Japan on the Web

Every Spring Japanzine magazine announces its Best of the Web, a list of Japan-related blogs, forums and websites. Readers are invited to submit websites (either their own or someone else’s) for inclusion on the Japanzine website’s voting list and, although I suspected this list was simply an excuse to get people to become members of the site, I joined and submitted Big On Japan anyway.

When the 2007 list was published in this month’s Japanzine my suspicions were confirmed - most of the sites submitted on the voting list weren’t featured in the final Best of the Web list, including (boo hoo) Big On Japan. In fairness, James Hadfield (the guy who compiled the final list) made some good selections, but I thought there were some omissions that should have been included from the voting list.
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Expat Magazines

For foreigners living in Japan there are a handful of English-language listings magazines, all of which have online incarnations. The most highbrow of these publications is Kansai Time Out, which has the most focus on culture and history. It’s also the only Japanese expat magazine that isn’t free, and this used to be reflected by the website. Their old site was dull and uninspired (presumably to encourage people to shell out for the magazine version) but after a redesign it’s looking much better, and the Kansai Guide is a useful reference section. There’re still only a couple of articles from each month’s magazine on the site though, so if you want to read everything you’ll have to go to your local bookstore and cough up ¥300. The listings are quite comprehensive (though the Kansai Clubs section is disappointing), while my favourite regular features include Jitsu Wa trivia, Diskoveries movies and the Infotech/Insites section.
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More Japanese Video Clips

In October’s Website Review I was talking about the popularity of YouTube and the availability of Japan-related videos on the site. YouTubes’s new owners are well aware of the commercial value of building internet communities/groups and this is something they’re trying to promote more on the site, making it even easier to find Japanese video clips. Some of the more popular Japan-related groups are Japan, Anime and Japan Lovers1, Japan China Korea, Pop Japan TV and Japanimation 日本, all of which have over fifty members. There are hundreds of other groups with fewer members (most with fewer than ten) and varying numbers of videos; I’ve created a Big On Japan group but we’ll just have to wait and see whether it gets any members…

A better way to find good Japanese video clips than going directly to YouTube is to let Gavin Purcell do all the hard work for you. His convenient TV In Japan site features LOADS of Japanese TV clips from YouTube, Daily Motion and Veoh, meticulously catalogued along with comments. It’s so good I’ll no doubt be stealing some clips from there and putting them on Big On Japan.

It’s all very well having a giggle at the wacky Japanese TV commercials available on the internet but for anyone with more than just a superficial interest in advertising Michael Fiorella’s Weblog Awards-nominated Japan Marketing News offers more in-depth analysis of selected commercials, as well as an overview of Japanese products and marketing in general.

Drug Smuggling Stories

The autobiographical books Midnight Express by Billy Hayes, The Damage Done by Warren Fellows and Mr Nice by Howard Marks offer fascinating insights into the consequences of drug smuggling, namely doing time in a foreign prison far away from friends and family and the impact that has on a person’s life. In all three cases the writers admit they were guilty of smuggling drugs, but what happens in cases where the guilt is less clear-cut?

Justice For Nick Baker is a site devoted to raising awareness of the trial and conviction of Nick Baker, a chef from England, who was arrested on drug smuggling charges at Tokyo’s Narita Airport in 2002. Baker maintained that he was tricked into bringing a suitcase through Customs by his travelling companion and was unaware that he was carrying drugs, but was found guilty and sentenced by a Japanese court to 14 years in prison with forced labour and a ¥5,000,000 fine. He continues to protest his innocence, and this website was set up by his family and supporters to keep people up-to-date about his situation.

Wikipedia (citing a Japan Today article by Mark Devlin) casts some doubt on his innocence, but whether you believe Baker or not is really incidental as the Justice For Nick Baker site now focuses more on the absurdities and unfairness of the Japanese judicial system. It seems the principal of being ‘innocent until proven guilty’ found in democratic countries may be inverted in Japan judging by the 99.97% conviction rate of Japanese Courts and trial by judge not jury, and the site also contains allegations of mistreatment of foreigners in Japanese prisons.

Other sites that focus on lengthy detention, unfair trials and mistreatment of prisoners in Japan include Chris Snell’s website and Amnesty International, while Wikipedia articles on Schappelle Corby and Chika Honda are interesting companion pieces to the Nick Baker article.

Console Wars

The next-generation console war stepped up a gear on Saturday with the launch of Sony’s PS3 in Japan, and naturally the console’s long-awaited (perhaps ‘long-delayed’ is more accurate) release has been the subject of a lot of discussion on the internet.

Two great accounts of the shambolic PS3 launch in Tokyo are ‘PS3 Get!’ on Tokyo Incidents and ‘Foreigners and Fights, PS3 JPN Launch’s Dark Side’ on Kotaku.com which report on chaotic queueing, poor organisation and hordes of Chinese people paid to wait in line by Japanese entrepreneurs planning to resell consoles on Yahoo Auction for over-inflated prices. Both sites have photos of the launch, and the Kotaku.com report has videos of the chaos too.

For a more general look at the console war, this month’s Japanzine has a good overview of the Xbox, PS3 and Wii. I also checked out the official MicroSoft, PlayStation and Nintendo sites and found Nintendo’s Wii to be by far the most interesting console - The official site has videos of an elderly Japanese couple, a Japanese family, a Japanese girl, and people of various other nationalities having loads of fun using the Wii-mote controller.

Japanese video clips

The biggest internet success story of 2006 has to be YouTube, the video clip site that was bought by Google for $1.65bn (£883m) this month. Showing over 100 million clips a day, the site has become popular with Japanophiles as a good source of Japanese anime, TV commercials, variety show clips, music videos and movie trailers.

Following the Google buy-out however, YouTube has become a victim of its own success and although the takeover has resulted in improved searchability of the site, its new owners have become more cautious about users uploading copyright material. While the site used to turn a blind eye to copyright violations, they’ve now started removing clips following complaints from the copyright-holders.
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