Yahoo Japan’s “everybody’s politics” section is becoming quite an amazing little site. I mean look at this hot top image promoting their new 2007 Upper House election feature:
It’s like dueling Kim Jong Ils!
Just look at some of these amazing features:
Best of all everything is free and better yet ad-free. Why? My guess: They are gearing up to claim to have a significant impact on next year’s Upper House elections and in the process boost traffic.
One of their newer features, however, indicates a major shift by some of the traditional media content providers – free, full-length articles from Japan’s weekly and monthly magazines! The Japanese internet so far has been pretty devoid of good free political analysis or even in-depth news coverage. This is largely explained by the newspapers and magazines’ reluctance to put their content online for fear of losing readership and, in the case of newspapers, the considerable special privileges they get as so-called public institutions. is “Read and Compare Political Articles” which reprints the main political articles in weekly journals, in their entirety, completely free of charge (or even banner ads, while we’re on the topic)! Downsides: No pictures, and the articles are deleted fairly soon after publication (about a month it looks like). But if you’re diligent you can at least save the articles you want on your computer (or if you’re like me, g-mail them to yourself).
This serves as an essential boon to Japanese and Japan watchers overseas (who can now vote in all aspects of Japanese elections after a court decision), who before could only view headlines for free, unless they wanted to sign up for media companies’ exorbitantly expensive pay services.
There still leaves much to be desired in terms of Japanese media content being available on the web (full newspapers, anyone?). But this is a very helpful step in the right direction!
Holy crap, that interview with Seto was rad! Who is that dude? I want an MF profile on the man!
The collection of full length political articles is great! And some of them DO have pictures included.
On a related note:
For all the hype that Google gets, they really need to invest more in Japan. Yahoo’s Japanese products beat Google’s Japanese products, hands down, no competition. Especially in terms of interfacing with Japanese mobile phones: Google hypes its mobile Gmail and mobile Calendar, but neither can be accessed at all from a Japanese phone, and it really shouldn’t take that much to make it possible! (I can’t even forward my Gmail to my phone because the message bodies somehow get deleted.) You can’t even get Japanese market quotes or correct Japanese weather on a Google home page. It’s BS.
Are you sure gmail can’t be accessed from one of the phones that advertises a “PC web site viewer”?
Either way, you are right that google needs to pay more attention to the Japanese market. They just seem to be concentrating more on new products than internationalizing existing ones, for the time being.