the intranational online clubhouse

It’s not easy to get a yahoo.co.jp email address. It used to be easier — anyone could do it — but now it requires a Japanese phone number.

“Oh, that’s easy, right? You just go visit or get a VoIP number” — nope! Sorry! Tourists get data-only SIMs. You will never get a Japanese phone number that could call or text or whatever just for visiting. For that, you’ll need a Japanese bank account — which you only get if you have proof of long-term residency.

Now imagine that a lot of things are gated around having a Japanese phone number: restaurant bookings, beauty parlours, really anywhere they don’t want foreigners and don’t want to just say that. But it also extends online for software purchases, imageboards…

By using a very loose affiliative web of restrictions, Japan has isolated a section of its internet, its society, for itself. You could imagine them doing the same with just email addresses instead of phone numbers; and they probably did before Gmail became the most common email provider. It used to be Yahoo! Japan; Softbank; Docomo, whatever. Now it’s hard to substantiate that you’re actually a resident from email alone.¹

Networks for “networks”

When I was first in Japan, I obsessively tried to get a yahoo.co.jp address. The combination of “retro” and “weeb” aesthetics proved too strong for me to resist and so every time my friend looked over at me on the metro, on a bus, in a restaurant, I was looking up some plot by which I could get a Yahoo! Japan email address. I wasn’t going to ask someone — that felt nuts. People tend to find tourists either annoying or novel. They are not looking to bind themselves to you or just do a random, arbitrary favour that seems strange or sketchy. So, I never got one. I satisfied myself with a very-not-Japanese provider’s .jp email and kept it there.

In retrospect, I feel like I wasn’t thinking enough about why the restrictions were there. They are keeping a garden loosely tucked away for themselves. And why not? Why is that a strange, separate thing to do? Why don’t other places do that?²

Well, there’s no reason to. Canadian society doesn’t have any national, institutional, or cultural reservations necessitating self-segregation. It’s profoundly “newcomer-friendly” (why can’t we just say ‘immigrant’?), even if we seem to exploit them more than integrate them — and so online we prefer to join with the cyber-morass. Separate but included, Quebec’s tactic is to make its unilingualism alone the cost of entry, but otherwise to be as welcoming as any other place here. .quebec signifies Différence, but there’s no one is gating their internet forum on having a Vidéotron email. Institutionally there’s arbitrary restrictions on some services; the University of Toronto doesn’t let just anyone get a card; only alumni or other institutional researchers.

The point is that we construct our networks to resemble and reify our interpersonal networks. There is no feeling of “differentness” that has necessitated a separation, of creating a boundary around any one club online or off. At first we used ISPs or institutional email addresses (sympatico.ca, rogers.com, start.ca, videotron.ca). But if you have ever had to jump providers, you realise how tricky and turbulent that is; so, like Americans, we use corporate-provided free providers (hotmail.com → live.com → outlook.com, yahoo.ca, gmail.com).

I sort of wonder why it is we have no national forum; no Canada-specific gated community, nothing that requires one person per account, each account verifiably a resident, etc. I wonder why we don’t create restrictions online in any other respect. My fediverse instance is gated simply by asking someone for an invite. Paralogue has nothing stopping you from joining. Why not create a community where you restrict it to specific emal providers that you need to be x,y,z to ever obtain?

That said, I don’t have any Canadian-specific email.³ I have no email provider of any kind that endows “status” or “reputation”; just ones anyone could obtain. ⁴ And I feel, ultimately, that it would be great if anyone joined these communities at all if they fit the feel of the space. How is it that this world is both so big and so small?