It has been just on a week now since the massive M9.0 earthquake and companion tsunami thrashed the north-east coast of Japan. It’s taken this long for me to be able to sit down and write some of my own feelings about what happened. I wasn’t in the middle of the destruction by any extent, [...]

The media explosion over the ‘Kokubo scandal’ over the last week was one of the biggest feeding frenzies over nothing that I’ve seen in the Japanese media in a while – and they are very good at feeding frenzies over trivial things.

I first heard about Olympic snowboarder Kokubo Kazuhiro’s ‘fashion choices’ and ‘attitude’ from [...]

Michael Cucek at his Shisaku blog had a great post a few days ago about how “Media Shifts Make Japan a Harder Read”. He cites some anecdotes from his own consumption of the media in recent times, and discusses some of the biases that exist in the various media organizations in Japan, and [...]

Yahoo has released a list of its top 10 searched stories for 2009, and Japanese manga series Naruto comes in at number 6, thanks to its massive surge in worldwide popularity. Manga and anime have been a rising force overseas for a long time, and over the last [...]

According to a Mainichi report today, an internet provider has been sued to provide information on a blogger that posted information about a Fukuoka doctor’s arrest and trial. Apparently an unnamed blogger who follows legal cases online had posted information about the arrest of the doctor, including the alleged crime. He then [...]

If you catch the morning, afternoon, or evening ‘news’ programs on commercial television in Japan, you may find out that a semi-talented ‘singer’ is having a baby with their manager. Or you may learn what kind of skirts to wear this season. Or you may even find out a great new place to take the [...]