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The story
TikTok has its roots in China, and LINE traces back to a Korean company — a 5ch thread pointed out that almost none of the world’s major social networks originated in Japan. Posters discussed the existence of China’s video app Kwai (Kuaishou) and how LINE was modeled on South Korea’s KakaoTalk. Sparked by the question “has Japan produced any globally successful social network in the past decade?”, the thread turned into a debate about the state of Japan’s content industry.
What people said
There was talk of him doing it together with Gackt and others, right?
Pretty sure they pulled out
I think they already said it flopped
They did make a mixi knockoff once
To be precise, it was made by the Japanese subsidiary of a Korean company
There's no LINE in Korea itself
But LINE is itself a knockoff of another Korean company's app, KakaoTalk, so it's Korean-rooted either way
LINE actually did exist in Korea, but there were suspicions people's chats and personal info were being monitored, so everyone moved over to KakaoTalk
Huh? LINE shows up all the time in Korean dramas though
Kwai has an insane number of users but it's completely unknown in Japan
It's like the best parts of TikTok and Niconico combined, pretty handy
And best of all there's tons of local video posted by users from rural areas, it's fun
I installed Kwai and used to watch it back in the day
This was before TikTok came to Japan, so it must've been around 2017
I remember thinking, wow, China's got some amazing social networks
🇺🇸Instagram → graciously borrowing America's
🇺🇸Twitter → graciously borrowing America's
🇺🇸YouTube → graciously borrowing America's
🇺🇸ZOOM → graciously borrowing America's
🇺🇸WhatsApp → graciously borrowing America's
🇰🇷LINE → graciously borrowing Korea's
🇨🇳Douyin (TikTok) → graciously borrowing China's
🇨🇳Xiaohongshu (RED) → graciously borrowing China's
🇨🇳Kuaishou (Kwai) → graciously borrowing China's
🇨🇳Weibo → graciously borrowing China's
🇨🇳WeChat → graciously borrowing China's
🇷🇺Telegram → graciously borrowing Russia's
So what about Japan?
What SNS has Japan made a worldwide hit in the past 10 years?
We don't have one, but they let us use theirs for free, so who cares
Did you really need to force Russia into that list?
Don't throw in random Chinese apps nobody's heard of
but I've seen Chinese SNS posts with over 100 million likes
I think they're missing out on 90% of life
Nothing but boring posts and hate
What even is "Japanese social media"?
X, Instagram, TikTok — none of them were made by Japan lol
Even though it only appeals to Japanese people?
It's great for killing time
There are so insanely many users you never get bored
Even farmer uncles and folks who'd never stream in Japan are posting videos — all ages, all walks of life
The problem with Chinese SNS is the content quality is way too low even if the quantity's huge
It's like filling up on mediocre fast food
If that's the case you're better off watching original, high-quality content on Instagram or YouTube — it sharpens your sensibilities more
https://www.asahi.com/sp/articles/ASV3F3WLTV3FUTFK00KM.html
#1 🇨🇳China
…
#3 🇯🇵Japan
Times are changing and there's no stopping it — Japan is in decline
Bashing Japan with stuff that's totally off-topic for this thread seems kind of dumb honestly, let's keep it a bit more intelligent and constructive
Whenever some viral security-camera footage shows up it turns into a meme and everyone posts copycat versions
Well, I think that happens in every country though
Personally I like watching cooking videos and stuff about ethnic minorities' daily lives, so I don't really notice that
I think it depends on what kind of content you're watching
Fair point — now that you mention it, posts about Chinese traditional crafts are seriously fun to watch
You can really tell that far more young people there value their country's traditions than young Japanese people do
but for some reason it's a half-hearted messaging app even in Japan, Rakuten's own home turf
Japan probably just can't handle a scale of 3 billion users
Background and Key Points
TikTok’s operator ByteDance is Chinese, and TikTok’s own predecessor, Musical.ly, was acquired and merged into Douyin’s parent company; LINE, meanwhile, is run by Japan’s LINE Corporation but its majority backing traces to Naver, the South Korean firm behind KakaoTalk’s rival portal — LINE launched in 2011 as a response to the Tohoku earthquake’s communication blackouts and became Japan’s dominant messaging app, but its capital and design lineage sit outside Japan. Japan’s own homegrown attempts — mixi (2004), which briefly dominated domestic social networking before Facebook and Twitter took over, or GREE and Mobage’s mobile social-gaming platforms — never scaled internationally the way TikTok, WeChat, or KakaoTalk did. Kwai (Kuaishou), mentioned in the thread, is a Chinese short-video platform with several hundred million daily users that predates TikTok domestically but remains largely unknown outside Asia.
The thread’s actual disagreement isn’t over the underlying fact — nobody disputes that Japan lacks a homegrown global platform — but over whether that matters. Some posters treat it as evidence of Japanese content industry decline, while others argue Japan simply chose a different, arguably rational strategy: distributing content across foreign-built platforms (X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) rather than sinking resources into building and maintaining its own, and that free access to others’ infrastructure is a fine trade-off rather than a failure.
What’s likely to get lost on non-Japanese readers is the LINE/KakaoTalk relationship posters allude to: LINE was developed in Japan by engineers connected to Naver’s Korean operations after Naver’s own Japanese search product failed, and it never actually launched as a consumer service in South Korea itself, which is why one poster’s claim of it being pulled from Korea over surveillance concerns is a common but imprecise oversimplification of a more mundane market decision.
※This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “China: “TikTok,” Korea: “LINE,” Japan: “Grrr…”“.
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