Why, oh Wai Wai
JAPUNDIT has become quite the talk of the Japanese Internet, which has been boiling over with anger over the now-defunct Mainichi Wai Wai.
It seems that someone has picked up on this JAPUNDIT post that quotes from a Wai Wai column we found particularly amusing because it was so incredibly outlandish. Of course, we intentionally inserted the Wai Wai name into the report as a signal to readers that the information contained in it was at the least sensationalized and the most totally made up.
Most of the comments I have seen seem to take issue with the Mainichi for allowing such things to be published under their name in English. Though Wai Wai sourced much, if not all, of its material from Japanese language weekly magazines, most of the ire seems directed against the fact that it was presented in English for the world to see. I did not see much talk of anyone taking issue with the weekly magazines.
Some are saying that Mainichi should be prosecuted for promoting underage sex.
One comment said that since such information is printed in the newspaper, everyone will believe it.
One girl wrote about how, when she read this report while riding the bus, she burst into tears, and ended up crying herself to sleep that night out of shame.
Another young lady declared that she hated the way “Europeans and Americans” were talking about this story, and then went on to complain that the JAPUNDIT slogan (Japan - A whole lot more than raw fish) made her mad because it is insulting to Japan!?!
Blogging sure is fun, isn’t it?
Making girls cry should be the goal for every blog.
June 30th, 2008 at 8:48 pm2ch users are so full of themselves and they should just die. (氏ねw）
Watch out for hackers…these people clearly have too much time on their hands and nothing better to do.
In the meantime, just to be safe, you should change the slogan to “A Whole Lot Less Than Raw Fish.” That should keep a few of them happy.
Or, maybe “A whole lot more than a place where girls burst into tears in public and cry themselves to sleep because of a random tabloid article seen on their mobile phones.”
Or…” A whole lot more than a place where reality for most anyone under 22 consists only of what they can see and do in their mobile phone.”
Scratch the last one. It’s clearly not true.
June 30th, 2008 at 9:53 pmYour slogan should clearly be “Making girls cry because of the internet since 2008″.
June 30th, 2008 at 10:04 pmRequesting links to where this is discussed also!
Here are some links.
Livedoor article that started it all.
Link.
Korean link
Link
Here is a GOOGLE page of relevant links.
June 30th, 2008 at 11:10 pmI once used a Wai Wai blurb as a source for an article and got slammed for it - my response was, if it was printed in the “respectable” Mainichi, then it must be true. Perhaps if the responsible folks at Mainichi had simply added an explanatory header to the Wai Wai column, nobody’s noses would have gotten out of joint.
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:50 pmWordsncollision.
There was a perfectly good disclaimer at the bottom of each Wai Wai column. But just reading the article should have been enough to activate anybody’s bullshit detector. I weep when I think about all the credulous souls that must exist in this world.
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:31 amIt has been a pretty wild week, during which our Japan-origin traffic shot up from 8% to 10% to around 90%.
We even got mail from the Cyber Crimes Division of a prefectural police department about a photo used in one of our posts.
Things seem to be settling down back to normal now, so on with the show.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:37 amWait a minute. You don’t think ‘we even got mail from the Cyber Crimes Division…’ is going to just pass us by, do you?
DETAILS!!! (you can make them up if it makes the episode more dramatic, you know).
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:00 amWell. . .
As you know, the Mainichi Daily News shut down Wai Wai after receiving complaints from J-netizens who were displeased with the English-speaking world being presented with information that made Japan appear to be a land of pedo-leching sex maniacs. In doing so, they deleted all of the WaiWai archives, and so latecomers could not see examples of what it is they were supposed to be incensed about.
Back in January, JAPUNDIT did a report on a WaiWai column that gave specific advice on how to play around without getting burned for underage solicitation. As we often do here, we added a generic photo of some high school girl lounging on a train station bench, purely for decorative purposes. A LiveDoor news report linked to it as an example of WaiWai’s sins, bringing in a flood of Japanese visitors.
It seems that the uniforms of the young women made them easily identifiable to those in the know as students from a particular school in Yokohama. The location of the station also was easily discernible, I was told. One concerned citizen contacted the Kanagawa Prefectural Police Department, who sent me a very pleasant note asking me to remove the offending photograph from the story. We complied, of course, and now things are back to relative normalcy in Japunditland.
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:21 amwhat about my photo of the Boss of UNESCO with a bullet-hole in his forehead
their priorities seem a bit mixed up I think.
rem.
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:26 amHere is a video from the protest outside MAINICH in Tokyo http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm3839968
July 4th, 2008 at 4:48 am