Digital Communication in Japanese Companies: The Corporate Blog. Current Trends, Challenges, and Future Perspectives

Abstract

The present article examines the digital communication patterns exerted by domestic Japanese companies through Japanese-language blogging practices: main characteristics, current trends, challenges, and future tendencies at the intersection of Japanese corporate culture, communication, and the digital realm. After a concise literature review of Japanese corporate identity and predominant cultural features of Japanese management, we will conduct a qualitative content analysis on a selected corpus of Japanese language corporate blogs to investigate the digital corporate discourse (content, types of public, communication strategies, and techniques) on a national level and to inquire into the extent of the impact exerted by the digital evolution of media platforms and the emergence of new AI tools. The implications of the present research are twofold. First, the database we manually compiled contains only Japanese language sources, thus surpassing the linguistic barrier many Western academics confront when researching Asian countries and media content in Asian languages. Examining the Japanese language digital discourse of domestic companies in a post-pandemic globalized context bridges the unceasing gap between the West and the East, thus decentring the focal point from the Western companies and shifting the attention from English-language digital communication. Second, connecting the Japanese-language business discourse with domestic blogging platforms represents another aspect of particular importance neglected by previous research.