The observation that technology changes our lives in unexpected ways is so trite, I wouldn’t be surprised if you started reaching for your mouse to click on another—any other—site before you came to the end of this sentence. If I were reading it instead of writing it, I know I’d be tempted.

What people seem to have missed, however, is that while technology can engender revolutionary changes, these changes can radically differ from place to place even when the technology is identical.

Take this medium, for example. After their role in the American election last year and taking down CBS news anchor Dan Rather, bloggers became almost as self-congratulatory as the mainstream journalists they had such contempt for. It’s hard to blame them, however; their impact was revolutionary. They became so successful that in the United States, the content of serioius blogs is assumed to be primarily political.

That’s not the case in Japan. I’m sure there are political blogs in this country, but I haven’t run across any yet. (Not that I’ve been looking all that hard.) And if there’s ever a revolution in Japanese politics, I’m not sure that blogging will have much to do with it.

Yet, the number of people blogging has mushroomed in Japan just as it has in the United States. But in Japan they’re not talking about politics. They’re talking about sex.

This May, we reported on Erogs, or erotic blogs, in which people–many of them women–talk about sex in the same way that Americans go on about Swift Boats. The difference is that the Japanese bloggers have more personal experience with their chosen topic than Americans do with politics, and of course the pictures are better.

It hasn’t stopped there. A couple of weeks ago, we reported on the sites that specialize in showing clandestine photographs or videos of people, most of them women, all of them taken illegally. The images are taken at such places as public baths and restrooms.

Last week, JP reported on a panty-pulling hoax, but loyal Japundit reader ghoti pointed out that rather than being a hoax, it was actually happening, calling it roshutsu play. (Scroll down in the comments to see his note.)

This article brings the image of blogging in Japan into clearer focus. The Daily Mainichi WaiWai column passes along a report from the Shukan Post, a weekly magazine, that there is a website in Japan run by a love hotel in which the lovemaking between people off the street is filmed and broadcast with their consent. The hotel has two specified rooms for broadcasting the action, and they charge visitors to the website a fee to watch. (The room rental for the couple is waived; they only pay a nominal charge for laundering the sheets.)

Hosei University law professor Tatsuo Inamasu has this observation:

“Since use of the Net became more widespread, there has been increasing worries about the protection of individual privacy and worries about leaked information. On the other hand, the proliferation of the Internet has also seen the rise of more people who want the world to know about their private lives. That’s been the whole basis behind the success of blogging.

It took me a little digging, but I think I’ve found the site here. It’s headlined Neo Real Peeping. The Japanese text explains that there are three secrets to the clandestine films of Neo Real Peeping. They are the complete cooperation of the hotel owners, the cooperation of the guests being filmed in the rooms, and the use of the latest technology.

My antique computer won’t show the images, so I can’t confirm what you’re getting, but scroll down to where it says “Sample” in English in yellow. Below the photos are some text and then some horizontal bars, one of which is flashing. Click that for a free sample.

I found it at this site, which offers an index of 24 other sites featuring clandestine videos, all in Japanese, but I’m sure our clever readers will find their way around.

In the course of tracking down the love hotel site, I came across a staggering number of sites offering clandestine videos. The hit counter for one of them showed more than two million. While JP thinks there is no panty-pulling craze in Japan today, there is something definitely going on just under the surface of everyday life on the street.

I saw a PR video for one site of a guy running up behind a woman wearing an elastic strapless blouse on the street, pull it down to her waist, and run off. She didn’t seem like she was acting to me as she quickly swiveled back and forth between the guy hightailing it down the street behind her and his accomplice filming from the front.

In the United States, everyone gets excited about the font used to type a letter allegedly 30 years old and compares it to documents written by a modern word processor. In Japan, they’re blogging about sex. In the United States, you can pay to watch the NFL and major league baseball in real time as you putz around the computer. In Japan, you can pay to watch everyday people having sex on camera in love hotels in real time as you just putz around.

I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions.