Guest author: Greig Holbrook of  www.obanmultilingual.com

We should all probably be paying a bit more attention to the Japanese.

They are, after all, the world’s second largest economy, the third-highest ranking online country in the world, and the fourth-largest language group on the internet.

By 2012, it’s predicted that there will be 100 million internet users on the island nation.

Business to consumer e-commerce hit £38.7 billion in Japan in 2008, second only to the US.

In terms of social networking, Japan is second only to China in number of users, with 12.4 million.

Meet the Japanese Netizen

The Japanese netizen is most likely to be between 13-39. That said, surprisingly high numbers of elders are logging on: internet penetration among those 70+ doubled in 2007.

They spend an average of 19 hours online per week. This is not a hugely high number, but still puts them above quite a number of countries in terms of time spent online.

He or she is most likely to spend this time checking their webmail or shopping online. Many also partake in online gaming, for which there is a voracious appetite in Japan.

Most Japanese netizens will frequent the Yahoo! sites, which are among the most popular. Following Yahoo! is Google, and then native Japanese Rakuten, which is one of the biggest online shopping malls in Japan.

Nine in 10 of these netizens who are over 18 will engage with blogs, whereas only just over half the younger generation (8-17 years old) does so. This trend is also paralleled on social networking sites, where many Japanese over the age of 18 are frequent users, but the younger generation’s social networking engagement is among the lowest in the world.

More often than not, the Japanese netizen will use Japanese-owned mixi for his or her social networking. However, there is speculation that many Japanese are losing interest in this sort of social pastime.

Of the netizens with businesses, eight in 10 have a website, yet less than one in 10 make use of social media to engage with their customers.

The Yen’s Online Zen

The current online buyer penetration in Japan is higher than China’s, at 83 percent.

Japanese are trading their Yen for online goods and services at a rate relatively unmatched, worldwide.

Last year saw Japan just miss the top spot internationally for most business-to-consumer sales. These sales are expected to increase by 60 percent to reach over £60 billion by 2011. Around this same time, there are predicted to be over 75 million Japanese online buyers.

Travel: Big in Japan

Japan is the online travel retail leader in Asia.

And like many things Japanese, online travel in Japan is very culturally-influenced.

Rakuten Travel and Jalan net, both Japanese-owned sites, are the two most popular sites used for booking travel accommodations by Japanese travellers.

At last year’s Web in Travel conference, where members of the travel industry agreed that Asia-Pacific’s online travel market was about to take off, it was agreed that travel websites in Japanese should be in the local language.

In addition to language, Japanese online travel consumers have certain needs and preferences when researching their holiday plans. Price and transportation access are among the two most important factors Japanese people look for when consulting a travel information site. Hotel websites are most popular for those Japanese researching their general travel, followed closely by travel information sites.

ICANN Changes the Game

New rules are about to change the face of the web, and also make life a lot easier for Japanese and the marketers who want to target them.

Top level domains (TLDs), the endings of websites (ex. .com, .co.uk), will undergo a massive change in 2009. The internet regulating body, ICANN, will soon be allowing non-roman characters in TLDs.

Currently in Japan, numbers are often used in URLs, representing a strong Japanese aversion to Latin characters (which are at present the only script allowed in TLDs). Allowing Japanese characters in website addresses will make the internet much more accessible to the millions of Japanese who don’t speak or write English or any other Latin-based language.

The introduction of these Japanese character TLDs will also be a huge advantage to businesses targeting Japanese customers. Having relevant key-phrases in domains has long been considered one of the most relevant criteria for search engine algorithms.

That Elusive Little Island Nation

Japan, with its homogeneous and thick-as-blood culture, has long been slipping through the fingers of internet marketers worldwide. The aforementioned aversion to English-only content is quite apparent on the web – Japanese search engines, for example, usually require at least one page of a website to be in Japanese to qualify for submission. In addition, Japanese is a complex language, with three different scripts in use. But with such a massive online network and market, it’s clear that it would be well worth the extra effort.