In most places, the blogosphere offers an alternative to the mainstream media where people can go for a taste of the unvarnished truth. But not in Japan.
Most bloggers here tend to trust what companies write about their products, and take their press releases at face value.
Nearly 63 percent of Japanese who keep blogs consider corporate press releases to be trustworthy sources of information, compared with fewer than five percent of English-speaking Americans, Canadians and Europeans, it said.
In contrast, almost two-thirds of English-language bloggers who write about products believe other blogs are reliable sources, a view shared by 15 percent in Japan, said the joint research by public relations agency Edelman and blog search engine Technorati.
“Japanese bloggers have high trust in ‘official’ information from corporations including news releases,” the study said. “Japanese companies have been using such one-way ‘monologue’ methods.”
The main reason Japanese get into blogging?
For Japanese bloggers, the top motivation to blog was to “create a record of my thoughts,” with 28.2 percent listing it as their primary reason.
The U.S. Navy cruiser USS Shiloh recently joined eight other Aegis-equipped warships in Yokosuka, southwest of Tokyo, in order to bolster ballistic missile defense capabilities in Japan. The deployment came in an apparent response to the threat posed by recent North Korean missile tests in the area.
That didn’t stop protestors from turning out in small craft, one carrying a sign reading, “Stop MD.”
Veteran Japanese politician and recent politically-motivated arson attack victim, Koichi Kato, has warned a group of assembled foreign journalists that Japanese militarism and nationalism is on the rise. In his speech to the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo, Kato likened Japan’s morally detached youngsters to helium balloons floating on air currents;
“Even in the slightest breeze they will all start floating in the same direction,” the one-time prime ministerial candidate said.
“And if there is a nationalistic mood that takes over the country, all of these balloons will begin to drift in a very strong way along this current.”
The newspaper story can be found here, and no surprise that this was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald/Melbourne Age’s Deborah Cameron, whose articles frequently take a negative view of Japanese politics. She continues in her story to outline such ominous signs of the rising tide of neo-nationalism in Japan as “foreigners being targeted by police in anti-crime crackdowns.” Since when was this a new phenomenon?
During a recent visit to Tokyo by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, Cameron missed the substantial positive outcomes of his meeting with Taro Aso instead choosing to focus in her write-up on the fact that Downer is the son of a POW held in a Japanese camp while Aso’s family had used POW slave labour during the war. Tellingly, none of the other major Australian dailies carried a story along these lines and it seems that while Downer himself has long since moved on from the issue, Deborah Cameron has not.
Salon.com are producing a series of ‘literary guides to’ and the latest is Japan, by Kyoko Mori. It’s all to do with a national “obsession with beauty and discipline”, apparently. Curiously she focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro for this trait, though she does at least acknowledge his English upbringing.
News just in… Tokyo has been chosen as the official Japanese candidate bid for the 2016 games by the Japanese Olympic Committee (33 votes to 22). No one I’ve spoken to who lives there wants it though, either supporting Fukuoka as the underdog or alternatively not wanting years of construction projects and congestion. I suspect they won’t have much to worry about as the bid is likely to remain just that, a bid. Still, it gives the Governor an excuse to run again next year.
If North Korea expecting relations with Japan to get better when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi steps down as Prime Minister in September, they may be mistaken.
According to reports, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, who is far and away the front runner to fill the post of prime minister, is considering even tougher measures against the NORKS than those imposed Koizumi.
As prime minister, Abe would boost the power of a government task force on the abductions and push ahead with new measures for economic sanctions in cooperation with the ruling coalition parties, the sources said.
They said these plans would represent a policy shift from Koizumi’s “dialogue and pressure” against North Korea to one stressing “pressure.”
Abe is reportedly considering a tougher approach in response to NORK defiance against Japan during Koizumi’s reign.
Is this propaganda from Tokyo’s tourism promotion authorities or what? They’re not fooling anyone with such blatant attempts to get foreign visitors to come to Tokyo:
“Shibuya has this image of being a youth-centered, bright part of town, but from the middle of the night to the early hours of the morning, it’s a real Sodom and Gomorrah. Photos I’ve taken show stuff like the streets being filled with kids coming home from all-night jaunts at nightclubs, girls sprawled on sidewalks not caring at all that they’re showing off their panties for all the world to see and kids beaten to a pulp over the tiniest disagreement”
Not being a ‘kid’ that doesn’t really bother me. And it’s really safe now too:
“Shibuya has definitely lost the risky types that used to be around. It’s definitely a much safer place,” a streetside talent scout says.
Though there’s a downside, apparently:
Nonetheless, Shibuya remains a magnet for runaway schoolgirls and the streets have junior high school girl runaways selling their bodies off, high school girls regularly indulging in hard drugs and other teens using fake IDs to find jobs working in the sex business.
If North Korea expecting relations with Japan to get better when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi steps down as Prime Minister in September, they may be mistaken.