THE BRIDGE

The Japan Internet Map

Your guide to Japan’s internet space

To explore the different sectors and companies that make up Japan’s internet and mobile space, mousehover on the interactive presentation below. To navigate:

  • Click on an element to zoom.
  • Click the red circle in the middle to zoom back out.
  • Click on a company name to find out more in our database.

Skip to read more about this project

About the Japan Internet Map

Since we launched our English site in February 2013, we here at The Bridge have done our best to give Western readers an informative overview of the Japanese internet, profiling a wide range of companies ranging from established net giants to up-and-coming startups. We recently surpassed 1000 entries in our database [1], and as we noted in our Top 50 Japanese startups article, there are lots of up-and-coming companies here in Japan.

Taking this a step further, we wanted to give you a sort broad overview of Japan’s internet landscape. And so we have created our interactive ‘Japan Internet Map’ which you see above. To start, we have selected 100 companies and services, sorting them into various sectors [2]. (If you’re confused, see our video).

Unlike many interactive graphics which are primarily eye candy, we made this to serve as a directory to our archived content, a doorway into our past articles which we think are relevant and rich [3]. We have lots of information we’d like to share, but the linear nature of a blog means that it can sometimes be hard to find older content.

We really hope you find this helpful. If you’d like to come back to this in the future, you can find it in our navigation menu bar at the top as ‘Internet Map’. But keep in mind we’re just getting started, and our efforts to date have just scratched the surface. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to discuss more about how we can better tell the world about great companies and services in Japan!

Thanks!

The Bridge team


  1. Note that our database entries are not just for Japan, but it also includes companies from around Asia, for our Japanese readership. The graphic above, however, is just for Japan.  ↩

  2. We actually pruned this down from around 150, in the interest of keeping it manageable in this first attempt. We may expand this if we do a later update. But we want to make it clear that this is not intended to be totally comprehensive, but we think it is more complete than anything that exists anywhere else. In terms of the visualization itself, we know there are lots of ways that it can be improved – and we’ll address that in future iterations.  ↩

  3. We’d like to tip our hats to Mike Bostock and Jason Davies as their Starburst and coffee wheel visualizations were the foundation for this effort. Props also go to the folks at Ogivly whose China Internet map was also an inspiration for this effort. And a huge thanks go to Nikita Barsukov who brought some serious D3 expertise to this project!  ↩