Tokyo Metblogs » Web

Nipponkan

MBHQ — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 01:14:13 +0000

Nipponkan is a new site that describes itself as “A vitamin C blend of Japan related links found at del.icio.us, Digg and Flickr”. Recent postings at the site include:

Japanese type foundries with free fonts
Online National Diet Library materials (a lot more interesting than it may sound)
Japan on Weather Bonk
Four Japanese blog search engines
Canned coffee goodness (link to a canned-coffee site maintained by Chin Music Press)
Japanese grammar resources
MegaTokyo (online manga)
Yahoo! Japan’s “scrolling maps” beta
Crash course “Tokyo” (link to Justin Hall travel guide to Tokyo)
Edomoji and more (Edo era fonts)

Yongfook speaks

MBHQ — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 16:53:05 +0000

Yongfook.com fans were legion long before Yongfook himself moved his base of operations from its former home (in a top-secret location, but widely rumored to have been within a dormant volcano in Kyushu) to its present one (at a “web consultancy” front company in Setagaya-ku here in Tokyo).

Since that auspicious event (which occurred just last August, and which many here have come to refer to simply as “the Big Move”), we’ve seen a kind of Yongfook mania spread through Tokyo — Johnny-come-lately fans popping up all over the place, making all manner of dubious claims (”Me and Yongfook go waaay back — we used to hang out in my parents’ garage and smoke tons of weed and read porno mags and talk about how we was gonna be rock stars someday”, etc.) to try to show how hip they are to Yongfook.

A lot of fans would have had a hard time imagining how Yongfook could get any cooler. I will admit that I was one of them. But in true Yongfook fashion, he has found a way to take it to the next level. Over the holidays, while the rest of us were all out just getting sloppy drunk, Yongfook was apparently hard at work (though he also was apparently sloppy drunk the whole time). And you can now sample for yourself the fruits of his genius by visiting the newly redesigned Yongfook.com.

The biggest and best surprise for fans: Yongfook speaks. His first entry for the redesigned site is a short one, but with a link to a podcast feed, the first offering of which is a 13-minute podcast in which you can — along with listening to some of his original music — hear him speaking in his own words about his alcohol preferences and giving his thoughts on topics ranging from humping whales to doggy-style vs. missionary-style sex.

True fans will remember that this is not Yongfook’s virgin podcast. The first one he did was back in May of last year. Perhaps that was actually a secret market-research feeler of some kind. Regardless, the Yongfook.com team appears to have made a clear move in the direction of giving us lots of Yongfook talk in the future:

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2channel, blogging, and “real news”

MBHQ — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 02:11:13 +0000

If you live outside of Japan and/or have never been here, I guess the chances are you’ve probably never heard of 2channel. (Or maybe you have. I don’t get away from Japan more than once or twice a year any more, so I can’t really claim to know.) Anyway, if you haven’t heard of it, do yourself a favor and head over to the Wikipedia site to read the 2channel article there. That article begins with the following:

2channel (2ちゃんねる, pronounced “ni-channeru”, 2ch for short) is the largest Internet forum in the world. With over 10 million visitors every day (as of 2001), it is gaining significant influence in Japanese society, approaching that of traditional mass media such as TV, radio and magazines.

As impressive as that may sound, I think it understates the influence that 2channel has had in Japan. Read a little further down in that article, and you will find this:

What is unique about this website is its scale and its management style. It has more than 600 active boards (Japanese ita) such as “Social News”, “Computers” and “Cooking”, making it the most comprehensive forum in Japan. Each board usually has thousands of specific threads, such as “Coming election in Tokyo: 4th vote”, “P4 vs. Athlon: overheating 51 times”, and “Best wheat for making Pizza: 3rd slice”.

And as far as the 2channel “management style”, well, there is none. At all. It is basically one big information free-for-all. And a completely anonymous one, at that. Because another feature that has set 2channel apart is that all posting there is done
anonymously.

Anyway, I am far from an expert on 2channel. But from what I know and have seen of it, I know that it is in part a resource where people go to ask questions and get some (hopefully) expert advice — even on the most obscure topics. People also rely on 2channel as a real-time source for breaking news and for discussion about breaking news.Yeah, some of it is just hearsay, but there are also firsthand reports, including reports from people who otherwise would not be sharing information unless they could do share it anonymously.

Now, as you would probably expect, users at 2channel can and do sometimes post bogus information. Sometimes they do it just for fun, sometimes for more sinister reasons. Given all that, the natural question to ask is: How do you know whom and what to trust there?

The answer to the “How do you know whom and what to trust at 2channel?” question is: You don’t. And the people (the smart ones at least) who use it as a source of information know that they can’t trust everything they read there. So they’re forced to fall back on the same resource that most smart people have learned from experience to rely on: Their own critical thinking skills.

I guess that experienced 2channelers end up acquiring a point of view that they need to take anything they read there “with a grain of salt”, and not just completely trust it. I personally think that’s a point of view that people should take when judging any media, anywhere.

Do you trust the New York Times?

Consider how easily the New York Times allowed itself, through one of its “star” reporters, Judith “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Miller, to be abused as a pre-war proganda tool for the invasion of Iraq. Or consider the fact that much more recently, the same newspaper agreed (at the request of someone in that same junta which they now fully know was responsible for feeding them all the WMD propaganda for the Judith Miller pieces that they have since retracted) to suppress for more than one year the news that Bush had unilaterally given an executive OK to the US National Security Council for a program to spy on private communications among US citizens within the US — in clear violation of existing US law and without any judicial oversight of any kind, including no oversight by that very courts that exist for reviewing these things in total secrecy.

So we have on one hand 2channel, which almost by its very design is not meant to be completely trusted. And on the other hand, we have traditional journalism, which asks you to trust it, but as we have seen, sometimes (perhaps often) betrays that trust.

Is “citizen journalism” a joke?

Which leads me to a posting by Dave! that I came across at Metblogs Chicago. It’s titled Chi-Cry-Me-A-Reader and is a response to a recent article in the Chicago Reader, written by one Michael Lenehan and titled “A Year Without Journalism: Let

Tokyo city guide in Wiki form?

MBHQ — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 18:14:20 +0000

Stephen Booth over at Metroblogging Birmingham has posted an announcement about the return of Birmingham OpenGuide, a guide to Birmingham implemented as a Wiki so it can be updated by anyone.

We need an OpenGuide for Tokyo. Anybody want to volunteer to set it up and/or host it?

The Birmingham guide appears to have been built using a kit provided by a larger project, OpenGuides. There’s a related article at the O’Reilly Perl.com site. Most of the existing OpenGuide sites seem to be for cities in the UK, but there are also ones for Vienna and for Boston and St. Paul in the US.

The OpenGuides site provides some details about software and setup for putting a OpenGuides city site together. It looks like a nice system. Anyway, it’d be great to have a user-editable city guide for Tokyo, regardless of what software it runs on. So if you have the chops and/or the bandwidth for hosting such as site, chime up here, and let’s see if we can manage to bring some people together to volunteer help in setting it up and getting it rolling.

Save Tokyo Damage Report

MBHQ — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:47:30 +0000

Tokyo Damage
Report is one of the best and most well-known weblogs published from Tokyo – written up in Boing Boing and in countless other places. But it’s now at serious risk of coming to an end. Find out why and find out how you might be able to help save it.

About Tokyo Damage Report
How you can help

About Tokyo Damage Report

Tokyo Damage
Report has been self-described this way:

This page is about interesting (meaning, fucked up) things that one can do in Tokyo. punk, visual, cosplay, s/m, gothic, street trends, capsule hotels, bizarre magazines, random subcultures, and bad Engrish. . . . .also it is about tokyo’s urban legends: square watermelons, Sanrio condoms, politically incorrect vending machines, etc.

Another part of the site describes certain pages this way:

These pages are ’safe for work’ . . . provided that you work as a pornographer

In short, it covers some unusual things. Things that certain types of people might find disturbing. And a few things that, well, actually just about anybody would find plain disturbing. If you are prudish or easily offended or consider yourself politically correct, it is not the site for you.

On the other hand, if you’re interested in the freakier aspects of Japanese pop culture (to use the word culture in its broadest possible sense), you’ll find plenty to keep you interested at TDG. In fact, on your first visit, it may all seem overwhelming. Though it does have a Google-powered search form to help,
TDR’s idiosyncratic site design can make trying to navigate through it a bit of a disorienting experience. But time spent on a journey through it will pay off bigtime Here are just a handful of examples of what you’ll come across there:

Underground Tokyo Guidebook – a goldmine of info about weird and otherwise off-the-beaten-track places of interest in the city
Hentai dictionary: Japanese perversions, fetishes and AV slang
a report, with photos, from a sewage trade show
a book that appears to be a photo-illustrated how-to sex guide from the 60s but may in fact be something much weirder
a genuine “adult english” textbook from 1980, which somehow manages to be both quaint and disturbing at the same time
odd pocket games – Digital Drugs, Pocket Breeder (horse breeding)
a cheat guide for a pornographic video game

What really makes the site unique is not just the massive amount of weirdness gathered there, but the commentary about it all from the guy who maintains the site. For example, the following:

apparently for some guys, not only is it too difficult to have sex with living human females, it’s ALSO TOO DIFFICULT TO SCORE WITH THEM IN X-RATED VIDEOGAMES TOO

And here’s a comment about a visit to a cosplay hostess club:

I would heartily reccomend this club to guys who find that blind dates are not awkward or expensive enough, end in sex too often, and do not generally have enough lasers

How you can help

Tokyo Damage Report is the product of the mind of one person: Steven Schultz.. He found all the bizarre stuff assembled there, took most of the photos, scanned in all the weird magazines, and wrote every word of the smartass commentary on it all.

Well, unfortunately, it seems that after coming back from a trip abroad a while back, he was informed by the Immigration authorities that he can no longer legally stay in Japan unless he gets an official visa of some kind – work, student, cultural, whatever. (He had been going back and forth on a tourist visa).

And despite spending most of his time over the last few weeks
urgently trying to make arrangements for a way to get permission to stay here in Japan, he
has not yet found a way. He hasn’t yet been able to land a job that provides a work
visa, and not been able to arrange for a visa of any other kind.
And he’s now at quite serious risk of being forced to leave the
country. In fact, unless some miracle of God happens, it appears
he’ll have to leave by January 24th, and not be able to come back,
ever, unless/until he gets something other than a tourist
visa.

He has a running log about the experience at his site.

So, if you’re reading this and you happen to be in the position
of being able to help arrange something that might provide him
with a proper visa – say, employment that would come with a
work visa – or if you have even a remote idea of someone
else who might be, please contact him.

His e-mail address is on the Tokyo Damage
Report front page (the right-hand side of the page, in
Japanese). There’s another address that he also checks, which is
near the
bottom of the site-map page for the site.

If you can help, contact him. Soon. Because if Steven goes, Tokyo Damage Report
goes with him, and we will have lost something impossible to replace,

Mixi

MBHQ — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 01:41:27 +0000

Mixi is a popular social-networking site (like Orkut or Friendster except that is doesn’t suck) that’s based here in Japan, though anybody anywhere can join it. (I think there are actually a significant number of people living outside of Japan who are using it.)

I think you can only join it by invitation from somebody who already belongs. And the interface is all in Japanese, so if you can’t read Japanese, it would probably be a bit tough to navigate through. But if you do join it and spend some time wandering around there, it can give you some insight into popular culture here.

There are currently more than 2.4 million registered accounts on Mixi. I can tell that because Mixi URLs for user profiles include a sequentially numbered ID that is unique to each user. And user number 1 is Ketama Batara, who I met before and who (I think) designed most of the Perl code that Mixi runs on.

User number 299825 is me, currently going by the handle/nickname バッドマザファカー.

By the way, Mixi lets you change your nickname whenever you want. It lets you do a lot of things that other social-networking sites don’t let you do. And it lets you do them well. For example, you can keep a diary/blog there (or if you have a blog elsewhere, just point it at the Atom (or RSS) feed for your blog), and you have a pane in your personal Mixi home page that shows links to all your friends’ blogs. And every time you update your own diary/blog, your Mixi friends will know, because a little link will show up there with the title.

Yeah, nothing particularly revolutionary there. It just works. Works well, works the way it should. Unlike the corresponding feature at, say Orkut. And unlike Orkut, Mixi is spam-free. I have never gotten spammed on Mixi. Yeah, I get unsolicited and perhaps unwelcome messages from other users at times — people I don’t know. But those are just peer-to-peer messages, not broadcast spam Orkut-style. (By the way, I wonder if by now, Orkut Buyukkokten is regretting naming Orkut after himself. I think that I might, if I were him.)

Anyway, another feature that works really well in Mixi is the “Community” feature. You can easily find and join communities, and create new ones of you want. Here is a list of some of the ones I’ve created there:

携帯フルブラウザ (keitai full browser)
モジョ・ジョジョ (Mojo Jojo, from the Powerpuff Girls)
全日本酔払い連合 (All Japan Drunkard Association)
トリニティー (Trinity, from the Matrix)
ジャック・ブレル (Jacques Brel)
パロアルト研究所 (XEROX PARC)

There are currently more than 500,000 registered Mixi communities (I know because they also have unique IDs in their URLs.)

Mixi is growing rapidly. I have heard that new users are currently joining Mixi at the rate of at least 10,000 each day, which, if it keeps up at that rate, will mean that it will have nearly 6 million users by the end of next year. I would not be surprised if the rate were to increase and the number of users ended up being quite a bit more than that by this time next year.

Christmas, Ghosts, and Loneliness in Tokyo

MBHQ — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 22:04:14 +0000

It’s Christmas Day here, and finding myself alone with time to do
a little wandering, I drifted into a quiet place where I
remembered spending some moments before. And I thought how fitting it seems to find myself in this place, on Christmas Day, in Tokyo.

The place exists only immaterially, so you wouldn’t need to come
to Tokyo to see it, and won’t find it here even if you did come.
But because it is situated in the same virtual world where you’re
reading this page, you can — without leaving the corporeal place
where you are now — visit it yourself.

It’s located here:

Ghosts of Tokyo: A visual haiku (2003)

What you’ll find there is a series of 50 photos in “book” form –
“A photographic poem on the city and its ghosts”.

The creator of “Ghosts of Tokyo”, Olivier Thereaux, describes it this way:

This book started as a project to document the “other” face of
Tokyo, by walking around the Yamanote, the ultra-busy circular
train line often thought of as the heart (or more appropriately,
the crown) of the city, and taking pictures of the areas between
the stations, when the common images were too often close to the
stations.

Those photos capture well the mood of a few of the kinds of places
you might find if you stray off the trail a bit in Tokyo — some
lonely places where your thoughts may start to turn inward a
little.

“Ghosts of Tokyo” is such an apt title for that book, and coming
across it again today made me think of another book about ghosts,
Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”.

I am sure that as long as the “A Christmas Carol” endures, in many
minds Christmas will always in some part be associated with
ghosts. I think that for a lot of people it’s a compelling
connection because it’s a reminder of what might be thought of as
a sort of dimly lit “alley way” of Christmas — one that that is
situated in stark contrast to the twinkling-with-happiness
vision-of-dancing-sugarplums main thoroughfare of Christmas.

And for me, there is only one shade which rules that dark side of
Christmas: Dickens’ “Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come”, whose
entrance into the story Dickens describes like this:

The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came,
Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which
this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.

It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head,
its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one
outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to
detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the
darkness by which it was surrounded.

He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and
that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He
knew no more, for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.

And in my opinion, the climax of that story comes not when Scrooge
happily finds himself back in the real world and finally makes
right for all the bad things he has done. The climax instead
occurs when the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come takes Scrooge, in
darkness, to a dilapidated churchyard “overrun by grass and weeds”
and among the headstones there, shows Scrooge his own grave.

In that moment, as he looks at his grave, Scrooge realizes that
his life of greed and selfishness has been a waste and that it
will end with him dying alone, unloved, and forgotten.

I think that moment — that dark, shattering part of the story,
rather than the bright and happy ending — is the part that
resonates most strongly in many readers’ minds.

Anyway, I guess there are bright and dark sides to many stories,
and I suppose it is worthwhile for all of us to remember today
that there are bright and dark sides to every season, and bright
and dark sides to life in every city in this world. And I imagine
that the bigger the city, the more abundant are its dark and quiet
and lonely parts, and the more numerous the people who find
themselves there.

Today, just as in most other places, there are many people here in
Tokyo who are spending Christmas alone. Many who are away from
loved ones — who moved here from other parts of Japan or
from other parts of the world.

And as one of them, I have to admit that this year I feel the
quiet and lonely side of life in this city more strongly on this
day, on Christmas Day, than I have on any other day of the year.