In Japan, the online social scene is shy

TOKYO -- Like a lot of 20-year-olds, Kae Takahashi has a page on U.S.-based MySpace, and there is no mistaking it for anyone else's.

It's got pictures of the funky Tokyoite modeling the clothes she designs in her spare time, along with her name, plus personal details and ramblings in slightly awkward English about her love life.

Switch to her site on mixi, Japan's dominant online hangout, and her identity vanishes.

There, Takahashi uses a fake name and says she is an 88-year-old from the town of "Christmas." Her profile is locked to outsiders.

Takahashi is far from alone: the vast majority of mixi's roughly 15 million users don't reveal anything about themselves.

It's not just mixi. It's Japan.

YouTube is wildly successful here, but rare is the user who follows the site's enticement to "Broadcast Yourself." Posting pet videos is far more popular, and has bred a generation of animal celebrities.

On large matchmaking sites like Match.com the whole point is to open up and meet strangers. But fewer than half of Match's paying members in Japan are willing to post their photos, compared with nearly all members in the U.S.

Welcome to Japan's online social scene, where you're unlikely to meet anyone you don't know already. The early promises of a new, open social frontier, akin to the identity-centric world of Facebook and MySpace in the U.S., have been replaced by a realm where people stay safely within their circles of friends and few reveal themselves to strangers.

"There is the sense that, 'My face just isn't that interesting, or I'm not attractive — there is nothing special about me to show people,"' says Tetsuya Shibui, a writer who has long followed the Internet in Japan.

Indeed, the Japanese virtual world has turned out just like the real one.

People rarely give their first names to those they don't know well. Spontaneous exchanges are uncommon even on the tightly packed trains and streets of Tokyo. TV news shows often blur the faces of those caught in background footage and photos to protect their privacy.