Do you know anything about the Twitter account @japan?

The world in the current era is dominated by SNS.
Millions or even billions of people are using social media to broadcast their freedom of speech.

For example, famous singer Kyari Pamyu Pamyu has almost 5 million followers at the moment.
Those who has more than a million followers on social media account might be able to make a living from their account.
But very few people know that there is an official Twitter account for Japanese government.
That is "@japan"
Oh at least Japan has over 100mil people as its population.
There should be a lot of followers here.

Let me check!

Just a little bit more than 82k followers.
As an official account for one country, it is just too small.
According to the profile of @japan

And this account also has verified official account badge.
Therefore it is surely official account.

However, as an official account,I think this is just too 地味 (low profile)...
Why is this account so 地味 (low profile) then?

Javier Castano used to be an artist and a graphic designer but lost his job when Spanish economic crisis happened.
He has foresight on internet service.
He started using Facebook few days after its service has been launched.

And when Twitter started its service, he found out that potentially popular account names such as "@ROME" "@Canada" and "@japan" are not taken yet.

There are many people who tries to get rare account names before someone get them, and sell them to someone at pretty expensive price.
But Javier was not a guy like that.
He just kept them to hand over to proper authorities.

Afterward, he actually handed over many Twitter accounts to many governments authorities.

And finally Mar 19, 2015, he officially handed over the last rare Twitter account he kept which is "@japan" to Japanese Government.
Since then @japan is managed under proper management by Japanese Government.

Since it is new account for Japan, there are not so many followers.
However this is very very important Twitter account that was protected by the courtesy of a Spanish man.

We now know that there is a warm history behind @japan account.
However why are tweets in this account made in English.

It is because this account is designed to be a bridge between Japan and foreign people.
If you are interested, how about following @japan?