Since the end of last year, the number of Japanese Netizens visiting the "YouTube" site has gone through the roof. According to Shibuya-based Net Ratings, a firm that tracks Internet utilization, visitors leaped from 200,000 a month in December 2005 to 4.1 million by May 2006.
That latter figure correspondents for 9.68 percent of Japan's Internet users. Even more remarkably, the number of YouTube viewers in Japan, on a percentage basis, surpasses the 8.83 percent of visitors in the U.S.
"Considering that it's an English-language site, these figures are off the wall," Net Ratings President Masayuki Hagiwara tells Shukan Asahi (7/7).
Koichi Mizugami, who operates a site covering Internet trends called "All About IT Industries Trendwatch," attributes the site's popularity to its being full of stimulating visual contents, free, and easy to access using Japanese-language search engines.
YouTube was launched in February 2005 by three former employees of PayPal. The site's "Broadcast Yourself" video contents are uploaded, and shared, between the users. Contents originating from Japan run the gamut of clips of the very first "Doraemon" animated cartoon (about the misadventures of a blue robot cat) first broadcast back in 1979, to the 1985 knife murder of Toyota Shoji President Kazuo Nagano, a notorious swindler, who was slain on live TV by two self-professed members of a right-wing group, as several dozen Japanese reporters and photographers stood by and clinically recorded the action.
Another segment shows former AUM Supreme Truth "guru," and current death row inmate Shoko Asahara, appearing in a variety show on the NTV network, in which he told viewers he habitually washed his hair using baby shampoo. This was the same man, mind you, who ordered his minions to release toxic nerve gas on the Tokyo subway system in March 1995.
Full Story from Mainichi News
