Trending Twitter topics in Japan

and the USRika Hashii

Supervised by Adam Acar

MethodOne of my seminar students’ graduation thesis was about the analysis of Japanese and American trending topics.

She collected the trending topics both in English and Japanese exactly at the same time (12 midnight Japan time) for 10 days. At the end, she had 100 Japanese trends collected over 10 days and 100 American trending topics collected over 10 days.

Findings

NEWS

Things

in lif

eSp

ort

TV

Chara

cter

Food

Politics #

Mes

sage

Inte

rnet

Mus

ic

Loca

tion

Compa

ny

Other

s0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

2 25

118

1

8

37

84

6

0 0

8

0 0

14

5

0 02

61

2 3 2 3 35

JapanUSA

American trending topics included more hashtags than did the Japanese sample.

Breakdown of Hashtags #

Cartoon film

TV Things in life

Radio CM Event Music Person Word Sport Location0

5

10

15

20

25

30

7

10

12

5

1 1 10 0 0 00

1

28

0 0

5

1

6

910

1

JapanUSA

####Americans tend to talk about about things in life such as #HowImetwithmybestfriend, #Iamhappybecause, #IfIhad1milliondolars, etc.####Japanese love to talk about anime and TV and, interestingly, radio programs…

To citeHashii, R. (2014). Cross-Cultural Analysis of Trending Topics on Twitter. Unpublished Graduation Thesis. Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Tarumi, Japan.