We all know that the personal is political, but in traditionally conservative Japan, what is personal is rapidly becoming social – and social media is driving the change.

When an 8.9 magnitude earthquake unleashed a tsunami on Japan’s northeast coast in March 2011, micro blogging site Twitter reported a 500 per cent increase in tweets in and out of the country within an hour of the disaster.

The technology was utilised in ways that were atypical of the Japanese, due to the collapse of mobile phone networks and some telephone landlines, says Japanese-based anthropologist Associate Professor David Slater.

Read the entire story on the College of Asia and the Pacific website.