[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...