact on politics, intensive attention should be given to the context of political communication activities, including, for example, the political system, the media system, and how polarized the political campaign is (Dimitrova & Matthes, 2018, p. 337-338). Different contexts usually result in different conclusions on social media’s political potential, and when studying Japanese cases, scholars need to be cautious of the research conclusions drawn from experiences in other countries (Ogasahara, 2014, p. 76-77). The context concern also serves as a reminder of theory generalization. If researchers are to explore the universal laws behind online political communication practices, they are expected to conduct cross-country and long-term studies to avoid being misguided by particular political and historical settings. Lastly, it is essential to conclude theories for the political implications of social media beyond merely describing phenomena (Dimitrova & Matthes, 2018, p. 338-339). Currently, existing works are mostly descriptive. For a social science of online political communication, theories with robust explanatory ability are indispensable.
References
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