A week ago, I wrote a blog entry chronicling Google’s gradual move into Japan. I was living and working in Tokyo from April 2008 to April 2010, and in that two-year time-frame Google started popping up all over the place in a country that otherwise had been dominated by Yahoo Japan.
Fortunately, we hadn’t gotten around to publishing that blog post yet, because in it I concluded that Google would never have the presence in Japan that Yahoo has. Then last week I found out…they’re teaming up, forming an alliance of sorts. Not a merger (Yahoo will keep its logo and interface), but the organic search and paid results will be based on Google’s technology. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Google will take over Yahoo’s presence, per se, since the logo will remain Yahoo’s, but it does mean that they will hold a virtual monopoly over what you can find on the Internet in Japan.
As someone who has lived in Japan, I believe the real power of Yahoo Japan comes from their partnership with SoftBank, the largest cell phone provider in the country, that owns a 40% stake in Yahoo Japan (compared to Yahoo Inc.’s 35% stake). I used Softbank while I was in there and found myself, always a loyal user of Google in the US, slowly switching to Yahoo. I never had the chance to sneak into a Japanese person’s house to track their search engine usage, but the feeling I got was that most people used the Internet more on their cell phone than at home from a personal computer. Trains in Tokyo are an odd site. They’re jam-packed with people to the point that you can barely move at rush hour (and rush hour, by the way, is more like eight hours), and still most of the people are glued to their phones, either text messaging (a major Japanese pastime), surfing the web, reading the news, or even watching TV. With the default browser of the biggest cell phone provider set to Yahoo, the Yahoo search engine maintains a very high status.
I think the affinity for SoftBank in Japan goes beyond what we as Americans can understand as brand loyalty to a cell phone provider. Because mobile phones are such a way of life in Japan and marketing is as amazing as it is, it’s not uncommon to see the mascot, a big white dog who used to be a human father of a family of normal people, dangling from people’s bags or worn as slippers at home. I follow the dog on Twitter. He has a separate account from actual Softbank. Furthermore, Softbank sponsors a baseball team, the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, which plays at the Fukuoka Yahoo! JAPAN Dome. Sweet deal.
As proof of Softbank’s status in Japan, here’s a fascinating commercial, featuring Brad Pitt carrying a gigantic sumo wrestler.
Anyway…
I think the biggest concern among Japanese people that are keeping up with the news of this alliance is that the organic search results are going to be really different. It always seemed to me that when I ran a search in Japanese on Google, the results weren’t as relevant as the ones Yahoo Japan pulled up. But I’m not a native speaker, so I’m not really the person to ask.
So what does the future hold for Google Japan? Probably a lot. But with the Yahoo logo still staying up as the SoftBank default browser, I don’t know that their presence will surpass Yahoo’s dominance as the most popular search engine in Japan. Yahoo is pretty settled into the Internet world there and I highly doubt Google could take over the dominance of their weather reports, auctions (did you know they had auctions? I didn’t! ), and aforementioned train schedules. It would be pretty cool, though, if they took over Yahoo! JAPAN Dome and painted it multi-colored…
