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Kakaku.com: Japan’s price comparison king

Rick Martin 2013.05.21

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan. Japanese price comparison site Kakaku.com is a pretty essential tool for shoppers in Japan, whether you do your shopping online or offline. While sites like Rakuten or Amazon Japan are among the most likely online retail destinations, along with countless other lesser known e-commerce options. But in order to find out where the cheapest option is, Kakaku is your spot. From a business perspective, Kakaku.com essentially offers both price comparison listing (for which it charges a fee) and free product listing/aggregation. But from a consumer perspective, what I find to be Kakaku’s best feature is its categorized product ranking. While this is a somewhat common features among product-centered sites these days, Kakaku executes it well, essentially removing any of the worry you might have that you’ll buy the wrong product. If it’s the top product or an editor’s choice than it’s pretty safe bet that you’ve made a good selection [1]. Kakaku has a decent mobile site too, so I find myself checking on prices even while in stores sometimes. The company does offer…

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan.

Japanese price comparison site Kakaku.com is a pretty essential tool for shoppers in Japan, whether you do your shopping online or offline. While sites like Rakuten or Amazon Japan are among the most likely online retail destinations, along with countless other lesser known e-commerce options. But in order to find out where the cheapest option is, Kakaku is your spot. From a business perspective, Kakaku.com essentially offers both price comparison listing (for which it charges a fee) and free product listing/aggregation.

But from a consumer perspective, what I find to be Kakaku’s best feature is its categorized product ranking. While this is a somewhat common features among product-centered sites these days, Kakaku executes it well, essentially removing any of the worry you might have that you’ll buy the wrong product. If it’s the top product or an editor’s choice than it’s pretty safe bet that you’ve made a good selection [1]. Kakaku has a decent mobile site too, so I find myself checking on prices even while in stores sometimes. The company does offer a bar code search app, although I have yet to give that a try.

The other useful feature of Kakaku is that it shows you recent price fluctuations via a line chart that shows both lowest and average price over time. So if you have a big purchase planned this is something you might keep your eye on, to make sure you’re buying at the right time. There are even some apps out there that will send you an alert when the price falls below a certain threshold.

Another major use of Kakaku is its kuchikomi user reviews. This is where users provide feedback about various products, giving you a little more insight into products you’d like to buy. To get a better idea about Kakaku’s web interface, check out this video overview that I made a little while back [2].

The company has a pretty extensive repertoire of Facebook pages which really help if you’d like to stay up to date on new products in a certain category. For example, I like to keep an eye on new cameras that hit the market, and Kakaku’s camera page is great for this.

Kakaku also has a number of interesting subsidiaries that you might be familiar with, including food-focused site Tabelog, Japanese movie information site eiga.com as well as travel-focused price comparison site 4travel.jp.

Interestingly Kakaku has been looking to offer its price comparison service in foreign markets, with sites already established and operating in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines under the PricePrice.com umbrella. It will be interesting to see which markets the company looks to next.

Also relevant in the price comparison space is Aucfan which helps consumers find the best available prices on online auction sites.

For example, I just bought a bathroom scales yesterday. What do I know about which is the best bathroom scales? Absolutely nothing. But by going with the top ranked scales on Kakaku I know I got decent value. ↩
While this video is a little dated by now, it still serves as a good illustration since the website hasn’t changed too much. ↩

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Beauty products portal @Cosme is an internet mainstay among Japanese women

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.05.01

There are a few major review portals in Japan that are loved by women — Cookpad (food recipes), Ozmall (beauty salons), and Tabelog (restaurants) come to mind. But when it comes to cosmetics and beauty products, @Cosme is the place to go. The review site opened way back in December of 1999 and since then it has accumulated over 10 million reviews [1]. According to Toyokeizai, the site is used by one in three women in their 20s and 30s, and over two million members write 10 million reviews monthly. Many Japanese women have an endless appetite for greater beauty, and to satisfy such women, many cosmetic brands launch new products more often than one would expect. Industry journal Syogyo announced that in the first half of year 2012, the number of newly released cosmetic products went up 3.3% compared to the same time previous year, with the number of items reaching 1849. The average price of new products was 4132 yen (or about $42). Product reviews at @Cosme are essential for these women to find best the suited products considering the number of products that are available. Users can check product reviews and rankings, ask questions about skincare and…

There are a few major review portals in Japan that are loved by women — Cookpad (food recipes), Ozmall (beauty salons), and Tabelog (restaurants) come to mind. But when it comes to cosmetics and beauty products, @Cosme is the place to go. The review site opened way back in December of 1999 and since then it has accumulated over 10 million reviews [1]. According to Toyokeizai, the site is used by one in three women in their 20s and 30s, and over two million members write 10 million reviews monthly.

Many Japanese women have an endless appetite for greater beauty, and to satisfy such women, many cosmetic brands launch new products more often than one would expect. Industry journal Syogyo announced that in the first half of year 2012, the number of newly released cosmetic products went up 3.3% compared to the same time previous year, with the number of items reaching 1849. The average price of new products was 4132 yen (or about $42).

Product reviews at @Cosme are essential for these women to find best the suited products considering the number of products that are available. Users can check product reviews and rankings, ask questions about skincare and makeup, and even find out where products are available offline. The site is free to browse, but by registering as a user, you can clip or bookmark your favorite brands, reviews, or reviewers, and also send messages to other @Cosme users about products. The site’s premium users pay a monthly membership fee of 294 yen (or about $3) which entitles them to receive special coupons and or points to win promotional products.

iStyle, the company behind @Cosme, went public on the Mothers market in March of last year. The site was initially founded to accumulate purchasing data across all cosmetics makers, but the company’s co-founder explained in a Toyokeizai interview that there is a limit to CRM as it only allows brands to collect information about existing purchasers. What brands really want is data about those who did not buy their products, which is essentially unreachable since that information belongs to competitors. @Cosme have successfully built a solution for this problem.

The core business of @Cosme is advertising, which accounts for roughly 25% of its profit, with ecommerce and retail stores just behind. @Cosme have opened six retail stores in popular locations such as Shinjuku and Ikebukuro to further engage consumers offline and online purchasing behaviors. Women can see the latest popular products on @Cosme, and visit the retails store to try them out and hopefully purchase them. @Cosme is very powerful in influencing purchasing decisions of beauty conscious consumers — so much so, in fact, that it is not uncommon to find products with things like “Chosen No.1 at @Cosme” on its package.

I myself do check out reviews on @Cosme when I’m deciding to try a new product. But I might not have anything in common with the reviewer in regard to skin type or preferred products. The site would be more fun and convincing if they tagged with products like Beautecam, allowing users to get connected with people having similar skin and beauty concerns.

As of August of last year. ↩

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Japanese curation site Naver Matome boasts 41 million users, cures information overload

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.03.07

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan. Naver Matome is a very simple curation platform that launched back in July of 2009. To date it has accumulated over 41 million users and over 1.2 billion page views per month. The platform is now operated by NHN Japan (perhaps best known as the company behind the Line chat app) after a merger with Naver in November of 2011. On the site, users are able to create pages that bundle images, links, and videos under a topic of their choice, ranging from dieting, to politics, to web services. There are many reasons behind the platform’s sucess including its friendly user interface, the wide genre of topics curated, compatibility with different social networks (especially Twitter), and strong SEO for both Yahoo and Google with 70% of its traffic coming from the two search engines. But above all, Naver Matome helps users overcome information overflow. This is especially true for the younger generation, which is Naver Matome’s biggest user segment 1. Many young people have never subscribed to newspapers, and for this reason Japan’s Nikkei,…

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan.

Naver Matome is a very simple curation platform that launched back in July of 2009. To date it has accumulated over 41 million users and over 1.2 billion page views per month. The platform is now operated by NHN Japan (perhaps best known as the company behind the Line chat app) after a merger with Naver in November of 2011.

On the site, users are able to create pages that bundle images, links, and videos under a topic of their choice, ranging from dieting, to politics, to web services. There are many reasons behind the platform’s sucess including its friendly user interface, the wide genre of topics curated, compatibility with different social networks (especially Twitter), and strong SEO for both Yahoo and Google with 70% of its traffic coming from the two search engines.

cosplay-matome — Curated cosplay on Matome

But above all, Naver Matome helps users overcome information overflow. This is especially true for the younger generation, which is Naver Matome’s biggest user segment ¹. Many young people have never subscribed to newspapers, and for this reason Japan’s Nikkei, one of the country’s largest newspapers, has partnered with NHN to allow the use of texts (up to 200 characters) and images from the digital version of the newspaper in the hopes of attracting younger readers.

The total number of Matome pages now exceeds half a million. But what is the motivation for users to create these pages? Many users do it to earn pocket money. In November of 2010, Naver Matome began an incentive program, where some very popular Matome users with around half a million page views per month could receive payments as high as a few hundered thousand dollars.

Narumi is an example of popular curator with over 2.3 million monthly page views. Some topics he has created include:

Some curators specialize in tech, others in sports. Many of the curated topics are in fact very interesting and inspirational, although there are also many meant to be simply light or humorous.

Sometimes old articles from my personal blog get retweeted, and it’s likely that Naver Matome is contributing to that. The curators on the platform are great hunters of information, assisting others who may have difficulty finding relevant content. I hope that in the future traditional media can find a way to cooperate with Naver Matome and take advantage of the curation platform rather than seeing it as a threat or potential copyright violation, as some currently do.

Naver Matome is a unique corner of the Japanese net, and if you can read Japanese, you’re sure to find something you like over there. Enjoy!

The 20 to 29 demographic accounts for 34% of users, and 15 to 19 makes up 16%↩

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Niconico Douga: Japanese online video site puts discussion front and center

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.02.27

Youtube is the most popular online video site in the world, and it’s certainly big here in Japan too. But Japan also has a very unique video sharing site called Niconico Douga that’s wildly popular among netizens [1]. The site enables users to comment on top of the video they’re viewing, resulting in the feeling that everyone is together in one big room enjoying (or not enjoying) the same video. Comments are displayed at the time in the video corresponding with when they were posted, and the random marquee-style text transforms the video into an entirely new form of entertainment. Here’s a screenshot of how it looks, with the actual video included below. Niconico Douga quietly first emerged back in December of 2006, pushing out a beta version a month later. Since then, the site has offered many unique features to its users, successfully accumulating over 30 million users as of 2012. That averages out to a whopping 440,000 new users per month. The user demographic is mostly male (with 67% men and 33% women) and most of the active users are in the 20-29 age range (about 42%). There have been over 8.7 million videos uploaded to the site…

Youtube is the most popular online video site in the world, and it’s certainly big here in Japan too. But Japan also has a very unique video sharing site called Niconico Douga that’s wildly popular among netizens [1]. The site enables users to comment on top of the video they’re viewing, resulting in the feeling that everyone is together in one big room enjoying (or not enjoying) the same video. Comments are displayed at the time in the video corresponding with when they were posted, and the random marquee-style text transforms the video into an entirely new form of entertainment. Here’s a screenshot of how it looks, with the actual video included below.

Niconico Douga quietly first emerged back in December of 2006, pushing out a beta version a month later. Since then, the site has offered many unique features to its users, successfully accumulating over 30 million users as of 2012. That averages out to a whopping 440,000 new users per month. The user demographic is mostly male (with 67% men and 33% women) and most of the active users are in the 20-29 age range (about 42%). There have been over 8.7 million videos uploaded to the site in total.

In general, the site is sort of perceived as a place for otaku who typically prefer anonymous communication. However since the launch of live streaming videos, people in the mainstream have also joined the site, including but not limited to politicians, idol groups, and music bands. Currently there are almost 100 official channels that live stream content on the site. What’s interesting is that Niconico Douga allows users to sign up using Facebook credentials, and that of course requires your real name. This may have been influenced by Ustream, which uses Twitter and Facebook for sign-in.

The company behind Niconico Douga is niwango, a subsidiary of dwango which runs a music and ringtone downloading business. Niwango’s sales for first quarter of 2013 was 3.8 billion yen (or more than $41 million). Of that, one fourth comes from their premium registry that allows users to upload videos of a larger size, as well as the capability to live stream videos, create communities, and more. So far 1.8 million users have joined this premium service.

Niconico Douga is definitely a unique domestic service with no strict equivalent outside of Japan, although the site does have a multi-language interface and has been supporting English comments since October of 2011. There are services like this other different genres such as bookmarking, curation, etc, and in the future I plan to introduce you to more of these Japan-optimized sites.

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan.

Japanese people often refer to the site as NicoDou. ↩

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Meet 4 of Japan’s hottest online fashion malls

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.02.21

According to a recent study, the fashion and interior e-commerce market in Japan was about 636 billion yen (about $6.79 billion) in 2012, a 121.5% increase on last year. Many domestic apparel brands join fashion online malls instead of developing and running e-commerce sites on their own. And as a result we’re seeing lots of buzz around these fashion online malls. While it’s likely that brands will have their own e-commerce presences soon enough, the online fashion malls which are currently so popular also have intriguing plans for the future. Let’s take a closer look at a few of the major online fashion malls in Japan (in no particular order), as well as their upcoming plans. 1. Stylife ¶ Rakuten recently acquired Stylife for 1.1 billion yen (about $11,770,000), becoming the biggest shareholder in the company. This is a smart move by Rakuten as it eager to increase its reach into the fashion space. For a long time, what differentiated Stylife from other online fashion malls was its print catalogue, Look!s, that integrated with the online mall, although the company ceased publication of the print version in March of 2012. It is now available online as a web magazine. 2….

According to a recent study, the fashion and interior e-commerce market in Japan was about 636 billion yen (about $6.79 billion) in 2012, a 121.5% increase on last year. Many domestic apparel brands join fashion online malls instead of developing and running e-commerce sites on their own. And as a result we’re seeing lots of buzz around these fashion online malls. While it’s likely that brands will have their own e-commerce presences soon enough, the online fashion malls which are currently so popular also have intriguing plans for the future.

Let’s take a closer look at a few of the major online fashion malls in Japan (in no particular order), as well as their upcoming plans.

1. Stylife ¶

Rakuten recently acquired Stylife for 1.1 billion yen (about $11,770,000), becoming the biggest shareholder in the company. This is a smart move by Rakuten as it eager to increase its reach into the fashion space.

For a long time, what differentiated Stylife from other online fashion malls was its print catalogue, Look!s, that integrated with the online mall, although the company ceased publication of the print version in March of 2012. It is now available online as a web magazine.

2. Magaseek ¶

Just a month or so ago, mobile carrier NTT Docomo snatched up online fashion mall Magaseek, acquiring more than 41.67% of the company’s stock. Magaseek targets female mobile users in their 20s, and its previous owner was general trading company Itochu which still owns 25% of its shares. Similar to Rakuten, NTT Docomo’s plan is to solidify its competitiveness in fashion commerce by cooperating with Itochu, the largest general trade company in the textiles industry.

3. FashionWalker ¶

FashionWalker is another online mall which has aspirations of expanding its business to the Asian market, most notably to Korea and Taiwan. To that end, back in November of 2012 it launched an fashion e-commerce service for Korea. Its parent company is ‘World’.

FashionWalker is more content-focused compared to other online malls, creating dedicated sections for fashion stylists to introduce their latest look-books, under the category of ‘Shibuya Style Village‘.

4. Zozotown ¶

Another fashion online mall that’s accelerating its business in the Asia region is Zozotown (operated by Start Today) which was founded way back in 2004. In addition to zozotown.jp which serves the Japanese market, the company also runs zozotown.com where items can be delivered to 82 countries. In addition to the global online mall, Zozotown will launch ZozoConnect on Feburary 28 where it will introduce international brands — especially brands from Asia — to the world. At the time of launch, the site will focus on five Korean brands, including Bratson.

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan.

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In Japan, there is no escaping Rakuten’s reach

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.02.04

Rakuten-Ichiba, Japan’s biggest online mall, celebrated its 15th anniversary last May. Rakuten (JSD:4755) originally launched back in May of 1997, with just thirteen online stores. It took them seven years and five months to reach 10,000 stores. Now, the total number of stores exceeds 38,000 and the total items sold is over 95.6 million. Rakuten has managed to reach over half of the total population of Japan, reaching about 75 million registered users out of the 130 million who live in the country. According to Rakuten’s 15th year anniversary announcement, until 2003 what sold on Rakuten were items that could only be bought online. In 2004, more consumers were buying food and gourmet items. It wasn’t until around 2008 when people began to buy fashion and apparel online 1. And in 2010, offerings expanded further as consumers began to buy everyday necessities such as water and rice online. Rakuten has essentially overseen the entire history of online shopping in Japan. It is more difficult to find what’s not available on Rakuten than to find what is available. From electronics, to toys, to beauty products – almost anything can be found on Rakuten. The main categories in order of popularity are…

Rakuten-Ichiba, Japan’s biggest online mall, celebrated its 15th anniversary last May. Rakuten (JSD:4755) originally launched back in May of 1997, with just thirteen online stores. It took them seven years and five months to reach 10,000 stores. Now, the total number of stores exceeds 38,000 and the total items sold is over 95.6 million.

Rakuten has managed to reach over half of the total population of Japan, reaching about 75 million registered users out of the 130 million who live in the country. According to Rakuten’s 15th year anniversary announcement, until 2003 what sold on Rakuten were items that could only be bought online. In 2004, more consumers were buying food and gourmet items. It wasn’t until around 2008 when people began to buy fashion and apparel online ¹. And in 2010, offerings expanded further as consumers began to buy everyday necessities such as water and rice online.

Rakuten has essentially overseen the entire history of online shopping in Japan.

It is more difficult to find what’s not available on Rakuten than to find what is available. From electronics, to toys, to beauty products – almost anything can be found on Rakuten. The main categories in order of popularity are food, women’s fashion, daily necessities/stationary, furniture, and men’s fashion.

According to a mobile usage survey conducted by Ceres Inc., 84.2% of respondents have engaged in online shopping. But where are they shopping? It turns out Rakuten is the most popular destination, favored by 68.5% of respondents. Amazon and Yahoo Shopping followed, with 58.0% and 38.6% respectively ². One of the most remarkable things about Rakuten’s user base is the survey says it appears to be favored by older segments of the population, as you can see below:

Ages	Percentage
10-19	34.9
20-29	65.6
30-39	72.1
40-49	72.1
50-59	77.2

In contrast, Amazon is preferred by younger users. The fact that Japan’s population is growing older and older is amazingly working in Rakuten’s favor.

As far as Rakuten’s website design goes, I am not their biggest fan. It shows far too much information at once and is much in need of an overhaul. But similar to Craigslist, people appear to have adjusted to the confusing and cluttered design – and it might even be a risk to change that now. But the design issue is not stopping more and more stores from joining Rakuten’s mall. And they still have lots of room to grow, since the online rate of the retail industry in Japan is only 2.8% ³. The rest are still small stores selling offline.

When you search for an item to buy, whether on Google or Yahoo, Rakuten items always show up on the first page of the search result. Popular blogs using Rakuten’s affiliate service make it difficult to escape, as their sidebar widgets remind you of products you may have been recently browsing on Rakuten. The company sends out millions of newsletters by store or by item category.

Here in Japan Rakuten dominates e-commerce, and if you frequent the Japanese web, there is practically no escape from its reach. As they expand abroad, it will be interesting to see how far that reach can extend!

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan.

A competing fashion e-commerce service called Zozotown launched in December of 2004, they were a bit ahead of their time, although with the right vision, successfully turned itself into the biggest online fashion mall.↩
Another recent survey of elderly consumers found that 90% of respondents use Rakuten, followed by Amazon at 55.2%, and Yahoo Shopping at 27.0%.↩
Report published by Ministry of Economy. ↩

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With 100 million users, LINE is the Japanese Facebook

Yukari Mitsuhashi 2013.02.01

Line, one of the most popular smartphone apps in Japan, recently reached the 100 million user milestone. The free chat application was made by NHN Japan Corporation, and launched back in June of 2011. The app makes use of the user’s phone directory, allowing them to get connected with people they actually know in real life. Sound familiar? Yes, Line is in many ways aspiring to be Japan’s Facebook — the primary difference being that Line is a social service born entirely on mobile. Line is gaining popularity around the Asia region with about half of it’s users coming from outside Japan. Many celebrities in Japan are using the app including current prime minister Abe Shinzo who joined the service in January. The biggest reason behind the app’s success lies in the timing of its release. It came during a time when not-so-tech-savvy mainstream users began switching from feature phones to smartphones. With a completely different and unfamiliar tool, people turned to Line for help. With Line, all you needed to get connected with friends was their phone number. And everyone with a phone has that already. Ubiquity, and beyond! Line was first adopted by younger users but gradually gained…

Line, one of the most popular smartphone apps in Japan, recently reached the 100 million user milestone. The free chat application was made by NHN Japan Corporation, and launched back in June of 2011. The app makes use of the user’s phone directory, allowing them to get connected with people they actually know in real life. Sound familiar? Yes, Line is in many ways aspiring to be Japan’s Facebook — the primary difference being that Line is a social service born entirely on mobile.

Line is gaining popularity around the Asia region with about half of it’s users coming from outside Japan. Many celebrities in Japan are using the app including current prime minister Abe Shinzo who joined the service in January. The biggest reason behind the app’s success lies in the timing of its release. It came during a time when not-so-tech-savvy mainstream users began switching from feature phones to smartphones. With a completely different and unfamiliar tool, people turned to Line for help. With Line, all you needed to get connected with friends was their phone number. And everyone with a phone has that already.

Ubiquity, and beyond!

Line was first adopted by younger users but gradually gained popularity over mainstream users including seniors. With over 100 million users, it is the new digital marketing platform. To better take advantage of Line, many companies are conducting user surveys. A survey of married couples and their usage of Line was a particularly interesting one. It targeted 800 married men and women of age 20 to 40. 39.5% responded that the app increased communication with their spouse. 29.4% of respondents answered that their spousal relationship has improved since using the app.

line tenki — Line also launched Line Tenki, or Line Weather this past week

But since last summer, the chat app has become more of a platform than just smartphone chat application. NHN began providing a service named Line Channel in July of 2012, a year after the app’s initial release. On Line Channel, users are able to enjoy games, fortune-telling, and even discount coupons. One game, Line Pop, has been downloaded over 20 million times worldwide as of January 2013, just two months after it’s release.

But there is a cutthroat war brewing in the chat application market. Line is no doubt the pioneer in Japan, but DeNA’s Comm and Korea’s KakaoTalk have jumped in the ring recently too. At the end of 2012, Comm had been downloaded more than five million times since it’s October launch. Kakao Talk had about 70 million users as of December 2012, with 18 million of those overseas, and about 4 million of those in Japan.

We were in touch with the CEO of Viber this week as well, who pointed out that they are hoping to make a renewed push in Asia where the app has 50 million users in total. Interestingly, six million of those are in Japan.

But still, Line’s dominance is pretty secure at home, with about 41.5 million users in Japan. Stay tuned to see how it fares abroad this year.

This is part of our ‘Japanese internet in-depth’ series (RSS). Stay tuned for more features that aim to explain what makes the internet unique in Japan.

For more information on the growth of Line, please check out our interactive Line Timeline which chronicles its growth from its launch back in 2011 up until the present day.

Japanese internet in-depth

Kakaku.com: Japan’s price comparison king

Beauty products portal @Cosme is an internet mainstay among Japanese women