What the Hell Is Happening in Japan?

Every year, the release of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report offers a kind of planetary weather map for media watchers, storm systems of misinformation here, dry patches of trust there, and rogue waves of TikTok-driven news elsewhere. But Japan, as always, stands like a still pond in the middle of this digital turbulence. It’s not that nothing is happening, far from it; rather, the current runs deep and quiet, out of step with the viral tides shaping the rest of the world.

At first glance, the 2025 report confirms what many observers already suspect: Japan is an outlier. Its social media use for news is near the bottom globally. Among 48 countries, only Denmark ranks lower. Facebook, which dominates as a news platform in much of the world, limps along at 3% for news usage in Japan. Even YouTube, Japan’s most widely used global platform for news, remains seven percentage points below the worldwide average. And for news consumption, TikTok barely registers. While hyper-personalised feeds and emotionally charged influencers increasingly shape the digital media landscape globally, Japan is playing an entirely different game.

Something many would probably do is paint this as a 'story of resilience', a country that still 'values its traditional news institutions', that trusts human-curated information over algorithmic chaos. However, that would be a significant simplification. The truth is far more curious and more revealing about the contradictions in Japan’s media ecosystem.

Instead of embracing global social networks, Japan has leaned into news aggregators like Yahoo! Japan, LINE, and SmartNews. These platforms are algorithmically driven, yes, but they still retain a vestigial editorial backbone. Content curation is not entirely at the mercy of clickbait incentives. Human editors still have a hand in shaping what floats to the surface, which may explain why the Japanese media landscape hasn't fragmented in quite the same way as in the US or Brazil. In fact, according to the report, only South Korea exhibits a similar reliance on aggregators as Japan. Perhaps this is a uniquely East Asian model of curated digital news distribution that prioritises stability over virality.

This preference for aggregators might seem conservative or even backwards to some. But in the chaos of the global digital news economy, it may represent a form of low-key media innovation. Where the West has gone all in on personalisation and engagement metrics, Japan has kept its distance, and in doing so, has buffered itself from some of the worst excesses of the platform age, fake news, filter bubbles, and algorithmic radicalisation.

Yet that buffer may come at a cost. Japan’s trust in news sits at 39%, notably below the global average of 40%, and far behind countries like Finland or Portugal. Aggregators may dampen misinformation, but they haven’t meaningfully restored faith in journalism either. Instead, Japan finds itself in a strange twilight, less polarised, but also less connected. Its users aren't enraged by the news; they’re increasingly indifferent to it.

The Reuters report finds that 37% of Japanese respondents say they often or sometimes avoid the news. And crucially, this trend is not being offset by the rise of creator-led media that we’re seeing elsewhere. In the US, nearly a quarter of adults encountered Joe Rogan discussing a heady mix of topics, including alien pyramids, politics, and MMA. France’s HugoDécrypte reaches 22% of under-35s with explainer content on TikTok and YouTube, and even some of Thailand's social media personalities are now central to political dialogue. For better or worse, Japan has few such leading figureheads. There is no definitive Japanese version of Hugo, Thai Pond, or Rogan-esque presence capturing the imagination of Gen-Z digital natives en masse. Japan’s digital news culture is defined less by reinvention than by retreat.

That said, to say Japan has zero figures pushing media boundaries would be to miss a certain kind of anomaly, the kind embodied by Hiroyuki Nishimura. Hiroyuki, the founder of the infamous 2channel (and now owner of 4chan), is perhaps Japan’s closest analogue to the wildcard media provocateur. He appears frequently on YouTube and livestreams, delivering deadpan commentary on a wide range of topics, from politics to pandemic policy. He’s wildly popular among a specific slice of disillusioned online youth, and he represents a very different model of influence, more troll-philosopher than cultural commentator, more irony-poisoned contrarian than earnest conversationalist.

But even Hiroyuki proves the point by contrast. He doesn’t really focus on interviewing guests so much, building coalitions, or bridging divides like some influencers we see overseas do. He isn’t creating a forum in the classic sense of the word; he’s cultivating an audience that wants to hear the system mocked, not explored. His visibility underscores just how unusual it is in Japan to build a media presence based on personality and perspective rather than platform or profession. And more importantly, his influence remains largely confined to digital subcultures, far from the mainstream centre of gravity that someone like Rogan, for better or worse, occupies.

This vacuum is telling. In the US, the surge in influencer-led media may be destabilising, but it is at least generative, creating new forms of storytelling, new audiences, new conflicts. In Japan, there’s instead a quiet void. The Reuters data suggests that even younger demographics in Japan are not turning to social or video-first news at the same rate as their global peers. They are simply disconnecting. Passive consumption through aggregator homepages and push notifications has replaced any sense of exploratory or participatory media culture.

This is the key contrast with the US and parts of Europe. There, the problem is often too much engagement, too fast, fractured attention, partisan content, and emotional overload. Japan’s problem is its mirror image: too little engagement, too flat. Where other countries are navigating digital disruption through storms of ideological intensity, Japan is drifting in still water, its traditional institutions intact but its currents fading.

Even platform strategies tell different stories. In the US, social and video networks have now overtaken TV and news websites as the primary source of news. In Japan, TV still holds a 50% reach. Yes, this is a fall from over 80% a decade ago, but it’s far more gradual than the declines elsewhere. This erosion, slow, steady, uneventful, mirrors Japan’s broader trend toward informational detachment. There’s no collapse, no platform revolution, no creator renaissance, just attrition.

And then there’s the role of AI. Japan remains sceptical, even wary, of its incursion into news production. While 27% of people globally are open to AI-generated summaries, Japan shows low enthusiasm. The desire for human curation still runs deep, in contrast with countries like India or Nigeria, where younger generations are more accepting of AI tools in news contexts. This hesitance aligns with Japan’s broader pattern: cautious adoption, preference for editorial oversight, and a cultural resistance to the flattening of voice that algorithmic media often entails.

In some ways, this paints a picture of Japan as the last bastion of analogue habits dressed in digital clothing (there is an analogy somewhere here with Japan's, until very recent, use of the fax machine). A society that reads more than it watches. That curates more than it shares. That distrusts influencers and doesn’t reward their presence. Where most of the world has allowed its media systems to be remade in the image of the feed, Japan still clings to the homepage.

But this is not a victory. It is a stalemate. The aggregator model, while buffering some harms, has also muffled the potential of Japanese media to evolve into something vibrant and participatory. News podcasts reach only 3% of Japanese respondents weekly. TikTok news use is negligible. And while personalisation is upending how news is served elsewhere, Japanese audiences show the least appetite for algorithm-driven feeds. The result isn’t resilience, it’s inertia.

There’s a deeper question beneath all this: is Japan’s media ecology a preview of post-engagement society? A vision of what happens not when the system breaks, but when people stop caring? The West is fixated on the dangers of too much news, too many creators, too much polarisation. Japan may be showing us the opposite end of that spectrum, where the volume dial is turned so low that the public can no longer hear the signal.

And maybe that’s the story we need to sit with. That in a world chasing scale, speed, and surgical targeting, Japan resists, not out of ignorance, but intention. In that resistance lies both comfort and cost. Whether Japan chooses to drift or disrupt remains uncertain. But as the tide of global media slowly rises and the currents of popularism twist, the question isn’t whether to jump in, it’s how not to drown in the noise once you’re already swimming.

Download the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 here.

I write a monthly magazine called UZU that provides commentary, interviews, and articles on branding, marketing, and life in Japan. Subscribe here. 📬 https://lnkd.in/gH-drv6B

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