Latest posts by Chris Salzberg from July, 2008
Japan: Toyota's Just-In-Time System and the Akihabara Killings (Part 1)
When Tomohiro Kato killed 7 people and injured many more in Tokyo's Akihabara district last month, the details of his life became the talk of the Japanese blogging world. Among these conversations, the murders sparked a huge number of conversations on the country's temp worker industry, as Kato himself worked as a temp worker at a factory under Toyota. No single blog entry however attracted as much attention as did a post by blogger boiledema, published two days after the incident and bookmarked on Hatena by a staggering 1366 users. In this first part of a two-part series, we translate the first half of boiledema's original blog post.
Japan: Communist Party gets boost from Nico Nico Douga
It is a long time since the Japanese Communist Party had any luck in Japanese politics, but with help from no other than Japan's popular video sharing site, Nico Nico Douga, this may be changing. A 51-minute video of a February 8th speech by Chairman Kazuo Shii of the JCP registered over ten thousand comments on the video sharing site, and there are now reports that interest in the party among people in their 20s and 30s is way up.
Japan: Mainichi's “Foreign Staff”
In the latest step in a long and drawn out controversy, Mainichi newspaper has issued a 3-page official apology in response to the harsh backlash concerning its English-language WaiWai column. Blogger polimediauk responds to the news, questioning the tendency to divide foreign and Japanese staff at the English-language Mainichi site and treat them differently.
Japan: The Linguistics of Nico Nico Douga
Metagold is a research blog based out of a project at Goldsmiths College, University of London, focused exclusively on the video sharing web service Nico Nico Douga. In a July 15th post, Metagold takes up the story of a linguist at Kyoto University, Kanamaru-san (id:kana0355 [ja]), who “asks how the...
Japan: Is it all over for Mainichi?
Nobuo Ikeda writes in English and in Japanese about the latest step in the drawn-out WaiWai controversy: after a string of earlier statements, Mainichi has issued a 3-page-long official apology, in which it pledges “to rehabilitate [Mainichi Daily News] into a site that can dispatch information to the world that...
Japan: Chinese Novelist wins Akutagawa Award
On Tuesday, the Akutagawa Award for Fiction, considered the most prestigious literary prize in Japan, was awarded to Chinese novelist Yang Yi for her work, “Tokiga nijimu asa”. Yang, who was born in Harbin and whose native language is Chinese, learned Japanese after she came to Japan in 1987. In this post, reactions to the award in Japanese and Chinese media, blogs and forums.
Japan: View from Ecuador on WaiWai “Child Hunt”
WaiWai was a column in Japan's fourth largest newspaper Mainichi, published for years in the English version of their website and featuring some of the most scandalous (and mostly fabricated) articles from Japan's weekly tabloids, translated to English with added “embellishments”. In recent weeks, the story of WaiWai erupted on the Japanese Internet, users reacting to WaiWai's negative depiction of Japan. One Japanese blogger living in Ecuador wrote a blog post expressing outrage at a WaiWai article about Japanese supposedly "hunting" for children in Ecuador.
Japan: Comment about abductions sparks harsh reactions
LDP member Koichi Kato has sparked harsh reactions from bloggers with a comment he made on July 7th. In the comment, Kato connected the stagnation of Japanese-Korea negotiations with the government decision in 2002 not to return 5 Japanese abductees to North Korea after they had been delivered to Japan by North Korea for what was expected to be a short time. The abductees were among a group of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Japan: 2ch and Waiwai
W. David MARX at META no TAME writes about the flaming of Mainichi's “WaiWai” column on 2channel, Japan's largest internet forum. Mainichi announced late last month that the column had been discontinued due to a harsh reaction from Japanese audiences, upset at the often sensational choice of topics covered in...
