The headline reads “Group with Google and others building cross-Pacific Broadband cable”. The important point though is who the “others are” in this case. One “other” is Bharti Airtel Limited, an Indian integrated telecom services provider. Others are various asian communications and mobile products companies… however one of the group which calls itself “Unity”… is…
This just in on the Googlemania blog (a blog in Japanese about google products and services). They say you can send smileys or little pictures to Gmail and it will show up. They say the same can be done with Willcom. I just tested it out with my phone and gmail and it works fine!!!…
I don’t want to get all sociological and everything, but I’d like to stress the word REPORTED. REPORTED I urge people who read news about Japan’s low crime rate to keep in mind that this is the number of cases reported and filed officially. There are many cases that go unreported for various reasons, as…
Teacher threatens to force schoolgirl to strip for using mobile phone in class Not that a high school girl would be better, but the schoolgirl mentioned in the article is a junior high school student… in Japan that means from 7th grade to 9th grade. I doubt that I’ll be able to follow up on…
There are nowhere near as many guns in Japan as in the U.S., however they don’t not exist. (That sentence is dedicated to all the grammarians in the audience.) There has been an increase in gun stories in the news lately and several shootings this past year. As far as I remember all the shooters…
Here’s your background reading. For most people, I guess there’s no controversy, it seems to be a battle between the governors teamed up with one political party against the party in charge. The governor’s taking on the central government is a bit unique because you often see the same kind of friction between the federal…
Sorry, don’t have a current English language link for this one. Here’s one from about a year ago which discusses the case…. Publisher, “Uplink” and it’s president Takashi Asai waged the battle and took it to the highest court in Japan. In 1999, Asai brought his company’s reproduction of Mapplethorpe’s collection with him to the…
This year’s festival had the biggest turn out because of the poster controversy. The guy who got the bag, having a beard and especially hairy body, seems to have grossed out some people with his body and facial expression. One train station refused to put up the poster (depicting the moment a winner secured one…
A bad elementary school teacher was arrested for trying to take a photo up the skirt of a high school girl. Does this kind of thing happen in the US? If one of my friends did something like this I’d be mostly grossed out and completely finished with the friendship. Don’t make me count this!…
I started February planning to count the occurrences of a few major social problems I saw in Japan hoping to bring some awareness people who visit this blog. It seems there are just too many so I think I’ll periodically publish commentary on several stories at the same time. I’ll have to rely on the…
The story about the murder case in Japan that I wrote about here in “CNN Almost Writes Pop-Japanology-less Article” has been described in a bunch of papers as a case of the traditional world of Sumo, and it’s incredibly tough training has produced a murder case which questions the fine line between “keiko” or a…
Well, this is big news in Japan now right. I feel I have to comment, but I also feel that things are moving too fast. Can we assume that there is overwhelming evidence against the defendent because the US Ambassador to Japan has already apologized to the governor of Okinawa? I am not saying that…