I saw on the Internet that Yahoo had reported some good news: increasing profits thanks to strong online advertising sales and an increase in the dividend paid to investors. This wasn’t actually Yahoo, of course, but Yahoo Japan, a separate Japanese company in which Yahoo! Inc. owns a 33% stake, with the majority being controlled by Softbank, the Japanese cell phone company headed by the enigmatic zainichi (of Korean ancestry but born in Japan) Son Masatoshi. While Yahoo has largely been eclipsed by Google in search and Facebook and Twitter in social media, here in Japan the majority of Internet users are still loyal Yahoo users. Part of this has to do with Yahoo Japan’s lineup of useful services, from weather to maps to the handy earthquake reporting site that was so helpful last year, but another part is the lack of technical savvy on the part of the average Japanese Internet user. For many, the Yahoo Japan homepage basically equals “the Internet” the way AOL did for your grandmother back in the 1990s, and in a country where merely mastering Microsoft Word and Excel is considered quite a technical feat and almost no one has a favorite Linix distro, Yahoo Japan fills the bill reasonably well.
Yahoo Japan is still on top of the Internet here.
