Just search in Katakana
UPDATE 4JUL2010: The ICANN board has now approved Chinese character URLs. I doubt this will change the marketing strategies for Japanese companies, however. I think we’ll just get a bunch of redirects.
Americans invented the Internet, and it’s going to stay nice and readable to Americans as long as they have anything to say about it (daggumit). Most people in the Americas, Western Europe, and Australia are blithely unaware that a battle has been raging for several years among the internationalists over the format of the URL (the web address you type to go somewhere on the web). Why? Because these countries all use the roman alphabet. Our slavic friends would love to use cyrillic URLs; Chinese want Chinese characters, Koreans want hangul, etc. The ICANN (the international standards cops) are still only testing and allowing non-roman alphabets in limited trials.
Last month in Tokyo, I noticed something about all the adverts on the trains: the Japanese companies have found a way around the common restriction: they simply tell you (the customer) what to search for, using Japanese kanji and gana, nevermind what the actual proper URL may be. I’ve highlighted two examples here (forgive the low photo quality– lighting on subways isn’t so bright).
On the good side, by asking the commuter to search for a specific keyword, they’ve immediately screened out all the content from the English-language Internet (which can be overbearing in volume). Every mobile phone has this rudimentary web search capability, so the call-to-action is immediate.
Solar backpacks-- just search for
On the bad side, however, this strategy assumes some risk: if I ask for my customers to find me by searching for “スマート外国人” (smart gaijin), what happens when someone else comes along with a better SEO value for that term? All my advertising now goes to benefit someone else.
Mitigating this risk are three factors: 1) campaigns on the trains cycle pretty quickly, so keyword hints can be updated often; 2) the keywords are pretty specific, and the campaigns only bring more traffic, which then reinforces the lead position; 3) Rakuten has an almost monopoly-level stranglehold on web publishing in Japan. If two companies conflict over a desired keyword, Rakuten can probably work it out between them (ah, the Japanese sense of controlharmony). It’s kinda like when AOL or Yahoo could get away with this back in the day.
I recently came back from an extended stay in my other home, Tokyo. While there ,we did the usual daily things: ride the train, buy groceries, get lunch, eat sushi, watch Godzilla movies (well, okay, just once). Here’s the thing: we only used a credit card maybe 3-4 times over 10 days, and used actual cash even less. Everywhere we went, we used our 
That last point is the killer. To buy anything, all we had to do was tap this thing inside a circle on the glass counter, as if we were beknighting the transaction, done. Meanwhile, a credit card requires a swipe, a printout, the hostess signing the receipt, and we (the buyer) countersigning. I know that some US places are just accepting the one swipe under a given amount (no signing required under $25 or so), but it’s still slower.
I promise I'm relevant 
Comments