Wired Looks At The Japanese Web

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]Wired: A Brief Tour of the Japanese Web
I'm sitting in a smoky room on the second floor of a Tully's Coffee in Western Tokyo, looking over the shoulder of Ichiroo Kiyota as he types on his laptop. Kiyota, an executive at Six Apart Japan, is showing me around some of the most popular ― and useless ― Web apps in the country. His Firefox browser displays what appears to be a simple search bar. "Enter your name to get an image of your brain," it says in Japanese. He types his name in the box and presses Enter. Seconds later, a two-dimensional image of a human head filled with kanji appears on the screen. "It says that I think about 'play' and 'food' all day, and that I have a tendency to lie," says Kiyota, laughing...more...

Wired: Meet Hiroyuki Nishimura, the Bad Boy of the Japanese Internet
I'm sitting in a sterile white conference room waiting for Hiroyuki Nishimura. Japan is a nation where the 3:17 train arrives every day at 3:17 ― not 3:16 or 3:18 ― and Nishimura is 45 minutes late...more...

Wired: US Fans of the Japanese Web
...Zalas is an electrical engineering grad student at Stanford, but his extracurricular passions are centered around the Japanese-language bulletin board 2channel. He was introduced to 2channel about three years ago when he noticed that friends from English-language chat rooms were posting links to 2ch.net. "I wanted to know what the Japanese fans thought of my favorite anime episodes," he says. On 2channel, Zalas found thousands of posts debating a single obscure reference that he may have otherwise missed completely. He has never been to Japan and doesn't speak the language fluently, but he taught himself the basics so he could navigate Web sites and occasionally post his own thoughts...more...

[fuckedupjapan]

Gotta say I hate that girl~ she seems to think she's the goddess of Japan and knows pretty everything there is to know. She's even gone so far as to write as book where she exposes "ancient secret Japanese household tips and tricks", like getting wax out the carpet by putting paper on top and ironing it. Can anyone here actually tell me they didn't know that already? Fixing a scratched cd with toothpaste? Anything else you want to claim as Japanese there Lisa?

Oh well, may as well plug your lame-ass book....

Japan has a way of thinking that is just . . . different. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Tokyo-born journalist Lisa Katayama's collection of urawaza (a Japanese word for secret lifestyle tricks and techniques). Want to turbocharge your sled? Spray the bottom with nonstick cooking spray. Can't find someone to water your plants while you're away? Place the plant on a water-soaked diaper, so it slowly absorbs water over time. The subject of popular TV shows and numerous books in Japan, these unusually clever solutions to everyday problems have never before been published in English until now! Urawaza collects more than 100 once-secret tricks, offering step-by-step directions and explanations in an eye-catching package as unconventional as its contents.

[ttjereth]

Gotta say I hate that girl~ she seems to think she's the goddess of Japan and knows pretty everything there is to know. She's even gone so far as to write as book where she exposes "ancient secret Japanese household tips and tricks", like getting wax out the carpet by putting paper on top and ironing it. Can anyone here actually tell me they didn't know that already? Fixing a scratched cd with toothpaste? Anything else you want to claim as Japanese there Lisa?

Oh well, may as well plug your lame-ass book....

Japan has a way of thinking that is just . . . different. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Tokyo-born journalist Lisa Katayama's collection of urawaza (a Japanese word for secret lifestyle tricks and techniques). Want to turbocharge your sled? Spray the bottom with nonstick cooking spray. Can't find someone to water your plants while you're away? Place the plant on a water-soaked diaper, so it slowly absorbs water over time. The subject of popular TV shows and numerous books in Japan, these unusually clever solutions to everyday problems have never before been published in English until now! Urawaza collects more than 100 once-secret tricks, offering step-by-step directions and explanations in an eye-catching package as unconventional as its contents.

She can come off as a bit irritating at times. Her book is mostly ripped off from similar products/shows in Japan.

[Mulboyne]

Lisa Katayama seems like a decent sort but what disappoints me about her blog and journalism is that most of the stuff she covers is already available in English elsewhere on the web, often well before she gets around to it. Given that she grew up in Japan and speaks Japanese, you'd think she might spend more time tracking down original Japanese material even though she now lives in the US. She writes about 2ch and Nico Nico Douga in those articles but you don't get the sense from her work overall that she ever regularly looks at either. Whether you share the interests of people like Patrick Macias and Steve of Tokyo Damage or not, there's no doubting their enthusiasm and willingness to dig much deeper to follow their own Japanese pop culture muse. As does Captain Japan over a much broader range of topics.

[gkanai]

Whether you share the interests of people like Patrick Macias and Steve of Tokyo Damage or not, there's no doubting their enthusiasm and willingness to dig much deeper to follow their own Japanese pop culture muse. As does Captain Japan over a much broader range of topics.

Amen. I'd put Marxy in that list too. And Mulboyne too.

[Ptyx]

Well i'll widen those critics of Katayama to about everything's Wired is writing about in their magazine.
It's the internet explained to boomers.

[gkanai]

Pre-Conde-Nast Wired was a different story. Louis and Jane's original vision was tremendous and visionary.

[Catoneinutica]

It's odd how many Nikkei-jin American corporate media seems to have covering Japan. It's almost as if the people who give out the media assignments buy into Michelle Malkin's crackpot thesis that a spooky kind of ESP exists between Nikkei-jin and Nihonjin.