This paper investigates data technology primarily developed in Japan from the viewpoint of data sovereignty (Hummel et al. 2021). It focuses on LINE, the dominant messaging app in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. LINE functions as a platform for platforms and, similar to WeChat in China and KakaoTalk in South Korea, offers more functionality than merely messaging.
Concerning data of Japanese users stored by LINE, issues of unwanted (though not illegal) access from abroad and storage on servers outside of Japan gained attention in Japanese mass media in March 2021. Asking the corresponding questions would have been of relevance for many years, especially since Japan’s data protection regime was recognized as equivalent to the European one in early 2019 – but this was seldomly done. However, in early 2021, issues of access and storage of this data were not only considered as relevant to individuals, but were framed as pertaining to national security. In order to make sense of this, the geopolitical background needs to be considered: the confrontation between the USA and China and the Japanese initiative Data Free Flow with Trust.
Combining the new materialist perspective of agential realism (Barad 2007) with aspects of decolonial theory (Mignolo and Walsh 2018), this paper contributes to understanding how nation states reshape political geographies of data and how private companies take part in their extraction. If the USA and China are two poles of colonial power regarding data (Couldry and Mejias 2019), Japan can clearly be identified as another one. Softbank, one of the owners of LINE, is one of the major Japanese extraction companies; as it will get clear, the strongly international profile of Softbank was enabled precisely through Japan’s past as a territorial colonial power.
Mots clés : Japan|Data sovereignty|Geopolitics of data|New materialism|Decolonial theory
A104413HK