from the inside, looking in

When I go to twitter.com, I get randomly signed in as someone else. Click on “logout”, and I can jump to another person’s page. and so on.

Someone has already landed on my page and added some juvenile comment. I only post to twitter via twitterfox, so stuff updated via the web page isn’t me, in case anyone was wondering.

Got to the settings page, and harvest lots of email addresses. Oh, this is F*cking great work, twitter….. NOT.

The uber-geeks at Glucose have released a (free) pretty blog widget called flickrflow to display flickr photos on your blog. (I’ve sort of given up waiting for them to get their act together and embark on a more serious commercial effort this decade, but they are certainly technically talented)

As one might imagine, it is a slideshow app widget inspired by Apple’s Cover Flow.

It is pretty, but this isn’t a photo blog, and however hard I try, I can’t get into the habit of taking photos (though I still think I would prefer taking photos to having photos taken of me). But it might be of interest to people more into photography (if the widget doesn’t make a mess of the finely tuned (yeah, right) UI layout you’ve created for your blog).

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Hopefully this post will mark a resurgence in posting, it’s been rather quiet of late.

Just watching the news on the TV, showing footage of the annual Army JGSDF exercises (held mainly for the benefit of the Defense Minister and other top brass) at Narashino Camp held today. Unlike normal years, this year’s exercises apparently lacked the traditional parachute drop.

Reason: Strong wind…. (admittedly it is very windy and cold today here in Tokyo)

I guess any potential aggressors will be courteous enough to launch an attack only when the weather is accommodating…..

Gen has a post titled as above, referencing an article in which he was quoted.

As comments are still broken chez Kanai, I’m got to write about it here. (Gen: hint. ditch MT ;-))

Gen writes:

My quote is:

“To a certain extent, Asia is a slave to the alpha keyboard, [..]“

I’m pretty sure I said qwerty keyboard, but I’ll let Jeff slide

I’d posit that Jeff’s liberal quote is more accurate. It is not really QWERTY that is the problem, as Dvorak or Maltron or any of the other proposed keyboard layouts which also assume alphanumeric requirements are equally “guilty”.

Gen’s quote continues:

“Many input methods for languages like Chinese and Japanese require knowledge of the Roman alphabet to use, which is crazy when you think of it. Imagine if the PC was developed in China and everyone in the rest of the world needed to know Chinese before inputting their own alphabet. Well, that’s the case for a lot of PC users in China and Japan.”

The more important point is this. Japanese input does not _require_ any knowledge of the Roman alphabet. OK, so Gen said “many”, but to ignore the fact that Japanese PCs come as standard with an ability to input text based on the Japanese alphabet is glossing over a not so trivial detail. All common keyboards sold in Japan have letters of the Japanese alphabet assigned in parallel to the alphanumeric markings (and there are plenty of keys to cover the entire Japanese alphabet. Typically the space bar is also shortened to add a few extra buttons to do things like hira/kata switching). You can even buy keyboards with markings which gives more prominence to the Japanese alphabet than the roman alphabet. I bet Gen’s Macbook has a US keyboard….

And as for the software side of things, all common OSes understand the key mappings required to type in Japanese. (And creating a new driver for any new input device is trivial)

I know literally just one single person who actually uses Japanese alphabet input in preference to phonetic (roman alphabet) input on their PC, though.

The current Japanese keyboard format is the so-called “old” JIS format, they actually tried to popularise a newer version but they killed that off due to lack of traction….

I guess if we were to design a Japanese keyboard from scratch, would it contain keys in 5 rows rather than 4? (to reflect the traditional set of 5 grouping in the Japanese alphabet) Do we set up the groups right to left in the traditional layout, or do we go for a layout which is closer to the existing JIS layout? Do we even want to bother in the increasingly heterolingual world we live in? Would there be a real productivity increase?

Rakuten, Japan’s largest on-line shopping mall, has launched an English language service.

Sort of.

The top page has been translated, but that’s it. Not very useful, really.

Rakuten has previously announced that it is setting its sights on overseas expansion, and I guess this is the first tiny step in that direction.

But is this the right way to go about it? English language users might stumble upon the English site, and will quickly see that the rest of the site is not translated. And they will likely never return. First impressions count, and I feel this particular piecemeal approach will be counterproductive.I’m sure they’re currently dealing with the backend fulfilment and logistics issues, and they probably wanted to show some visible signs that they are indeed planning to target non-Japanese audiences. A cynic might say this is an IR play.

Asiajin launched yesterday, claiming it the first English language blog written by Japanese authors dedicated to “Web Services/Companies/People Reports from Asia”.

I guess I could claim some obscure niche first for myself too, if I were to insert multiple qualifiers. lol

Anyway, being serious for a moment, I think it is a good thing for the Japanese tech community, providing for overseas exposure, given how little effort is made to address the market outside of Japan by most Japanese emerging tech companies. The fact that one of the co-authors is somewhat of a high profile blogger in Japan might give it a bit of an advantage starting out.

I do hope that the authors whose names are attached to the posts do continue to write their own posts. There are instances of blogs (which shall remain nameless, at least for now) which were originally penned by one person but have (without any disclosure) become group efforts with the owner farming out the writing to ghost writers. Not that the Japanese internet and blogosphere are renowned for their integrity….

I’ll withhold any extensive critique on Asiajin’s content until they hit their stride, but the content available thusfar is ho hum. Not much actual commentary or analysis.

So we now have blognation Japan (although what will happen to that is uncertain, given the recent troubles at blognation HQ) and Asiajin, two different English language perspectives on Japanese tech.

Good luck to them.

Looking back at my original reason for starting this public blog a couple of years ago, I too hoped that I would be able to cover interesting Japanese tech, more than I actually do at present. I guess the bottom line for me was that I found little which was really worthy of exposure.

English language blogs posting “serious” content beyond lightweight (sometimes copyright infringing) content scraped from other sources gives me more material to build on. A part of me hopes these blogs will be positive cheerleader blogs so that I can present an alternative angle…..

Nobutaka Machimura, Chief Cabinet Secretary in Yasuo Fukuda’s current cabinet, finally comes clean about the promise the LDP gave to voters ahead of the election (which they lost anyway).

「最後の１人まで３月末までにやるというわけではなく、選挙なので『年度末まですべて』と縮めて言ってしまった」

We didn’t mean that every last case was to be completed by the end of March, but it was an election so we said that “we will complete it all by the end of the financial year”.

Oh, OK then.

That is a pretty staggering admission, though.

If that is’t a clear confession of an attempt to mislead the electorate (which failed miserably anyway), I don’t know what is.

I suggest that the people within the cabinet who made the commitments take responsibility, and not in the typically Japanese “I will take responsibility by persevering and delivering on my original promise (albeit with a grossly revised schedule)” fashion.

If the media had any balls (and weren’t in bed with the political circus), they’d drag up every instance of footage they have of LDP members during the election campaign insisting that they would get the problem resolved by March, and call for all their heads.

There is one critical difference between being a political commentator talking head on TV and being the Minister for Health, Labour and Welfare. The public expects accountability in the latter, especially when making bold promises. (In an ideal world, the former would also be held accountable for their words too, and we’d see much less of clueless idiots like Norio Minorikawa (Mino Monta for people watching TV), but I don’t see that happening any time soon)

We may see an election sooner than most pundits thought, although the thought of the inept (and in-fighting) DPJ coming to power, backed by conservative trade unions (in Japan that isn’t an oxymoron…) isn’t likely to produce much of a change in my book.

No, I’m not in Bali.

Unlike approximately 10,000 participants (from 190 countires) of said UN summit on global warming.

Anyone see the irony of transporting all those people by plane to a resort island to discuss global warming? I won’t deny that there are cases where face-to-face meetings are invaluable if not absolutely necessary, but 10,000 people???

Gen has many of the links on his post.

The lawsuit makes for interesting reading. It’ll be interesting to see how Dentsu and the defendants answer the charges in court.

I’m not really sure the why the plaintiff had to make a fuss about his trip to the onsen/sento in Japan, though. Prior notice was probably appropriate, but to put a sexual harassment spin on public bathing in Japan is really bizarre.

(Although to be fair, if the defendant exploited the fact that his American colleagues were not familiar with Japanese public bathing facility protocol and denied them the opportunity to avail themselves of a “modesty towel” whilst he himself did and thereby put them in a situation where they had to parade around completely naked, that would be inappropriate)

I wonder if the plaintiff has ever sued his sports club for the fact that the showers and changing room facilites are communal, too……

I find it mildly offensive that is put on the same level as being forced to go to a brothel, or taking up-skirt panty shots of tennis stars or photographing women in swimwear without their consent.

And the claim that “the plaintiff was fired in part because he is Jewish” which appears twice, is a bit of a stretch. There is no account of any racial discrimination in the filing.

Regardless, the comments attributed to the defendant, if they are true, are deeply offending. Having double penetration sex is certainly not a way in which this particular Japanese business man commemorates business dealings. Maybe it is at Dentsu, who am I to know.

The thing that most interests me is how long it will take the Japanese mainstream media to report this court case, and how much attention they will give it.

Remember just a few months ago, when a senior Toyota executive was sued for sexual harrassment, and even Toyota’s advertising purchase power was not enough to prevent the case from making it on to the TV with talking heads criticizing the indiscretion of said executive.

Dentsu however has historically been able to minimize the exposure of its dirty laundry. A few years ago, a senior Dentsu employee was arrested for indecent sexual assault on a train. (OK, he was arrested for groping a woman and the Japanese laws being what they are, don’t give out harsh enough penalties for what is plainly indecent sexual assault, and he was probably charged and fined according to the usual watered down statue the police press for such gropers) None of the TV stations (nor many of the newspapers) reported the person’s name, in contrast to many such cases committed by other people working for companies with less influence over the media.

The Nikkei is reporting that Mixi, Japan’s largest SNS is jumping on the OpenSocial bandwagon.

No official announcement from either Mixi or Google as of noon on Friday Japan time, even though the MySpace announcement  also mentioned in the Nikkei article is the subject of a release from Google.

The Mixi tie-up, if it does materialize, would be an interesting development, given Mixi’s dominant position within the Japanese SNS scene.

Whilst I think opening up is great for users, and is the only way “also rans” can hope to compete with dominant players, it is interesting to see someone in the position that Mixi is in embracing the concept.