How do people in Japan use Social Media?

According to Twitter's official blog (blog.twitter.com), when the clock stuck midnight last New Year's Eve, Japanese Twitter users went crazy, recording 6,939 tweets per second-a new record at the time. In fact, globally 14 percent of all tweets are in Japanese-second only to English, with 50 percent-which explains why Japanese was the second language to be added to twitter menus. And according to Virginia-based research firm ComScore, 20 percent of all Japanese are using Twitter, while only 8 percent of people in the United States are users. Twitter has grown so much in Japan that it now has more visitors than Japan's most well-known social network service, Mixi. And last month, Twitter appointed their first international manager outside the U.S-in Japan. But why has Twitter been embraced so rapidly here?