Japan Net Penetration Doubles in Past Year

Japan's Internet penetration rate has grown sharply over the past year, according to a recent survey, reaching 30 percent for the first time in August.

By William Auckerman
Japan Correspondent, asia.internet.com
[October 12, 2000]

A random telephone survey by the Internet Audience Rating Center (IARC) of Nikkei Business Publications Inc., conducted from August 17 to 28, 2000, found that 30.6 percent of those interviewed had used the Internet at least once during the previous month.

This marked a growth of nearly seven percent points over a period of five months — from the 23.7 percent penetration rate found by the IARC’s previous (March 2000) survey — and was double the 15.0 percent penetration rate recorded by a 1999 fall survey.

The IARC has been conducting surveys of Japanese Internet usage twice-yearly since fall 1997.

That first survey found an Internet penetration rate of 11.0 percent, rising to 11.5 percent in spring 1998 and 13.4 percent in fall 1998.

The August 2000 IARC survey concludes that, in addition to strong PC sales, the booming popularity of Internet-capable mobile phones (first introduced in February 1999) has fueled the rapid growth of Net use in Japan.

While PCs remained the predominant Internet access device (used by 91.8 percent of respondents who had been online), nearly one-fifth (19.3 percent) of respondents said they had used an Internet-capable mobile phone.

Lagging far behind as Internet-access devices were personal digital assistants (3.4 percent) and video game consoles (1.6 percent).

The August IARC survey found that Web surfing and exchanging e-mail were roughly equally popular activities for PC users (75.2 percent versus 67.7 percent, respectively), while mobile phones users were much more likely to exchange e-mail (85.3 percent) than to access Web sites (49.2 percent).

While 30.6 percent of survey respondents had been online (either surfing the Web, exchanging e-mail, or accessing an online service) during the month prior to being interviewed, another 6.6 percent answered that they had previous Internet experience but had not been online during the previous 30 days.

The rest (62.8 percent) said that they had never been on the Internet.

[Editor's note: altough a significant proportion of Japanese Internet subscribers use one provider, NTT Docomo's i-mode wireless Internet service whose latest subscriber numbers are here, an interesting point revealed by this report is that wired access has become more popular than mobile Internet access.]

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