Posts Tagged ‘waiwai’

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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Japan Times places Tokyo Confidential column under “Editorial review”

Jun Okumura of GlobalTalk 21 has discovered that the Japan Times website no longer allows access to its Tokyo Confidential columns. Visitors who try to click on links to past columns are redirected to pages with the following message:

This article cannot be displayed because it is currently under editorial review. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Much like Mainichi’s WaiWai, Tokyo Confidential was a column that translated and reported odd stories from Japan’s sleazy tabloid magazines. However, the column was presented in a manner that made it very clear to readers that the articles cited were from sleazy tabloids, and I don’t feel that it produced the same level of confusion over credibility that Mainichi WaiWai column often did.

It’s probably safe to assume that the higher-ups at the Japan Times pulled all the articles from the site after hearing about Mainichi losing many of its advertisers over the WaiWai controversy.

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How internet anger brought Mainichi to its knees

Remember the online campaign by Japanese bloggers and 2-channelers that forced Mainichi to remove its WaiWai column, punish employees, and make several apologies? Adam Richards has translated an in-depth article about the WaiWai incident and its effect on mainstream Japanese media. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the article:

The amazingly destructive power of Internet-organized telephone pressure campaigns

To find out about the recent scandal involving sleazy articles disdainful of women posted for years on the Mainichi Shimbun’s English-language website (Mainichi Daily News), over the past month I have met with many people, both inside and outside Mainichi [Japan’s third-largest newspaper in terms of circulation.]

As a result of my discussions, I have learned that this incident’s impact both on Mainichi and the newspaper industry as a whole was much greater than people imagine. Its destructive force has created an astonishing situation. This incident may well be the milestone that turns the relationship between the Internet and the mass media on its head.

Read more: What’s going on inside the Mainichi Shimbun? (Part 1 of 2) by Toshinao Sasaki

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Mainichi English edition to re-launch as ‘more news-oriented site,’ removes article archive

In late June, Mainichi ended the WaiWai column on its English site after facing a lot of anger on the internet. Mainichi launched an investigation into the matter and promised changes, and today we have been told just what those changes will be:

On Aug. 1, we will reorganize the MDN Editorial Department, and on Sept. 1, under a new chief editor, the MDN will be transformed into a more news-oriented site. We will translate Mainichi Shimbun editorials and commentaries by prominent figures, such as “Jidai-no-Kaze” (Sign of the Times), and post them on the site in an effort to deepen the understanding of Japan among readers overseas.

[...]

We will appoint a female employee as the new chief editor, based on our realization that the lack of a woman’s point of view, in addition to the lack of a checking system, helped to create a situation in which inappropriate articles continued to be published in the column. An advisory group will be set up to give appropriate advice on the content of articles.

We have already shut down the WaiWai column, but if we find outside Web sites that have copied and posted past WaiWai articles, we will explain the situation and ask the site operators to correct or delete them.

We received valuable opinions from members of the Open Newspaper Committee, who were asked for the first time for their views on the English site. We will ask them to keep a close eye on Mainichi Web sites including the MDN. We will also boost the system to properly respond to opinions from those outside the company.

Seeing this announcement, I couldn’t help but wonder if this meant that Mainichi no longer planned to translate national news stories about crimes such as sexual assault and train molestation. Such stories of outrageous crime weren’t rare on Mainichi’s site a couple months ago, but a check of the front page today reveals no stories like that.

It wasn’t unsual to see the occasional story about bureaucrats or police officers being arrested for such crimes – translating shocking news like that would merely reflect actual top stories in Mainichi’s Japanese edition and other Japanese media outlets. Will such stories be censored because of the anger Mainichi faced from WaiWai?

Mainichi now seems to no longer allow us to read English language articles that are over a month old, so I couldn’t even find examples of such news stories (However, traces of them exist on Google Search). Checking the Japanese edition of Mainichi’s site, I found that top news story archives from late 2007 until present were searchable and viewable*. Could this removal of old English language articles be a response to the Japanese blogger/2-channeler anger over news articles that contained “inappropriate content that should not have been dispatched in Japan or to the world?” Whatever the reason behind it, Mainichi’s removal of only English language news articles from its archives is unfair and infuriating.

[hat tip to Julián Ortega Martínez]

*Mainichi does not keep searchable archives of every single Japanese news article, just a select few top stories and special columns from each day.

Mainichi announces third-party investigation into inappropriate articles in WaiWai column

With Japanese bloggers and 2-channelers continuining to rage over Mainichi’s “hentai” column that translated (and sometimes embellished) racy stories from Japan’s tabloid weeklies, the newspaper has added yet another announcement to its homepage:

Mainichi to announce results of investigation into inappropriate articles in WaiWai column

The Mainichi Newspapers Co., Ltd. is conducting an in-house investigation into the publication of inappropriate articles in the WaiWai column of the Mainichi Daily News.

We will announce the results of the investigation, such as why inappropriate stories were run on the site, in the middle of this month.

We will ask the “Open Newspaper” Committee, a third-party organization comprising of outside experts, for opinions on the investigation results and report it.

Mainichi had previously announced that it had punished several employees it deemed responsible for the WaiWai scandal, but that did little to reduce the anger on 2-channel and the blogosphere. Because many of those internet users did not trust Mainichi’s internal investigation, the newspaper now seems to have consulted a third-party organization.

Meanwhile, English language Japan blog Stippy.com has been reposting old WaiWai articles with the following explanation:

…[WaiWai] was a much loved form of entertainment amongst foreigners in and outside of Japan. To any reader it was obviously not serious news, but it was a set of articles that portrayed quite well how the Japanese tabloids actually write about their own country. In 2008, a small number of Japanese people bought it to the attention of rival news groups that Mainichi was running an anti-Japan column on its website. With the bad publicity, Mainichi was forced to shut the page down, and take punitive measures against the journalists that were working on it, claiming that it was receiving opinions that were critical of the column, such as “its contents are too vulgar” and “the stories could cause Japanese people to be misunderstood abroad”. A perfect example of how Japanese consider what they write in their own script to be an acceptable secret code, that the rest of the world cant understand. When that same tabloid rubbish gets inconveniently translated to English to make light of some aspects of the Japanese people, it gets canned. Stippy.com finds this unacceptable, and will reproduce as much of the Waiwai content as possible in order to bring it once again to our computer screens for a good laugh.

Quite a few of the articles have already been posted, including some of those that most angered Japanese internet users (“Fast food sends schoolgirls into sexual feeding frenzy,” “More mums going down, to ensure grades go up!”, etc.), but it still hasn’t posted the article about Japanese tourists shooting children for sport in Ecuador(update: they’ve got it).

[thanks to Julián Ortega Martínez for keeping us up to date on the latest developments in this story]

Anger over Mainichi WaiWai column continues…

Last month, Japanese bloggers and 2-channelers scored a major victory by bringing public attention upon Mainichi’s WaiWai column, a popular section of Mainichi’s English language website that reported on some of the wildest and most perverted stories from Japan’s weekly tabloid magazines. Mainichi’s English language WaiWai column has since been discontinued and the company has apologized and punished employees that were deemed responsible for the column.

Many of those that had called and e-mailed complaints to Mainichi about the WaiWai column were probably satisfied with the result. However, some don’t think it’s enough. Blogs that called for the end of Mainichi’s WaiWai column are continuing their attacks on the paper and demanding that individual authors be outed and punished for writing WaiWai pieces.

There are also videos popping up on YouTube about the issue, such as this one that calls for a hanging of some sort (its description specifically names Ryan Connell as the author of WaiWai):

I also came across this blog post about a protest held yesterday. They include videos of the demonstration:

The man talking on the loudspeaker expresses anger over the “perverted” [hentai] column on Mainichi’s English site. Towards the beginning of his speech he implies that the disinformation being spread by Mainichi’s English website has caused crimes against Japanese women in other countries, a claim so idiotic I stopped watching the video at that point.

Meanwhile, Mainichi seems to be taking some additional measures. A source connected to GPlusMedia, the company that runs GaijinPot.com and JapanToday.com, has informed us that Mainichi has been pressuring the company into censoring some forum threads and articles that mention WaiWai and the controversy over it.

Update: The demonstration mentioned above also made TV news (including a mention of Japundit as a foreign website running WaiWai articles).

Update 2: The Aussie press has an article about Ryan Connell, claiming that he “has become one of the most reviled figures in Japan,” and that he is under police protection after numerous death threats directed at him and his family have appeared online. [via Marmot's Hole, hat tip to Julián]