· July, 2013

Stories about Japan from July, 2013

An Undeniably Racist Song, ‘Asian Girlz’ Sparks Controversy

  31 July 2013

Packed with Asian stereotypes and fetishes, song ‘Asian Girlz’ by ‘Day Above Ground’ has invited controversy and angry comments. Blogger Angry Asian Man typed down the entire lyrics to comment [if they have not] ‘run out of stereotypical Oriental stuff to list off, the song would have gone on for another ten minutes”. The...

Fukushima: No Place Like Home

  22 July 2013

‘No Time for Anger [de]’, a visualization journal by a team of Swiss media reporter and designers, illustrates Fukushima two years after the triple catastrophe of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami followed by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011. Fearing radiation, some residents sought evacuation to other areas...

Data Visualization: Electric Japan

  15 July 2013

Electrical Japan [ja], a website by researcher Asanobu Kitamoto [ja] lets you explore electric power plants and energy consumption in Japan through data-visualization. The color of the dots represents the type of power plant, for example fossil-fuel plants are red and hydroelectric plants are blue. The size of the dot represents the amount of power generated....

Web Popularity of Japan's Candidates Ranked

  15 July 2013

In the midst of Japan's first election campaign where politicians are officially allowed to use social media, freelance engineer Masahide Mori [ja] has compiled a ranking [ja] based on the number of likes and the number of subscribers on the Facebook pages of candidates. Users can view increase and decrease of Facebook...

Former Fukushima Plant Manager Passes Away

  9 July 2013

Masao Yoshida, the manager at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant at the time of the accident in Japan, died on July 9, 2013. He had esophageal cancer. Many people expressed condolences on social media, and EX-SKF blog translated more details on Yoshida's unfulfilled dream to speak for workers and stabilize the...

Japan: Winny Developer Dies at 42

  8 July 2013

Isamu Kaneko, the Japanese developer of file-sharing software Winny, died due to an undisclosed illness on July 8, 2013 at the age of 42. He was charged in 2006 with “assisting” Winny users to violate copyright, but the case against him was later overturned and his acquittal upheld by the country's Supreme...