At least a half dozen manga artists (like 福満 しげゆき, 中村 光) have had work that they posted online lead to serialization in Morning or other big magazines (this is the cultural equivalent of getting a B-level HBO show). Is the mountain starting to move?

Are average Americans not still getting most of their information from lame local news shows? I think that the “America” that appears in these Japanese internet debates ends up taking the highly educated and highly engaged as the rule rather than a notable exception.

Japan has seen some interesting moves in its information sphere over the past few years – like the dramatic expansion of Shinsho publishing. These are “books” that fall somewhere between a magazine and a mainstream non-fiction title. Some lame ones (Baka no Kabe) are the biggest sellers, but there are a lot like Hanhinkon that challenge the status quo in meaningful ways and have sold well. Japan lags in internet debate, but I don’t think that this should be mistaken for the lack of an engaged chattering class. Japan has had over 70 books published in the last year with kakusa, working poor, etc. in the title. Kanikosen is going on 1,500,000 copies (all versions including manga). I’m not confident that one can walk into a big chain bookstore in the US and find a variety of inexpensive titles on poverty problems. Zinn did a “People’s History of Poverty in the United States” last year – it’s a $30 hardcover. Information doesn’t necessarily want to be free and there is a whole lot of it is being tied up as elite, pricey, status consumption products in the US. There are good and bad things going on in each public sphere.

I think that is an great idea though it’s one that will vary depending on people’s abilities and interests. Honestly, until recently I didn’t really feel confident enough to try, but I’ve been heartened by the generally positive reaction to my past couple attempts from MutantFrog. Those were on swine flu and 9/11 conspiracies, two issues where I felt I had something to add to the discussion. Posting on places like MFT and NJ might be something of a hindrance, but it’s one I’ll live with because I hate the Japanese blogging services’ user interfaces and page designs so much.

On the state of the Internet:

Where I think Marxy and Umeda stray is in trying too hard to reach a broad, general conclusion, and by doing so muddy definitions and ignore the real ways in which the internet and new technologies in Japan really have revolutionized people’s lives. This isn’t directly internet related, but yesterday’s Nikkei reported that as of April 30, there were 130 million “e-money” cards in people’s wallets. That’s more than one apiece and is a clear change in the way of life here. One small but important way things have changed is in the smoother passage through ticket gates. I would say small changes like that have taken place to change people’s lives at the margins. Probably a majority of people aged 18-29 have a Mixi or Gree account and use it to plan high school reunions, share photos, keep a diary of their trips abroad, or just reflect on the day’s events for a small audience. But like Chris mentions that’s my gut feeling, not supported by facts (though I am looking!). And as seen in the many “blooks” and keitai novels that have been published to high sales and acclaim over the years, the compelling, funny, and moving stories produced by true amateurs have made an impact culturally as well.

Where they have a point, however, is where they echo Ikeda Nobuo’s frustration that in Japan public discourse by the elite has not shifted to the internet to the extent it has in the US (By “public discourse” I basically mean the process we are all familiar with of a news cycle and how large scale developments are reported and discussed in public).There are some aspects where it has – the dinosaur media seem to be completely left in the dust with any true reporting on the internet since they just dont understand it. But despite the fact that many MPs, celebrities, and economic experts have their own blogs, so far it does not add up to the more revolutionary situation in the US where elections are decided on Youtube campaigns, the Dow Jones Industrial Average component stocks are decided in part based on bloggers’ (reasoned and fact-based) suggestions, and of course celebrity life is relentlessly documented and dissected online. To a large extent, I think it can be agreed that the online product of top-shelf elite players (with notable exceptions such as freelance journalists) is at best supplementary and at worst non-existent. I won’t go that extra step and make a value judgment of good/bad/disappointing or claim that history is on the march; obviously no one can predict the future, it’s definitely not true that everything that happens in the US is desirable, and often the supposed badguys win – players like Johnny’s Entertainment have the law and the policymakers on their side, and it’s clear that upstarts who challenge this cozy system can easily find themselves marginalized.

The process of public discourse has undergone a revolution in the US. Today the 6-o’clock news seems like an ancient concept but up until the 1980s it was most Americans’ window on the world. Now, even CNN is considered part of the so-called traditional media and faces competition from Internet video. This change is not just important to the existing players’ bottom lines – it jeopardizes their ability to shape the coverage of stories and maintain some control over events, attributes that are attractive to the official sources they rely on for stories.

But the story of how the internet shapes public debate, like the stories of the printing press and pirate radio before it, is one of finding a balance between agitators and the people in power. Very crudely, the story goes like this: A new technology emerges, the muckrakers and sensationalists take advantage of it, and eventually the people in power try to keep it down until they can figure out its usefulness and co-opt it. For example, back in 2004 or so blogs by independent players were influential in scooping the mainstream media on political scandals and some other major stories. Today that is still the case but the MSM has adapted by hiring its own “bloggers” and placing a lot of its content online. And while the internet’s “here comes everybody” effect has reduced the MSM’s stranglehold on how the news is reported, those same media institutions are learning and adapting to varying degrees of success.

Overall, as a US citizen I find the addition of a new chattering class called “the blogosphere” to be very healthy for the country because it allows a more diverse set of opinions to influence our elected leaders, watch them for corruption, and subject their claims to critical scrutiny. Not only that, the very fact that the MSM have been coaxed into the open is another “step forward” in terms of transparency and “keeping them honest.” So while it may sound a little triumphalist and grand, I do hold hopes for a similar cleansing effect to take place in Japan as well.

It is simply a fact that the opinion-makers in Japan have not yet embraced the net with the same enthusiasm. This comes from lots of potential reasons, among them a fear of massive flame attacks or even right-wing terrorism, a failure to see what they’d gain by offering for free what they now sell in 1,500 yen hardcovers, and a similar failure to see what they’d gain in influence since influential people in Japan might maintain 5 paper newspaper subscriptions but never read a single blog. Then there are the institutional reasons, such as a company’s reluctance to let employees speak out, the relative ease of getting served with a defamation suit that keeps even the MSM from speaking critically of certain products, or the harsher copyright/image rights laws that make it difficult to directly cite the latest stories (one popular TV talent/stock commentator was all but destroyed for printing parts of Nikkei stories in her mail magazine).
http://www.j-cast.com/2008/10/29029423.html

And on the prospects of individuals stepping out from anonymity to become super-influential bloggers, for some reason I don’t see this happening so much. Most of the individual bloggers seem content giving away their content for free to Ameba or whatever other hosting services. It seems like to host your own site and try and monetize your writing or creating a brand for yourself that way, you really need to consider yourself to be taking the same level of risk as a freelance journalist or an independent designer, which would be a minority of the population in any country. So with such a high hurdle to entry, I think there ends up being a lack of motivation for most people. And as for having an effect on society, I think people might feel stymied because in a lot of ways that avenue is really only open to genuine experts and other so-called influencers in Japan, simply because even if you make the most powerful argument in the world and have a million followers, the ministry involved might just wait until the anger dies down and then just do whatever it wants when no one is looking. It’s that lack of transparency and accountability that I think cuts off the logical connections between rational persuasion and government/official action. This is of course not set in stone, but it’s my gut feeling about the motivation behind some of the secrecy among amateur writers on the net. As to Chris’s encounters with people who don’t want a wider audience, I can see that being the same as people from Livejournal who might write something particularly insightful but not really want it shared beyond their circle of friends (no doubt that fuels some of the anger toward Somethingawful’s “weekend web” feature).

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the big media here in Japan have so far had a pretty bumbling response to the Net ((just look at the WaiWai scandal), and that they have tended to err on the side of keeping both their content and prestige offline, offering only the same kind of supplementary content described above. Essentially I think they are acting on the same institutional awareness as the big media houses in the US - they want to figure out how to adapt themselves to new realities while maintaining their positions in society. However, the tide does seem to be shifting if slowly. Japan is often said to move slowly and adopt new technology only after it’s proven successful abroad. In the US, The Wire creator David Simon worries that the news industry has acted so fast to go online without thinking of a way to make money off it, so they might go bankrupt before there is a viable alternative online. In that sense Japan may be served in the long run by an MSM that only acts when it is safe. But like kids in the 80s who wanted their MTV, I want to start seeing Aso having to deflect Ikeda Nobuo’s talking points now rather than later.

I would just add that it’s not like people aren’t trying. J-Cast is an independent news site whose headlines share space on Yahoo News’ front page with the mainstream press; many freelance journalists publish their writings online; and there are lots of fee-based mail magazines etc for investigative reporting and other topics.Also, the proliferation of celebrity blogs apparently does result in closer communication between fans, and gives celebrities a place to respond to scandals and communicate directly with fans without the media filter. It’s just except maybe for J-Cast and the IT media we don’t see much in the way of success stories for independent content producers in absence of offerings from MSM.

“I find it hard to believe that no one on the Japanese net is hoping for the day when their efforts have a much wider audience and have an effect on society.”

It’s a sensitive and subtle point. I’ll say from my experience at GV that in translating blogs, I often had this very uneasy feeling that if the translation drew a lot of responses (as sometimes was the case), the blogger who wrote the original post would get angry at me for the attention I had directed at them (which is why I often requested permission first for sensitive topics). Most often the opposite was the case, but I’d say a large percentage of J bloggers feel this way, or else feel this way but perhaps wouldn’t realize it until the attention actually comes to them.

In the U.S. parallel, the typical blogger would be more worried about being properly credited, but in Japan there is a genuine concern among many about having influence. Many would prefer to stay in their niches, with their small audience. Many (most?) don’t even really blog to be read widely at all. That’s partly due to 2ch and the whole enjo phenomenon, but I think it’s also something internal. It’s caused me personally to question the whole idea that it’s natural that everybody wants as many people to listen/read/follow/etc them as possible—i.e. having direct influence as a desirable thing—which is the assumption in the “west”.

The influence in the J net (as I see it) bubbles up from small niches, rather than propagating out from influential individuals. That’s my picture anyway, not scientific just impressionistic.

Actually one of the reasons I like Hatena is that it has a bit of both of these worlds, the bubbling up (via Hatena Bookmarks) and the influential individuals:

外国人として、はてなのどこが面白い？
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/colourofthesun/20090503

This is a great way to visualize Hatena bloggers/news and niches, btw:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/10/06/japan-newsgraphy-and-hatenarmaps/
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm4282947

Sure, but so is every other net. I guess my question is, where are the larger content sites (not utilities like Mixi) — a la 2-Channel Itai News — that are widely-read common experiences? Where is the “net mass culture”? Seeing that Japanese society does have create strong bonds through the shared experience of mass media consumption (especially TV), I just don’t think the net has the same impact for society until it moves out of just being a large collection of individual silos and small niches.

There are fashion blogs I like in Japan, but none of them have 1/100th the influence of a mass media fashion magazine. I know you don’t read the list of American blogs I mentioned, but the idea is not that they need to be replicated, as much as that they are all professional-quality, massively-read, central content sites that shape the national dialogue to some degree. I find it hard to believe that no one on the Japanese net is hoping for the day when their efforts have a much wider audience and have an effect on society.

“I’d like to hear about this difference. Because in theory, an idea is an idea.”

Don’t agree. Ideas are very much shaped by the language you express them in, and by the context in which you express them, and by the audience to which you orient them. To varying degree ideas are expressible/inexpressible (or at least more/less easily expressible) in other languages, is my view.

But more to the point, as soon as you post what is obviously a translation, even a very good one (and I am a proponent of translation, don’t get me wrong) you give the impression that you are not speaking directly to an audience. This debate is about the J net, so it should involve the J net, not just in the sense of some article being available in Japanese (as a piece of writing for them to read), but also of you, the article-writer, being there and ready to discuss ideas with people who read it. That is the beauty of the net, after all. That’s what everybody is doing in this thread.

If you can show that you are genuinely there, talking and listening, you may get insightful responses. You may also just get angry rants, who knows, but I think it’s worth putting in the effort once and a while, especially on topics like this one.

“The follow-up to this is… okay, what are the killer Japanese blogs and sites out there?”

There are plenty of places to start on this. I have my preferences, I like Toshinao Sasaki’s stuff a lot, as you know. I also like a lot of the bloggers who are part of the Agile Media network:

http://agilemedia.jp/en/

But that’s just me. The Japanese net is full of little niches, I often stumble on amazing stuff out of the blue. Recently I found this amazing blogger:

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Delete_All/

e.g:

ラブホテルをつくろうと母は言った
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Delete_All/20090528#1243501499

But again, what you actually find depends on what you are looking for, and what you’re expecting to find.

The follow-up to this is… okay, what are the killer Japanese blogs and sites out there? And the answer is usually disappointing… The great thing about the Internet in Western Society is that it literally has something for everybody, not just info-utilities and narrowband content for a hardcore group of IT professionals and angry middle-aged men. Global Voices has done a great job of finding interesting Japanese blog posts when they arise, but I think one of the best things about the Eng-net is high level aggregators that make finding tiny pockets of activity much easier. 2-Ch Itai News is good (and less overtly-racist these days) but a bit skewed on what they cover. A lot of other blogs do a good job of aggregating foreign content, but it’s still a bit of an unnavigatable jungle.

not translate your articles into Japanese—there’s a difference),

I’d like to hear about this difference. Because in theory, an idea is an idea.

I was thinking today that one of the presuppositions of this entire argument is that the Japanese print media world is incredibly professional and diverse. Japanese fashion magazines, for example, destroy the Western competition. Long-form journalism a la Vanity Fair or the New Yorker is not a strong point, sure, but for any fields fringing on commercial products or hobbies, Japanese mags rule supreme. And the biz and social analysis of mags like Diamond or Toyo Keizai can be great.

But why is none of this high-level analysis, depth of knowledge, and professional graphic design reflected on the Net? My main complaint is not that “Japan should be more like America” as much as “The Japanese net should be as good as the rest of the Japanese mediasphere.”

(Bonus point: when people crush over Ikeda Nobuo, it’s so clear that they are excited that he has adopted a totally American style, pro-level, thinking-man’s blog.)

“The Drudge Report, Huffington Post, Slate (and its podcasts), Hulu.com, PBS/NPR podcasts, Bill Moyers video casts, BuzzFeed, Boing Boing, Mega-Alpha bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, etc. etc. ”

I’m sorry, but I just can’t see what you’re writing here as anything but trying to find America in the J net, instead of appreciating the J net for what it is, with all its good and bad. I don’t read any of those sites/blogs regularly myself, am I missing out?

“Japanese net users do not have to automatically take the position that “Japanese culture is different and therefore all of our sites must be different or differently operated. No YouTube, we must migrate to NicoNico Douga. No Facebook, OUR system is Mixi.””

I don’t think Japanese net users take this position at all! They don’t “take the position” that J culture is different, J culture just is different. They didn’t migrate to Nico Nico Douga to be different. This is a crucial point which could be made for many other countries as well about services that are popular in some countries but not in others.

sandbaggerone’s point I agree with:

“The Internet is by its nature supra-national. I found a healthy mix of foreign and domestic sites in use in Japan. There is no need to duplicate the wheel for each country. Just give the Japanese a localized version so they may play in their native tongue.”

Above and beyond which, as I stated on Twitter, your discussions about the J. net culture seem to demand a response from people who are a part of that culture itself. which implies to me that you should write something in Japanese (*not* translate your articles into Japanese—there’s a difference), preferably at a blogging service used by Japanese net users (i.e. not a wordpress blog, etc.). Then you will get an interesting discussion going on this topic.

You mean, all of society.

I think when we say “politics” we tend to put too much thought into what is happening in Washington, when really, it’s battling ideologies that make the U.S. a hotspot for political blogging. People are super liberal or super conservative, and this is not just voting preference but lifestyle.

I just don’t see ideological difference or exposition being a big part of Japanese life. It used to be from 1945-1960, so it has nothing to do with “Japan” as much as contemporary society. And clearly, the lack of ideological battle is going to hurt blogging.

But you could say that the emergence of the 2-ch right winger shows that ideology does create net productivity, even in Japan. Too bad there is no vocal liberal Left to respond in kind…

While not every country’s internet will be or should be like the American example, there is no reason to automatically think that embracing the American model of “more information, better platform, more voices, more influence” is somehow capitulation to cultural imperialism. Defamation laws may make things harder in certain regions, but there is no reason why more behind-the-scenes information cannot be leaked on the net in Japan to legitimate third-party web media sites (like Wikileaks), instead of say, the obnoxious and frankly unbelievable Kikko. Japanese net users do not have to automatically take the position that “Japanese culture is different and therefore all of our sites must be different or differently operated. No YouTube, we must migrate to NicoNico Douga. No Facebook, OUR system is Mixi.”

In fact, the government’s original demand to create a “separate Japanese internet” is what seriously slowed down the global net coming to Japan in the first place.

Because of the language, Japan will always be a little separate from everyone else, so I don’t get why so much action has to be taken to make “separation from the rest of the world” the main goal of internet development. I would like to think that global standardization of platform does not mean standardization of content. Japan CAN have podcasts without somehow that meaning defeat to the American behemoth.

And as Tokuriki says, quoted by “Shioyama,” Japan needs to show the world what is great about the Japanese net. And if it’s using totally different sites and platforms, that will be a hard battle.