Mayor Speaks Up About Embracing Facebook: “I Was Being Flamed on 2channel”
Takeo City in Saga has the youngest mayor in Japan, the 42-year-old Keisuke Hiwatashi. Hiwatashi has attracted various businesses and a shinkansen line to Takeo, and at the same time is grappling with bringing Japan’s notoriously bureaucratic municipalities to online social networks. Last year, all 390 city employees were given their own Twitter accounts. In November, Takeo City replaced its website with a Facebook page. Today, ITmedia.co.jp interviewed him about his embrace of social networks in one of Japan’s most rural prefectures. An excerpt from that interview is translated here:
People have surmised that it was the mayor’s idea to move the city website to Facebook. Could you tell us a little bit about why you’ve taken this measure?
Our website was quite old. It was slow to update, and there was no bidirectionality or cooperation. In short, we were working with stone tools, which is fine if you’re living in the Stone Age, but in our age of speed it’s impossible to deal with stone tools.
I think the difference between the Web and paper is the possibility for bidirectionality with users. Nevertheless, it’d be impossible to make all the city employees communicate in HTML, and if you make a city bulletin board it becomes a rough situation like “2channel”. In other words, we were unable to guarantee good bidirectionality on the city website thus far, and users were unable to share their information with us reliably.
When did you begin thinking about this?
It was about 10 years ago. That was around the time I learned about the trashy stuff people post on 2channel. At that time, I was working for the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the national government. I started about 5 threads, and all of them got flamed in the most ridiculous way.
For example, I was transferred to Takatsuki in Osaka, and decided to invite people to Kansai University. I succeeded at that, but I also got amazingly hate-filled replies. Which would have been okay if I had known who was writing them, but they were anonymous! So, I thought “this is really no good”. It wasn’t constructive at all, just the proverbial “bathroom graffiti”.
Based on my personal experience, I thought that after all, a web site needs to have a real-name system. Furthermore, without bidirectionality, we won’t get a good range of opinions, and it’ll be mottai nai. For example, when you’ve got two people arguing about something, with bidirectionality others can enter the conversation.
I was thinking about this for many years, and when Twitter got popular, I decided, “This must be it.” But Twitter has no real-name system and in the end noise got into the signal. Just as I was deciding, “This isn’t it after all,” Facebook got its boost [from the movie The Social Network, which premiered in Japan in late 2010 --A].
When I started using Facebook, I had only 100 friends, but my own contributions got excellent responses. And of course these responses weren’t just praise for me, but also people saying, “I think it would be better if you do it this way”, “look at the data I’m linking here”, and so forth. I got very involved in the discussions, and started thinking it could have real practical value for city administration.
Essentially, Facebook is the biggest site with a real-name registration system. The system I was wishing for 10 years ago when I got flamed on 2channel has finally arrived. This is why I moved the city website to Facebook.
[...]
Aren’t there a lot people being left behind by this technological evolution?
Oh, certainly. I don’t expect 70 to 80 year olds to get on Facebook for my sake.
But I feel like even that is changing these days. If you ask me how a 70-year-old in my city is meant to acquaint himself with Facebook, I would say that just like with vehicles, those who can’t drive for themselves can “carpool”. Rather than learning the keyboard for themselves, they can look on and contribute with the help of family members who can use Facebook.
Up until now people didn’t even know about the vehicle called Facebook, so they weren’t familiar with this process. But now everyone recognizes the usefulness of this tool. Like with a driver’s license, there are some people who won’t ever get one, but they can still carpool. I think that should be good enough.
The interview also discusses Hiwatashi’s F&B Goods initiative to sell products made in Takeo through the Internet. About this, he says:
In the past, just talking about business for a moment, it was an age when big cities had the advantage. But with social networking, these days it’s an age when if you’re really making something good, you can sell it. Administration usually lags behind technology and has its demerits, but I want to make use of the reliability of government to promote a trustworthy “social business network”.
Contributor Bio: Avery teaches English somewhere near Takeo. When he is not translating things, he is probably visiting haikyo or researching weird footnotes in Japanese history. He can be reached on Twitter at @ahm.
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