Posts Tagged ‘media’

The graphics department must be on vacation

NTV’s graphics department must be off for the silver week holiday, because one of their news programs used this crude drawing while discussing a story about a train that nearly hit a small child:

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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
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Drugs are bad, nnnnnnnkay

Image courtesy of The Mainichi Daily News

Watching the hysteria over this story about celebrity Noriko Sakai’s drug use (Check out the Mainichi Daily News article here), I keep thinking about how unbelievable this would be in my own country, the U.S.A.

Try to imagine so much being made of Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, Charlie Sheen, the list of drug-crazed celebs goes on and on.

Seems to be a couple of things going on.  First, us Americans seem desensitized to this.  If we gave a shit about every celeb who turned to drugs, we’d have no time to talk about anything else (to a certain extent this is the case now).  Second, Americans love to watch the car crash–drugs tend to make the spectacle of people’s lives falling apart that much better.  Third, drugs have long been tightly controlled on the island-nation of Japan.  As a result, people here appear to be very naive about drugs. . .marijuana is just as bad as heroin in many people’s eyes.  So, the conversation is just in a different place.  Last, there seems to be a kind of satisfaction here in Japan that comes with casting a moral gaze down upon celebrities.  They are judged very harshly.

I personally feel sorry for Sakai having to air her dirty laundry like this.  Remind me not to become famous in Japan.

Would love to hear other thoughts on drugs, celebrity, and mass communication in Japan.

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Contributor Bio: I am a doctoral student of environmental anthropology currently living and conducting research in a mountain village in Nagano. In my research I explore modernity as it is expressed in a rural mountain community. Specifically I look at national management structures, as well as social discourses, related to forests and probe the impacts these have on local human communities. I have lived and worked in Japan for 5 years. My interests also include Buddhism, literature, music, and mountaineering. Read more at my personal blog: In the Pines.
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Yakuza steals giant Peko-chan dolls

A pretty strange news story:

Police arrested Hiroshi Inaba, a 42-year-old man of no fixed address and a member of a gang connected to the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza group, on suspicion of theft.

Inaba is accused of conspiring with a male acquaintance in his 30s and stealing a Peko-chan doll — which measures about 1.1 meters in height, weighs about 10 kilograms and is sold at 40,000 yen at market value — displayed at Fujiya’s Arimoto store in Wakayama on Feb. 12 this year.

As funny as this story is, I’m more amused by the fact that NTV’s “Real Time News” thought it was so important that the Peko-chan dolls needed to be beamed into their studio:

Damn fine job, NTV graphics team!

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Forbes: “Shabu Shabu” is an illegal drug

An embarrassing error in Tim Kelly’s article for Forbes about the Noriko Sakai drug scandal:

Though discussed little in public, estimates put Japan’s regular drug users in the millions. Amphetamine crystals, known locally as shabu shabu is common, but cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana and other narcotics are readily available despite stiff penalties. Japan doesn’t differentiate between soft and hard drugs.

Shabu shabu, as some of you Japanese food lovers out there may already know, is a term for Japanese hot pot cuisine- not amphetamine. He may have confused it with “shabu,” a drug which is apparently different from “aburi,” the actual street name being mentioned in Japanese press reports about the drug arrest. The article also incorrectly states that Noriko “went on the run for a week with her 10-year old son” (she left the kid with a friend), and that police found “less than one thousandth of a gram” of drugs (they found 8 thousandths of a gram).

For all you junkies at home, here’s a video about how to brew your own batch of shabu shabu:

[hat tip to fukumimi]

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Problems with New York Times report on 2-D love in Japan

If you’re a regular reader of Japan news sites, you’ve probably encountered links to a recent story in the New York Times magazine about the “phenomenon” of otaku men who date pillows in Japan. Its author, Lisa Katayama of Tokyo Mango blog, is a writer who has built her career on reporting quirky things about Japan, and most of what she writes isn’t too bad. This article, however, had a few issues.

Those unfamiliar with the facts might think that the “thriving subculture” of ultra-otaku Katayama describes are representative of otaku culture as a whole. Journalist Francesco Fondi wrote the following in a blog post denouncing the article [I've added a link to this quote to explain the Mainichi reference]:

“Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade. It’s impossible to say exactly what portion of otaku are 2-D lovers, because the distinction between the two can be blurry.”

Are you sure?! If you have been in Akiba or Toyko even once you know that this “new phenomenon” (as they call it) is fake/made up. Have you ever seen otakus dating their Moe pillows?! Me no…
This is an example of why traditional journalism is sinking and why writers outside the Otaku culture should stay out of it and do not write about it…

Basically they took a classic WaiWai style “scoop” and presented it as a real and widespread social phenomenon in Japan !!

He also noted that Nisan is well-known within the otaku community as a extreme weirdo, and that some think his pillow love photos are just part of an act aimed at getting attention. He’s been around for a few years now, with some of his ridiculous photos becoming internet memes.

Perhaps the comparison to WaiWai is not out of line. When I noticed that Adamu of Mutantfrog was having trouble believing the “more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins” claim Katayama makes in her article, I was reminded of something I had read in a WaiWai column. Sure enough, some Googling turned up a WaiWai article from 2007 contained a line that stated, “almost one in four Japanese men aged 30 to 34 remains a virgin.”

Adamu did some research on the statistics Katayama uses in the article, digging through Japanese government reports to find that both the WaiWai article and Katayama’s article made the remarkably similar mistake of omitting the fact that the virginity statistics only applied to unmarried Japanese – not the entire population of adults between the age of 30 and 34. He’s written an excellent post summarizing some other problems with the article, which I urge everyone to read.

Lisa Katayama has denied that she used WaiWai as a source, but she has not shared the specific studies from which she got her statistics. She has responded to criticism through Twitter:

That may have applied to some of the early complaints about her article, but now that a well-written piece of criticism is up on the net, it might be time for Katayama to deliver a more serious response to her readers.

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Foreign Ministry Needs Help Handling Foreign Press

The Japanese government will finally start training its foreign ministry officials to coherently and convincingly explain policies to the international media:

The planned sessions, which will be offered to several officials, including the vice minister, will be getting under way just as Japan gets ready to host several international conferences, including the Group of Eight summit in Hokkaido in July.

The upcoming sessions will include exercises on how to respond to questions from foreign journalists in English during mock interviews and news conferences, and review sessions to evaluate their responses. The envoys’ gestures, responses and clothing also will be subject to review, he said.

Takahashi said the training would be realistic.

“There cannot be any training without using the most difficult topic to answer,” he said, hinting the contentious whaling issue may also be taken up during the courses.

The training will be conducted by a private PR company that will be hired soon. The official refused to disclose the budget for the training program, but said the amount would be “extremely tiny.”

According to the ministry, most of the G8 member states require officials to take training courses on handling the media when they join the ministries or are sent to overseas offices.