LINE 'Em Up

Messaging one at a time

Spending any extended period in Japan will mean you inevitably download specific Japanese apps on your phone. I believe the single most necessary one is LINE (styled Line for the purposes of this article, so it doesn’t feel like I’m yelling it at you) . For the unfamiliar, this is not an app that helps draw lines. Today we discuss Japan’s favourite superapp.

On The Line

For the uninitiated, Line is first and foremost a messaging and social media app. It is a very dominant app. In fact, if you have a smartphone in Japan you will have Line. That might sound like an exaggeration, but as of 2022 there are 93 million Japanese monthly active users. Given that the population of Japan is 125 million, only those who are tech-phobic, extremely privacy oriented or literal children won’t be using this app.

So how did an entire country turn to use this one means of communication? This Japanese favourite was born following the tragedy of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake. The destruction wreaked by the natural disaster meant traditional telecommunications ceased working. The infrastructure of telephone wires and power lines was damaged and everyone wanted immediate contact. The internet infrastructure was intact, so people quickly flocked to find ways to message using the internet.

All this was set up for an existing superapp… KakaoTalk. The dominant chat and messaging name in South Korea, KakaoTalk was perfectly positioned for millions of Japanese to immediately download this app, allowing free and instant calls and messages via the internet.

As all this unfolded, there were a group of engineers in Japan who thought “no way am I letting this foreign app completely dominate our country”. KakaoTalk was created by a Korean company for Koreans, and was not customised for a foreign market. So these engineers decided to, well, rip off the idea. They pitched it up to headquarters, who fully backed them with money and marketing. After all, it was a point of company and national pride, in that order.

Spelling it out, these guys would create Line. It was a massive gambit, to score a point in an infamous rivalry. Not the Korean-Japanese rivalry. You see, the founders of Line were from rival firm Naver. The Korean firm.

Naver is essentially the Korean Google. They had been caught from a position of great power to relinquish the instant messaging game in Korea. Not only was KakaoTalk made by another company, which is bad enough, but it was made by the 2nd largest search company, Daum.

By rolling out quickly (and copying many early features from KakaoTalk and Whatsapp), Line was able to launch by June 2011, just months after the initial earthquake. Japanese users signed up in droves, crashing the servers with its popularity. Within a year, Line had 50 million users and over 100 million in just 18 months.

Sticker Shock

Why was it so successful?

Network effects for one. Basically if everyone’s using it, then you have to use it too. Yet Line had its own secret weapon to make it a cultural fit with the Japanese userbase.

The Sticker.

An essential aspect of Line’s early launch, we can’t discuss Line’s successes without talking about this core aspect of Japanese online communication. Essentially, the sticker is digitized cuteness beyond the standard emoji set we know and love today. It was emoticon on steroids, injected with Japan’s long standing partnership with kawaii. Most other apps (include KakaoTalk) now also feature this… feature, but it all started with Line. In October 2011, stickers were launched with the app, to add some extra energy for the users. These proved to be extraordinarily successful. The original Line Bear and Friends has become a Japanese icon of their own, with plushie stores and merchandise that could rival Sanrio’s Hello Kitty empire.

The brilliance of LINE’s sticker system wasn’t just in the design, though. It was in the marketplace. You might think that purchasing additional stickers when you’re already accessing a full library of free emojis seems excessive, however I like to think of these as the ringtone boom of the early 2000’s—the default Nokia soundtrack wasn’t enough to express yourself; you needed Crazy Frog.

People went crazy (frog) for the paid stickers. Now you could have your favourite characters (subject to license) perform your messages to others. Incidentally, this also created a new class in the subtle hierarchy of creative types of Japan; If you had an idea of some sort of stylised creature or thing, Line made it possible to elevate it to mega-fame and fortune (if you were lucky).

The suddenly giant sticker economy was perhaps the last shove that pushed Line over the line to become the app that everyone needs.

Now you can pay your bills, order food, play games, read manga, and even do your taxes through Line. It’s a one stop shop, multi tooled Swiss Army knife of digital services, and its success in Japan has made it the superapp model for other countries. However, Line has been wise and focused on ever-improving their domestic offerings rather than chasing growth abroad.

From taking on Kakao, they know that localised tech wins out. So if you wonder whether life in Japan is possible without Line, the answer is yes and no. Technically a nomadic life devoid of basic social interaction and community is possible, but with Line it’s a lot easier. So while it’s tempting to roll your eyes at the sheer ubiquity of it, you have to respect what Line has built. Line isn’t just a tool now. It’s a symbol of how technology can adapt, evolve, and hopefully even make a creator millions from a drawing of a bear.