Exploring how Japan talks about Gen Z
In this blog post, we take a look at how we can use a content landscaping workflow to pick up insights about Generation Z in Japan from Japanese news articles—without even knowing Japanese.
Getting familiar with how something is covered in news media in another country used to be a daunting task, especially if newspapers in that country are published in a language you do not understand. Traditionally, this involved recruiting a team of native desk researchers who would locate and read through the news texts they can find and then synthesize their findings and present them to you. Needless to say, that is a time-consuming and often expensive process.
Fortunately, you now have a different approach at your disposal: Dcipher Analytics’ content landscaping workflows will automatically collect news articles from around the world in any major language within the scope that you define, and then use AI to pick up different topics in the material and generate a visual overview of them as well as summarize them in English and provide you with statistics about their volumes and growth rates.
This may sound a bit abstract, so let us take a look at an example and see what topics we can find in Japanese news articles mentioning Generation Z. To do this, we go to Dcipher Analytics’ Workflow Store and choose to run “Content landscaping of news”. As input data, we set up the workflow to collect news articles published in Japanese in Japan during the last 12 months that include the Japanese term for Gen Z. This is the only part of the process where we do need to use a little bit of Japanese. Those of us whose Japanese is rusty or nonexistent may opt to use an online translation tool, which will tell us that “Generation Z” in Japanese is “Z世代.” We enter this as search phrase in the workflow’s setup wizard and click “Create” to let the AI do its magic.
After a short wait, we get a notification telling us that we have an interactive report waiting for us. Following the link, we are greeted by a “landscape map,” which will let us explore topics within different thematic areas:
The map is a visual representation of the processed news articles, which have been organized according to their content, with similar articles placed close to each other. The red and orange color in some parts of the map indicate that many articles with similar content are clustered there. Such areas represent their own topics, and each identified topic is further illustrated as a colored circle. To help us navigate through this landscape of topics, the AI has also identified high-level themes to which the topics belong and generated a label for each. The topics within each theme share the same circle color. (You can find a link to an interactive version of this landscape map at the bottom of this blog post.)
Looking at the right side of the landscape, we see a number of clusters of topics related to music artists and other pop culture personalities who belong to or are popular among Gen Z. We can also find topics about different aspects of Japanese social media culture, for example focused on the influence that social media have on the Japanese language that young people use. To get an initial idea of what topics are about, we hover our mouse pointer over the topic circles to see their labels:
In the top-left corner of the landscape, we see topics connected to various surveys that have looked at attitudes and consumer behavior of Gen Z Japanese. Several of them have focused on different demographic subgroups within Gen Z, or on different subcultures or interest groups. Clicking on a circle will bring you an AI-generated summary of its topic, together with links to representative articles that you can follow to learn more about the survey results.
If we keep exploring the content landscape, we will come across some very specific topics, such as tamagotchi and other virtual pets gaining popularity again, as well as very broad ones, such as the topic of what people from Gen Z want to see in a workplace. Some of what we can read in the workplace topic is very similar to how that is discussed in the west, including observations of young employees being more inclined to move on if they don’t find their job meaningful, but the topic also includes conclusions such as that Gen Z employees may not see the value in “traditional workplace events like drinking parties.”
Many topics are also covering what different companies are doing to attract members of Generation Z as either consumers or employees. One such topic relates to how Japanese car manufacturers are trying to adapt their car designs and marketing to stay relevant. An example that is mentioned is a stronger focus on safety features, as a way to appeal to a generation understood to be more safety-seeking. We can see that, as in many other countries, there are many examples of brands collaborating with sports (including esports) stars, online influencers, and pop culture personalities. The singer and actress Ano has, for example, made a music video together with McDonald’s, in which she has a serious look on her face and sings that she will not deliver any fake smiles—a video aimed to attract members of Gen Z, perceived as hating falsehood, to apply for jobs at the fast food chain.
In various industries, companies organize commercial events specifically targeting Gen Z. The train company JR West has for example arranged event train tours especially for Gen Z. Other examples that we can see among the topics include esports events for young women. Not everything we can read about companies’ activities in relation to Generation Z is directly commercial, though; there is also a topic of social engagement, with examples of companies working to prevent mental illness among young adults.
If you want to take a look at these and the other topics yourself, you can find the interactive landscape map here. Or why not sign up for a Dcipher account and run your own content landscaping workflow? Upon signing up you will get $50 free credits that you can use for all the workflows in our Workflow Store.