On a recent trip to Tokyo, I was drinking in Golden Gai with a friend of a friend. The tiny bar played great song after great song, and all of it vintage Japanese rock. I mentioned how much I was enjoying learning about all the great bands from back in the day that never got any exposure in the US, but lamented that—Juain Cope’s book Japrocksampler not withstanding—finding a good English-language source for information on these bands was tough.

That’s when my friend told me about Jrawk. Run by an obviously knowledgeable and dedicated fan, the site intends to be nothing less than a repository (or database if you will) for Japanese rock music. It has interviews, album reviews, live show reports, and more, and all of the music covered is at least worth a listen. If bands like Flower Travellin’ Band, Nagisa Ni Te, or Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her is your thing, or if all you know about Japanese rock is Cornelius or Boris, you should really check it out.

(The site is pretty new, but it’s filling fast with content, so don’t let the sparseness deter you.)

The folks over at BoingBoing TV have written in to alert us to something called TOKYOLOGY, a new documentary exploring contemporary Japanese pop-culture hosted by Carrie Ann Inaba.

Oh, what adventures await: sneak behind the scenes at a Japanese Rock TV show that pretends it’s shot in Los Angeles, cruise Harajuku, go clubbing with goth girls in Shinjuku, shop for shoes with Lolitas, experience the madness of the Tokyo Anime Fair, visit a video game company, browse the streets of Akihabara, and meet anime creator Yoshitoshi Abe.

DVDs are available in retail stores and online, tokyology.tv has details.

If Japanese castles are your thing, and you don’t know about it already, head over to jcastle.info, which provides an in-depth guide to all Japanese castles.

The site provides as much information as you would need before visiting, including 5-star ratings, maps and access info, photos, links, and some historical notes.

And in that spirit, here’s a picture of Kumamoto castle, taken during a recent hanami. Kumamoto celebrates the castle’s 400th anniversary this year, with a newly restored section opening to the public at the beginning of Golden Week.

The site cubo.cc has only one page. It features a Japanese woman following your mouse pointer with her eyes. While I’m sure this will bring out the peeping Tom in some of you, I couldn’t help not to notice how red her eyes are.

The site itself doesn’t offer any further information other than an e-mail address and a link to another site. However, inspecting the source code, the technology seems to originate from motionportrait.com.

Seen on Mixx.

You might want to check out the latest addition to our Japan blogroll, jDonuts, a blog by an Australian living in Japan.

Be sure to check out Overoften’s Kumamoto Diary for a fabulous account of the life and times of an Englishman residing at the foot of Mt. Aso.

japundits, as human beings, symbiotic fish, and the transcendent beings known as /4/chans, we must all, to truly live, at some point in our lives be dedicated to a higher purpose. whilst scanning the internet i came upon a website, which along with the recent spat with fg inspired me.

now go forth…and conquer

jk
hat tip to xkcd

“A 200-strong army of beady-eyed, ball-shaped robots” is being deployed nationwide, says Pink Tentacle.

Not quite as scary as they might sound, these spherical chaps are “Pollen Robots” and are to be employed by Weathernews.jp to monitor the pollen count. And this being Japan, they have built-in Cute - the ‘eyes’ light up different colours as the level changes.

As the Asahi reports, when the Japanese cedar and cypress get that lovin’ feelin’ and go into their springtime overdrive, data on the pollen count will be sent from these robots to the site. They’ll be stationed outside the homes of a couple of hundred volunteers, all hay-fever sufferers, who will also be reporting on their symptoms.

As the Asahi gravely intones, “Pollen levels from Japanese cedar and cypress are expected to be higher than last year in many parts of the country.” Oh joy.

Japundit has drawn reference to this site before. But if no one is looking at Japanese and other Asian movies (I saw The Maid the other day there…) on the Crunchyroll site, then that is a shame. It’s free and if you choose “bigger” the streaming video will be about twice as big as YouTube and quite good.

The cadillac solution is to pay them about $4/month to be a member and the extra bandwidth and size is definitely worth it. After all–what does it cost to go to the movies downtown? I don’t think Crunchyroll is getting rich, but they do have bills to pay.

Veoh.com is a good alternative but there you must join formally and download their Veoh player–maybe it’s worth it though–but there are lots of good Asian movies on that site.

As always, you find some things on one or the other–like this gem on YouTube. Still, the best montage of Studio Ghibli stuff with Beatles soundtrack is only on Veoh.com. Multiple sources is best.

But for an example here is a Crunchyroll rock video by Chage and Aska from Ghibli Studios about their angel movie–which sadly I have not seen and don’t even know what its title is. But you can figure out the story pretty well from this vid. I must say I didn’t like this video at first and found it repetitive–but it kind of grows on you. Be sure to click “bigger” to start!

Anyway–there are lots more great movies and anime on the Crunchyroll site so do check it (them) out!

It’s starting to get cold and I’ve been dreaming of ramen (or more correctly raamen). Problem is, there’s no good ramen in NYC and I’m not going to be in Japan for a couple months.

What to do? Hmm. I’ll make a ramen website!

Here it is: TastyRamen.com

For all the ramen lovers out there, it will get you in the mood.

The art of Chinese counterfeits has risen to a whole new level with the revelation that someone has created a fake website posing as the country’s food and drug watchdog.

The site was apparently set up to promote a diabetes medication, according to a report on government-run Web site china.com.

While looking very similar to the State Food and Drug Administration’s real site (www.sda.gov.cn), it has a totally different address — and was still functioning Thursday.

The fake site apparently was set up to promote the efficacy of some new diabetes drug, and even though reports about the site are circulating on international new wires, it is still up. Click here to see it.

If the site does disappear, here is a screenshot.

Just a quick note to say congratulations to our friends over at Japan Sugoi on their first anniversary, and best wishes for many more to come!

And now for something completely different (as they say)…

Hitotoki: a narrative map of Tokyo.

comScore did a study on the expansion of social networking across the globe, revealing that several sites have experienced dramatic growth during the past year but also disclosed that that certain sites dominate in certain regions. The whole point of social networking is that everyone (who’s anyone) is on the same site(s) or else they wouldn’t be much good for communication.

Social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted more than 114 million global visitors age 15 and older in June 2007, representing a 72-percent increase versus year ago. Facebook.com experienced even stronger growth during that same time frame, jumping 270 percent to 52.2 million visitors. Bebo.com (up 172 percent to 18.2 million visitors) and Tagged.com (up 774 percent to 13.2 million visitors) also increased by orders of magnitude.

We are used to hearing about MySpace and Facebook, ad nauseum, but we often forget that these are primarily popular only in North America. Both MySpace.com (62 percent) and Facebook.com (68 percent) attract approximately two-thirds of their respective audiences from North America.

But Bebo.com has a particularly strong grasp on Europe, attracting nearly 63 percent of its visitors from that region, while Orkut is firmly entrenched in Latin America (49 percent) and Asia-Pacific (43 percent). Friendster also attracts a significant proportion of its visitors (89 percent) from the Asia-Pacific region.

While not really into “social networking” I have a Friendster page put up largely under duress and now desperately in need of updating. But it would be interesting to know what the most popular social networking site in Japan is currently?

Since edojin says most Japanese do not treat Japan to be part of Asia, perhaps it isn’t Friendster at all? Earlier this year Kaishin reported on the SNS war heating up in Japan — especially MySpace taking on Mixi — but has a clear winner emerged as yet?

The .ASIA TLD, launched yesterday, is the latest top-level domain and it’s sure to be a popular and long-overdue one. DotAsia Organisation is the Sponsoring Organization and Registry Operator for the new .ASIA Sponsored Generic Top Level Domain. DotAsia is a not-for-profit, community-based organization incorporated in Hong Kong.

EURid, the European Registry of Internet Domain Names welcomed the new TLD: “The pioneering .eu domain, which is available to 490 million Europeans in 27 countries, was the first top-level Internet domain for a broad, multi-country region. The launch of .asia reflects the growing interest in regional top-level domains, which some regional supporters hope will eventually include Africa and Latin America as well.”

According to EURid, no one knows which names would be most popular on October 9, when the .asia registry started accepting the first round of applications, but EURid’s experience offers some clues. In the first two days .eu domain names became available, EURid received 227 applications for sex.eu, 118 for hotel.eu and 94 for travel.eu.

“The .asia registry will probably see the same rush for generic names but that will pass,” said Marc Van Wesemael, general manager of EURid. “After a time, Europeans realized that a .eu domain was good for business. People in Asia will surely discover that as well.”

Previously, Internet users in the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific region only had the option of utilizing a generic TLD (gTLD) whose registrants were dominated by US and European individuals and businesses, or country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) intended for local use.

According to VeriSign Global Registry Services only 11% of .com and .net (the two largest gTLDs) registrants came from Asia. However, Global Reach estimates that over 64% of the Internet’s population are non-English speakers and that Asian languages alone make up 33% of the online population.

While current gTLDs tend to focus on a vertical group (e.g. commercial entities, network providers, organizations , etc.) within the global Internet, “.Asia” will embrace a horizontal perspective with a clear brand to reach and enrich the broad global community. Unlike ccTLDs, which provide for a local audience, “.Asia” will allow the user to express membership in the larger Asian community.

The launch of the new TLD which DotAsia calls the the “sunrise” of .asia, is divided into three basic phases, which have been dubbed SR1, SR2 and SR3. According to a statement issued by DotAsian, the SR1 phase “provides priority for governments in the community to reserve and register domains,” while SR2 will allow registered mark owners to acquire domains corresponding to the marks they own, and SR3 will permit “registered companies, organizations and other entities in the DotAsia Community to obtain domains corresponding to their entity names.”

DotAsia said that it created the multiphase launch system after seeing the “experience of past domain launches where chaotic situations arise because of a huge number of interested parties racing to register the domain names they want.”

Something I never noticed before is that “EU” is the Greek affix for “good” as in euthanasia, euphonious, Eurythmics, evangel, etc. Many people think that ISO is an initialism for International Standards Organization, which of course it isn’t. It’s actually a word — Greek “iso” or “equal.” I’m not sure what the connection is but EU was a good choice anyway.

But Asia is even better. Hmmm… http://www.japundit.asia looks good? But as the boss would undoubedtly counter — North Americans (who I think account for the majority of Japundit readers) are used to automatically assuming a “.com” TLD so that anything different may not be good. We automatically type .com, .gov and .edu predictably and are thrown for a loop when dealing with a UK government department.

Even in Europe, where “.eu” has caught on splendidly, many companies still use “.com” and we all sort of expect that. “.us” and “.biz” never really caught on over here, did they? However, anything is better than having to guess a TLD like “co.sa” or “co.nz” — which brings up another issue: will Australia (and even NZ) be welcome to use the .asia TLD? Someone may know the answer, or indeed whether these former European colonies regard themselves as part of Asia or not?

Check out the post by Steve Levenstein over at InventorSpot where he reports on some of the unusual offerings from the Japanese chewing gum industry.

Check out this site for the Japanese version of Statetris, where you can enjoy playing a little Tetris while testing your knowledge of Japanese geography

Thanks to Raymond Penners

China is sending out two virtual police officers to patrol the Internet to combat online pornography and other “illicit activity”, state media said on Wednesday.

The virtual officers, a man and a woman, “will appear either on motorcycles, in a car or on foot, at the bottom of users’ computer screens every 30 minutes to remind them of Internet security,” the China Daily said.

But more importantly, has the repressive state apparatus in China gone kawaii?

I took my first trip to Japan in 2004. When I got back to New York I found that I missed being there and seeing all the unique things about it, especially seeing what people are wearing on the street. Tokyo people really put themselves together well and you really notice it when you come back in the USA.

Anyway, when I got back I searched the Internet for websites about Japan and found a couple that were just pictures of everyday people on the street. One of them was Japanese Streets. At the time the website was a little difficult to navigate so I never really got hooked on it, but today I got an email in my Inbox stating that they’ve just relaunched the site with a new design and more content. I just looked at it and now it looks like a real website

They have pictures of regular people (not fashion models) on the street and they’ve kept their old archives online which could be interesting if you want to see what Japanese people were wearing in 2004. They even added videos and some other stuff, too. I don’t have any affiliation with the site and I don’t know the guys who run it, I just think it’s a cool website if you like this kind of thing.

Check out Let’s Go J-Sound! for a fabulous trip back in time down J-pop memory lane with a couple that describes their efforts thusly:

In 1991 a guy and a girl met and fell head-over-heels for each other. They spent much of their time from that day forward hanging out in San Francisco’s Japan Town and encouraging each other’s interest in things like Japanese music, movies, toys and food. This blog is a result of their 15 year relationship and their mutual love of music. You’ll find nothing but songs, videos and other various music related bits here. We hope you’ll enjoy exploring J-Sounds with a guy, his girl and their music collection.

And straight from Let’s Go J-Sounds, here’s a real blast from the past — Shiroi Iro Wa Koi Bito No Iro (Colors of Love) by Betsy & Chris, a popular singing duo from Hawaii that made it big in Japan in the early 1970s.