This article explores the emergence of the dominant mobile social media platform in Japan, LINE. In particular, the article focuses upon its usage to maintain familial ties, especially between matriarchal connections. Drawing upon ethnographic work with 12 families over 3 years, this article seeks to provide a detailed and nuanced sense of how social mobile media is deployed intergenerationally.

Over the past few years, the notion of ‘facilitation’ has been increasingly gaining attention and acceptance in Japan, especially in the context of education and training. Today, Japanese educators think and talk about facilitation, even if it is not yet clear what facilitation is. Interestingly enough, the term facilitation does not exist in the Japanese language. Even so, the term fa-shi-ri-tei-shon somehow seems important to use, and by ‘importing’ and using it, we feel more comfortable talking about certain aspects of our communication processes. Without it we may not feel able to say anything about these aspects of communication processes. Conceiving of the act of facilitation as utilizing a set of tools enables research and writing on facilitation to examine its outcomes or effectiveness rather than being limited to considerations of it as a process. This article introduces and applies the idea of social construction of technology in order to examine the notion of facilitation.

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