Medium’s strategy in Japan: haiku-inspired long-form content

For decades, Japan has led the charge toward more minimalist writing. During the 1990s and early 2000s, world-beating cell phones were the nation’s preferred means of written communication; they spawned bevies of shorthand slang and emoji that threatened long-form text with obsolescence.

Blogging sites like Mixi and Ameblo have lost out to Japan’s Twitter users, who regularly set world records for volume of tweets per second. Even novels were miniaturized on cell phones when quick-thumbed authors tapped their way to the top of the national bestseller list for the first time in 2007.

Medium is hoping to reverse the trend in Japan. The publishing platform, started by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, launched its Japanese operation on January 29, along with the “for Shirusu blog,” which updates Japan’s users on the service’s latest developments.

Kazumichi “Mario” Sakata, Medium Japan’s brand ambassador, thinks that Japan’s writers are invested in the sort of storytelling that Medium facilitates. Sakata spoke at Tech in Asia’s Community Vol. 1 meetup yesterday, held at SmartNews’ office in Tokyo, and joined by SmartNews director of media communications Shigeki Matsuura.

The challenge, as Medium sees it, is cultivating the tolerance of a populace so deeply entrenched in non-textual communication like Line stickers.

“Readers in Japan struggle with reading long text,” Sakata concedes. “This is what Medium wants to change – the reading habit.”

In its first six months, Medium Japan has doubled content output and tripled the number of active users – but there’s a long way left to go. Of the 2,000 or so stories in all languages published on Medium each day, Japan still accounts for only between 30 and 40. Still, Sakata says that Medium has identified Japan as a high-priority market – along with Spain and the United States – and that the growth rate is only expected to increase from here.

A freeing environment

Matsuura, who joined SmartNews after serving as The Huffington Post Japan’s editor-in-chief, has had his fair share of experience courting the nation’s readers. For him, the position of editor-in-chief has evolved over recent years to encompass a broader range of roles.

“It’s not just about managing editors and content,” Matsuura explains. “I think the importance of building a media brand has grown.”

That lesson isn’t lost on Medium. Sakata, who also works as a UX architect for Recruit, touted the platform’s clean interface as a major selling point. Japanese writers, he says, are less concerned with who wrote something, when it was written, or how many “likes” it got.

Medium Japan’s Mario Sakata.

Matsuura pointed out that Medium’s content is not as driven by current events or the news cycle in the way that SmartNews is. Sakata sees that as giving Medium’s users a sense of timelessness when they read or write stories.

“I wrote something last year, and I still get comments on it,” says Sakata. “And that’s where Medium’s charm lies – it gets information to the people who want it, and you can see, ‘Ah, my story is still getting to the people who want to read it.’”

The Japanese tradition

Medium subscribes to the idea that online writing has followed a logical progression from blogs to Twitter, and now to something with elements of both. Matsuura admits that the Japanese have not yet entered a post-Twitter world, but he feels that they may be ready to do so.

“Considering the level of nuance that the Japanese language affords, I expect to see more of the stress that Medium puts on storytelling.”

Sakata likened Medium’s storytelling approach to the composition of a haiku, a similarity that he believes will draw Japanese users into using the service.

“It’s the act of viewing the phenomena around us and editing by applying a sort of filter to that image so that it will reach those around us,” says Sakata. “The Japanese people have done this for years – I don’t think they can resist this opportunity to bring that back.”