The present study explores how online communities affect real-world personal relations based on a cross-cultural survey conducted in Japan and Korea. Findings indicate that the gratifications of online communities moderate the effects of online communities on social participation. Online communities are categorized into a real-group-based community and a virtual-network-based community. The membership of real-group-based online community is positively correlated with social bonding gratification and negatively correlated with information- seeking gratification. Japanese users prefer more virtual-network-based online communities, while their Korean counterparts prefer real-group-based online communities. Korean users are more active in online communities and seek a higher level of socializing gratifications, such as social bonding and making new friends, when compared with their Japanese counterparts. These results indicate that in Korea, personal relations via the online community are closely associated with the real-world personal relations, but this is not the case in Japan. This study suggests that the effects of the Internet are culture-specific and that the online community can serve a different function in different cultural environments.

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"Anshin" is an emotion in Japanese that is difficult to translate because it is vague, varies from person to person, and is subjective. It means something like "a feeling of contentment". The demand for Internet use with "Anshin" is high. We believe that the emotion and the demand could be universal. To study "Anshin," we conducted group interviews as our first step. We obtained 95/157 cases of "Anshin"/anxiety from 28 people. From the results, we found that studying anxiety is valuable. Anxiety is a kind of opposite concept to "Anshin" and controlling it leads to a kind of "Anshin." To discuss this, we constructed a model of the process of anxiety generation and selected candidates for the related elements. After investigating obtained cases, we produced a questionnaire for Internet anxieties to prepare the evaluation of them.

Public Perceptions of "Fake News" in the United States and JapanConcerns about the spread of misinformation and its implications for democratic participation have increased worldwide. The concept of fake news and its implications largely has been studied within a western context. There are few studies that examine empirically how fake news and misinformation are manifested in East Asian democracies. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the way that fake news is perceived in Japan and the United States. While research on misinformation has proliferated, much of it focuses on the message source. Studies primarily treat the audience as a target that is subject to manipulation. This paper views the audience in more active terms as it examines the public's understanding of fake news in the American and Japanese contexts. The paper addresses the following questions in comparative perspective: What does the term "fake news" mean to the public? To what extent does the public perceive misleading information to be present in media coverage of politics and elections? What sources do Japanese and American voters use for political information? Where are Japanese and American voters exposed to misleading information? Finally, how do voters' views of misleading information differ based upon their political orientations, such as political interest, party identification, and support for leaders, and their media use habits?