By late 2007, something unusual was happening inside Twitter’s early usage data: Japan had become one of its top markets, despite the product being English-only, with no local team, no marketing, and no SMS integration. Japanese users were adopting Twitter ahead of any formal expansion effort, finding workarounds for broken character displays and sharing it organically across blogs and forums.
At the time, Twitter’s team was small (around 25 people), and global expansion wasn’t yet a priority. But in Tokyo, a handful of people at Digital Garage, including Kazuya Minami, Joi Ito, and Hiroki Eda, noticed the pattern. What unfolded next became one of the most successful cases where a U.S. consumer tech company not only gained traction in Japan, but helped shape how the product evolved globally.
Japan Was Already Tweeting
Before Twitter, Minami had already spent over a decade helping foreign tech companies navigate Japan. In the early 2000s, after years of bringing Silicon Valley ideas into Mitsubishi’s Information Systems and Services Group, including helping launch General Magic’s Japan presence and introducing Regis McKenna’s marketing frameworks to Japanese corporates, he joined Joi Ito’s Neoteny, one of Japan’s first internet-focused incubators.
The team was especially excited about Blogger, Evan Williams’ first breakout product. They believed it had real potential in Japan and negotiated deep into the deal. At one point, Minami and Ito even sat with Williams at the Palace Hotel lobby in San Francisco reviewing terms. But before they could close, Google moved in and acquired the company.
Still, the connection stuck. So when Williams went on to co-found Twitter, it wasn’t a cold start. By then, Minami and Ito had regrouped at Digital Garage, a broader internet business development company that, in many ways, picked up where Neoteny left off. When DG reached out to Williams in 2007, it was a familiar voice. At the time, Twitter was still figuring itself out. The interface was unstable. International expansion wasn’t on the roadmap. But something unusual was happening. Japanese users were already on it.
Despite the UI being English-only and SMS integration not working on Japanese feature phones, usage from Japan had quietly grown to account for a disproportionate share of Twitter’s global traffic. Ito and Minami noticed the anomaly, and realized it wasn’t just noise. It was an early product-market fit, hiding in plain sight.
Arriving as Early Birds
Back in 2007, the team had just about 20 people without expansion playbook or international sales members. But it did have trust in the Digital Garage team. Rather than wait, they agreed to a leaner, faster model: a capital and business alliance.
In January 2008, Twitter announced that Digital Garage would make an initial $200K investment in Twitter Inc. (with additional funding to follow) and help localize and support its Japanese launch. This wasn’t a joint venture, and the DG team acted as the on-the-ground team.
Digital Garage set up a small, hybrid task force. At its core were five people:
- Kazuya Minami, leading from DG Incubation (DGI), served as the strategic business architect.
- Hiroki Eda, a former tech journalist from Nikkei BP, handled product and communications.
- Yu Takaki, a lead engineer who was well known in Japan’s tech community, owned the technical integration.
- Masahiko Sato, the second engineer who had a strong grasp of local nerd culture, supported Takaki.
- Fumi Yamazaki, a one-person user support team, known for being constantly on call with a 24-hour beeper.
The collaboration between Twitter and Digital Garage was anything but hands-off. Early on, Minami and Eda flew to San Francisco for business discussions. Soon after, Takaki was embedded at Twitter HQ in SoMa to speed up integration. Despite timezone and language barriers, the two teams operated more like a single unit than two separate entities, sharing user feedback, shipping product updates, and debugging live issues in close coordination.
The work to make Twitter usable in Japan went far more than translation. First, they fixed character encoding so Japanese users could actually post without text corruption. Then they negotiated a critical change: allowing full 140 characters in multibyte Japanese, which had previously been cut in half. Minami called this one of the most important localization wins as it immediately unlocked expression in the language.
The small team also built a mobile web version compatible with Japan’s feature phones, which were dominant at the time. Unlike in the U.S., SMS never mattered in Japan. Mobile internet via carrier gateways was the norm, and Twitter had to adapt. With help from DG engineers, the team delivered a lightweight, browser-based mobile UI that worked across all three major carriers.
Twitter’s first ad experiments were also launched in Japan. DG’s marketing arm, CGM Marketing (CGM), led by Tomoya Sasaki team with support from DGUS expat Akinori Koto, began selling small banner slots on Twitter.jp, a revenue model HQ hadn’t even touched yet. Initial sponsors included Toyota and a Twitter how-to book. While minor in appearance, these efforts helped prove that Twitter could monetize.
Finding a Japanese Voice
The launch of the localized UI in April 2008 marked the beginning of Japan’s Twitter boom. But the Digital Garage team didn’t stop at product tweaks. They knew that Japan’s internet culture was shaped by tight-knit communities. Years earlier, Ito had launched the Japan Blog Association to promote open blogging standards, inspired by platforms like Movable Type and Blogger. But the effort drew backlash from users of Japan’s existing mobile diary platforms, who saw the open-web push as tone-deaf to local norms. That experience left a mark.
So this time, Twitter Japan started from the ground up. They hosted user meetups along the Tokaido Shinkansen line, at every station from Tokyo to Osaka. DGI and CGM also threw events where pop stars and academics shared the stage. Invited early influencers, bloggers, and engineers to co-create the culture around tweeting. They even held a public birthday party for Evan Williams in Tokyo.
“We weren’t building a user base,” one DG member later said. “We were building a community.“
The term “tweet” itself didn’t translate well. Its direct translation (saezuru) sounded awkward. So Hiroki Eda coined the verb “tsubuyaku” — “to mutter.” It was soft, non-performative, and deeply Japanese. It rebranded Twitter from a megaphone into a whisper network. Millions found the tone inviting, and “tsubuyaku” quickly entered the national lexicon.
Building Community, Not Just Users
Not everything was organic. While much of Twitter Japan’s early growth was driven by user enthusiasm, the DG team also deployed a number of deliberate outreach tactics that proved critical. They actively recruited early Japanese bloggers and influencers they had built relationships with during the blogging era, giving them the first official verification badges on the platform. These users helped bridge communities from blogs to Twitter.
They also worked to insert Twitter into traditional media. Minami himself appeared on a Fuji TV news segment explaining how Twitter could be used in politics, years before such use cases became mainstream globally. In fact, Japanese TV stations began showing Twitter hashtags on screen before the feature had widespread usage in the U.S. By 2010, Twitter was seeing more tweets per second from Japan during major events (like World Cup games or New Year’s countdowns) than anywhere else in the world.
The team launched a push to spread Twitter buttons across Japanese websites, educating companies and media outlets on why the platform mattered. They also engaged cultural figures like singer Kohmi Hirose and restaurateurs like Sushi Saisho and Butagumi, inviting such early adopters to community events and encouraging them to share their experiences. This blend of political, pop-cultural, and grassroots advocacy helped accelerate adoption across different segments of Japanese society. They got a lucky break too: Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama began tweeting, completely organically. This drew more users to the platform and within weeks, Hatoyama’s Twitter account followers passed 1 million Japanese users.
Then came March 11, 2011. When the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, landlines failed. Government websites crashed. But Twitter didn’t. People turned to it in real-time: for evacuation info, tsunami warnings, blackout updates, and safety check-ins. Twitter became an emergency lifeline. This moment changed the platform’s perception and government agencies and broadcasters began integrating Twitter directly into their disaster response and media programming.
In the months that followed, Twitter opened its first formal international office in Tokyo. They hired James Kondo, a former government advisor and McKinsey partner, as Japan Country Manager. Interestingly, DG had planned a joint venture, but growth came too fast and Twitter saw upsides.
Still, there was no bad blood. DG retained some ad rights via CGM and people moved on. In 2013, when Twitter IPO’d, DG’s stake was small but significant. From an experiment run by a handful of believers, Twitter Japan had become a fully staffed operation inside one of Twitter’s most important global markets.
Looking back, Minami credit Twitter Japan’s early success to three key elements:
- Timing: Japanese users had already started using Twitter before localization began. Acting quickly was critical. “If we had waited,” Minami noted, “domestic clones like Wassr or MoGMoG might have won the market.” Japan’s infamous “タイムマシン経営” (“time machine management” which describes watching for what works elsewhere and copying-and-localizing-fast) dynamic meant a foreign player couldn’t assume it had time to spare.
- Cultural alignment: Rather than force a global playbook, the team worked with how Japanese users naturally communicated. Language choices, product tone, and media messaging all reflected local norms.
- Community-first execution: The rollout didn’t start with brand campaigns. Instead, it started with grassroots users. The team identified and supported early bloggers, influencers, restaurants, and musicians, then amplified their voices through events, verification, and platform features.
Years later, Japan counts roughly 68 million active X users, second only to the United States. That’s over half the population, with a staggering 55% penetration rate, the highest in the world. A big part of that success came from working hand-in-hand with strong local partners, who helped them navigate the nuances of execution on the ground.
For Minami, success was never about simply importing software.
“If you want a product to grow in Japan, you don’t just translate the interface. You build trust, in the right language.”
Who we spoke to: Kazuya Minami is a Managing Partner at Mitsubishi Estate’s Innovative Communities Department and a long-time builder of Japan’s startup ecosystem. He previously co-led Twitter’s Japan market entry at Digital Garage / DG Incubation and has held leadership roles spanning Mitsubishi Corp., Google Japan, Tokio Marine Capital, Neoteny, and more.
