Meet Hiroyuki Nishimura, the Bad Boy of the Japanese Internet

I'm sitting in a sterile white conference room waiting for Hiroyuki Nishimura. Japan is a nation where the 3:17 train arrives every day at 3:17 — not 3:16 or 3:18 — and Nishimura is 45 minutes late. The PR assistant who painstakingly coordinated our interview, a typical salaryman with a dark suit and receding hairline, looks increasingly uncomfortable.

"I was late to two other meetings today," Nishimura says when he finally arrives. It's a semi-apology, delivered as he shuffles across the room in Velcro sandals. He has a slightly nasal Tokyo accent and speaks in an informal idiom rarely used in business settings. "I can't wake up in the morning or get to places on time. I often wonder whether I'm an adequate human being. Seriously."

In Japan, there are specific rituals surrounding the exchange of business cards. It's customary to proffer your card with two hands while bowing slightly, then study the other person's card intently for several seconds before putting it away. Nishimura fumbles in the pockets of his cargo pants, then sticks his card in my face as he receives mine with a dismissive nod.

The stereotype of Japanese office culture — rigid, formal, and hierarchical — is still the norm in most of the country. Nishimura observes none of those rules. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, the lackadaisical 31-year-old with a soul patch and wispy goatee has become the most influential figure on the Japanese Web.

We're in the downtown Tokyo headquarters of Dwango, the company that runs a Web video site called Nico Nico Douga (Smiley Smiley Video). In just over a year, Nicodou, as it's affectionately known, has become the fifth-biggest online time-suck in Japan, with users spending more than 12 million hours on the site each month. Dwango owes much of that success to its partnership with Nishimura.

His salesmanship is unconventional, to say the least. "Nico Nico Douga is a total waste," he says with a grin. "You'd be in trouble if you didn't have Google, but you wouldn't dieif Nico Nico Douga didn't exist. But waste is our culture in Japan; look at how we package each candy individually." It's true — in Japan, if you buy a bag of gummies, each piece inside is swaddled in its own superfluous wrapper.

Nishimura has given his countrymen the tools to cut through all that packaging. He started with 2channel, a bulletin board service he created in 1999. It's become one of the few places where Japanese people can say exactly what they feel without concern for decorum or propriety.

Now Nicodou has brought the 2channel style of community to Web video. The site lets users plaster their comments directly on top of any uploaded video. Posts are sometimes so numerous that they obscure the clips. "Even when the videos are boring, the viewers are getting together and entertaining each other," Nishimura says.

"Hiroyuki's figuring it out as he goes along, not really giving a shit, but he hit the nail on the head," says Joi Ito, a Tokyo-based venture capitalist and CEO of Creative Commons. "Japan is an unhappy culture. The people are lonely and depressed, and the Internet is a release valve."

To the online communities at 2channel and Nicodou, Nishimura is a folk hero and role model. (In Japan he's referred to solely by his first name, a privilege afforded only to top-tier pop stars and TV heartthrobs.) And in a nation that actually has a word for "death from overwork," Nishimura takes pains to point out that he hasn't had to exert himself much to achieve success and fame. He's just a slacker who showed a nation how to goof off. In his 2007 book Why 2channel Will Never Fail, he wrote: "If running the site required me to get up at 9 am every morning, wear a suit, and not have time to play videogames, I'd probably quit."

"I taught myself to code in grade school," Nishimura says. "After that I did some odd jobs, and now I'm here." He gestures at the conference room and bows with exaggerated self-effacement, as if to apologize for his boring life and easy path to success. Nishimura is cracking wise; he thinks it's ridiculous that a journalist would travel from America to interview him about his silly Web sites. In the lingo of 2channel forum posters, I am kuki yomenai — someone who "can't read the air," who isn't in on the joke.