· March, 2008

Stories about Japan from March, 2008

Japan: Views on Yasukuni, the movie

A documentary film about the controversial Yasukuni shrine, shot by a Chinese filmmaker through funding by a Japanese government agency, has sparked debate and discussion after a group within the ruling LDP party convened a screening to assess its "neutrality". Bloggers offer differing views on the move and on the idea of their government subsidizing what some see as a "political" film.

31 March 2008

Japan: Ikeda Nobuo's Spectrum Japan Blog

Blogger and economics professor Ikeda Nobuo has started [ja] an English-language blog entitled “Spectrum Japan” focused on spectrum policy in Japan. In the first post, he explains that the Japanese...

26 March 2008

Japan: Nobody Outpolls Asō

Global Talk 21 highlighted a poll on “Who among the current Diet members do you think is most appropriate as the next Prime Minister?” The choice on “nobody” has outpolled...

25 March 2008

Japan: The New Era of Video

Last Friday, Japan's national broadcaster aired a special on the "New Era of Video" predicting changes in the industry of broadcast television that will shake the foundation of mass media. But why would a broadcaster as big as NHK air a TV special about the end of TV? Wouldn't that be against its own interests? Blogger Kobayashi Akihito asked if there wasn't more to the NHK special than meets the eye.

24 March 2008

Japan: Eyes on Tibet

Essa at the Uncategorizable Blog proposes (in Japanese and also in English) a simple way for bloggers to focus attention on Tibet, by adding a Tibet-related link to their everyday...

24 March 2008

Japan: Rokkasho nuclear reprocessing plant fuels debate

The village of Rokkasho, situated Aomori prefecture in the north of Japan's main island Honshū, hosts a nuclear facility for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, the first of its kind in Japan. While the scale of this reprocessing plant dwarfs standard nuclear plants, most Japanese citizens have up to recently known little to nothing of its existence. This has started to change recently with demonstrations held in various parts of the country by citizen groups. Bloggers have also picked up this debate, offering varying perspectives on the costs and benefits of the latest development of Japan's nuclear industry.

21 March 2008

Japan: Crackdown on File Sharing?

Danny Choo writes about an announcement that Japanese ISPs are going to forcibly cut off users who share files over the Internet, pointing out differences between English-language and Japanese-language coverage...

17 March 2008

Japan: Tibet Tibet

Blogger and artist Takami Toshio writes about the Japanese film Tibet Tibet [ja] at his blog Radical Imagination. He points out the similarity in perspectives between the director, who is...

17 March 2008

Japan: Support for Tibet

As fires rage on in the streets of Lhasa, bloggers in another part of the world have been anxiously following developments in Tibet with open eyes and open ears. Over the weekend, as mainstream media in Japan presented what many criticized as toned-down coverage of ongoing events in Lhasa, the word "Tibet" climbed to number one on Japanese blog search engines with thousands of entries largely in support of the uprising.

17 March 2008

Japan: Obama gets support from Japanese city

Excitement is growing in a sleepy fishing town on the coast of the Japan Sea. The city of Obama, whose name means “little beach” in Japanese, is receiving unusual attention for its coincidental resemblance to the name of a certain US presidential candidate.

16 March 2008

Japan: Mythical Body Worm

Edo from Pink Tentacle introduces a 16th Century medical book which explains body diseases with body worms and describes how to fight them with acupuncture and herbal remedies.

13 March 2008